A painting by the impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919) that was going to go out today to the sale in the auction house vienna Dorotheum has been stolen by unknown persons, confirmed this Wednesday to police sources.
“Three men, currently unknown” and “apparently professionals” robbed Monday, a painting by Pierre-Auguste Renoir that was exposed in the second floor of the Dorotheum, explained the Direction of the Police of Vienna in a press release.
“The men left the site for various outputs,” continues the police, which has published photos of the alleged robbers as they were filmed by surveillance cameras of the building, located in the centre of Vienna.
Doris Krumpl, spokesman for the Dorotheum, confirmed to Efe that the work stolen is ‘Golfe, mer, falaises vertes’, signed by Renoir in 1895, a landscape in oil painting, 27×40 cm priced at between 120.000 and 160.000 euros (135,000 to $ 180,000), and said that this theft is completely unusual.
The Dorotheum, which with close to 250,000 objects are sold per year is the largest auction house in Central Europe, “with ample security measures. Our works of art are insured and in the past decades no box had been stolen,” he said.
The box removed was part of the auction today titled “Classic Modernism”, which will be held as planned after you delete the box by Renoir from the list of works of the sale.
An auction that includes a second canvas of Renoir, as well as the works of Pablo Picasso, Henri Rousseau, Giorgio de Chirico, Marc Chagall, Fernando Botero, Emil Nolde, Henri Matisse, Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, Alred Kubin, Carl Moll and Roberto Sebastian Matta, among others.
The public tv channel of austrian ORF had been informed last night of the crime, but then both the police and the Dorotheum had declined to confirm or deny the news.
According to the ORF, in one of the pictures you can see how an unknown “you dangle a piece of the wall, is the subject under the arm, leave the building calmly and disappears after among the passers-by in the centre of Vienna”. EFE
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