The AGNSW van Mieris theft: what a daylight heist still teaches

Seventeen years on, a small 17th-century Dutch painting is still missing from a Sydney gallery wall, and nobody has ever been charged. That’s the plain, uncomfortable fact sitting behind the 2007 theft of Frans van Mieris’s A Cavalier from the Art Gallery of New South Wales. It happened during opening hours, in a room full […]

The Weeping Woman theft: what NGV’s 1986 case still teaches

Four screws. Thats roughly what was left on the picture rail at the National Gallery of Victoria on the morning of 2 August 1986, once someone noticed Pablo Picasso’s The Weeping Woman was no longer hanging where it should have been. No smashed glass, no forced door, no dramatic struggle. Someone had simply unscrewed the […]