Friday, February 08, 2008

More Stolen Picassos

The BBC reports:

"Two paintings by Pablo Picasso have been stolen from a Swiss exhibition. The artworks were stolen on Wednesday after closing time at the show of the artist's work in the small town of Pfaeffikon, near Zurich. The oil paintings - Head of Horse and Glass and Pitcher - were on loan from the Sprengel Museum in Germany."

Derek Fincham: "[T]hese works will never be sold on the open market, they are too widely known. I think a more interesting issue is security when these works are loaned out to regional museums like this one, which was the problem with works stolen in Nice last August. I think there are a lot of benefits to loaning works, and sharing collections; however there are trade-offs. Often these smaller regional museums have less-sophisticated security systems given their smaller budgets and collections."