Paintings worth millions stolen from Paris museum

May 21, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

Associated Press

PARIS

A thief stole five paintings valued at more than $100 million, including major works by Picasso and Matisse, in an overnight heist Thursday at a Paris modern-art museum with a broken alarm system, officials said.

The paintings disappeared early Thursday from the Paris Museum of Modern Art, across the Seine River from the Eiffel Tower in one of the French capital’s most chic and tourist-frequented neighborhoods.

The museum’s alarm system had been broken since March 30 in some rooms, Paris Mayor Bertrand Delanoe said in a statement. The security-system operator ordered spare parts to fix it but had not yet received the equipment from the supplier, the statement said.

The museum reopened in 2006 after spending three years upgrading its security system.

Christophe Girard, deputy culture secretary at Paris City Hall, said a single masked intruder was caught on a video-surveillance camera.

Investigators are trying to determine whether the intruder was operating alone, Girard told reporters, who suggested the heist was carried out by a very “sophisticated” team or individual.

The intruder entered by cutting a padlock on a gate and breaking a museum window, the Paris prosecutor’s office said.

The office initially estimated the five paintings’ total worth at as much as $613 million but later downgraded that to $112 million. Girard said the total value was “just under 100 million euros.”

He said “Le pigeon aux petits-pois” (“The Pigeon with the Peas”), an ochre and brown Cubist oil painting by Pablo Picasso, was stolen, as was “La Pastorale” (“Pastoral”), an oil painting of nudes on a hillside by Henri Matisse. The other paintings stolen were “L’olivier pres de l’Estaque” (“Olive Tree near Estaque”) by Georges Braque; “La femme a l’eventail” (“Woman with a Fan”) by Amedeo Modigliani; and “Nature morte aux chandeliers” by Fernand Leger.