Thieves have blown open the door of an art gallery in the southern Netherlands to try to steal four works from a famous series of Andy Warhol screen prints, but damaged them all and only managed to get away with two in the botched heist.
The gallery’s owner, Mark Peet Visser, said the thieves had attempted to steal the works from a 1985 series by the US pop artist called Reigning Queens, which features portraits of the then-queens of the UK, the Netherlands, Denmark and Swaziland, which is now called Eswatini.
Visser said the heist early on Friday at the MPV Gallery in the town of Oisterwijk was captured on security cameras, and he described it as amateurish.
“The bomb attack was so violent that my entire building was destroyed” and nearby shops were also damaged, he said. “So they did that part of it well, too well actually. And then they ran to the car with the artworks and it turns out that they won’t fit in the car.
“At that moment [two of] the works are ripped out of the frames and you also know that they are damaged beyond repair, because it is impossible to get them out undamaged.” The other two were left on the street damaged.
Visser declined to put a value on the four signed and numbered works, which he had planned to offer for sale as a set at an art fair in Amsterdam later this month.
The thieves got away with portraits of the late Queen Elizabeth II of the UK and the former Queen Margrethe II of Denmark. The prints of the former Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands and Ntombi Tfwala, who is known as the Queen Mother of Eswatini, were left on the street as the thieves fled, Visser said.
Not much is known yet about the theft, “but it is strange that explosives were used”, a Dutch art detective said. “That’s not common for art thefts,” said Arthur Brand, who has made headlines for recovering artworks, including a missing Picasso and a stolen Van Gogh.
Police appealed for witnesses as forensic experts examined the badly damaged gallery on Friday.
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Visser told the local broadcaster Omroep Brabant that the stolen works were worth “a considerable sum”, but Brand told Agence France-Presse they were “not unique and most likely tens of them were made”.
“This makes it easier to sell than unique works, but not that much easier,” he said.