“Olympia” Painting by René Magritte was Stolen from a Brussels Museum

Written by Irish Times and Art Knowledge News Friday, 12 August 2011 21:31

Brussels - A painting by René Magritte was stolen from a Brussels museum on Thursday morning by two armed men, The Guardian reported. The robbery occurred just after 10 a.m., shortly after the museum, a former home of Magritte, opened, when a man rang the doorbell to ask if visiting hours had started. The man then pointed a gun at the museum attendant while an accomplice went inside. The thieves made museum workers and visitors kneel in a courtyard while they left on foot with a 1948 painting, “Olympia,” above, a nude portrait of Magritte’s wife.

The Guardian said that the men, who spoke English and French, set off an alarm when they broke a glass plate that protected the painting, but that they had escaped by the time the police arrived. The stolen work is said to be worth about $1.1 million, according to The Guardian.

The men escaped with the 1948 oil painting Olympia after threatening an assistant at the Magritte museum with a pistol.

The portrait, of Magritte’s wife, Georgette, with a shell placed on her stomach, is estimated to be worth more than €750,000 and had been one of the museum’s most popular items. The painting hung at Magritte's former house which has been turned into a small museum. Entry is by appointment only. It is separate from a larger Magritte museum that opened this year.

“To us it is one of our major works at the museum. It is so well known that it cannot be sold in a public auction and was probably stolen to order by the robbers,” said Marthe Lemmens, an assistant at the museum, which is based in the house in the suburb of Jette, where Magritte lived between 1930 and 1954.

The thieves arrived at the museum just after 10am, pretending to want a tour of the house. When the door opened, one of them pushed a pistol against the head of one of the three staff and demanded that they all move to the back of the house.

The curator of the museum described the thieves as of Asian appearance, without elaborating. One of them spoke English and the other French, he said.

“I saw them running away with the picture tucked under the arm of one of the robbers before they got in a car,” said Amine Mentaoui, a local council worker.

“I hope they are caught quickly. People here are scared at what has happened.”

The Brussels police said the robbers knew what they were doing, and the entire raid took just two minutes to complete.

“They seemed to know which picture they wanted to steal and took the whole painting off the wall, including the frame,” said Johan Berckmans, a police officer working at the scene of the crime yesterday.

Magritte is probably Belgium’s most famous artist. He has influenced a host of well-known modern-day artists, including Andy Warhol, and has two museums dedicated to his work in Brussels.

His artistic style involved depicting ordinary objects displayed in unusual contexts. He is probably best known for painting bowler hats, pipes and green apples.

The robbery occurred just a few months after a new museum with some 250 original works dedicated to Magritte opened in another part of Brussels.

The loss of Olympia is likely to prove a heavy blow to the Magritte museum, which has a far smaller number of original works by the artist. The Art Loss Register has 19 artworks by Magritte registered on the database, 8 of which are currently missing. In 2007, a Magritte painting went missing in transit, only for it to be recovered shortly afterwards by police.