Why We Can’t Get Enough Juicy Art Heist Stories

I didn’t take much convincing. In movies, there is always that scene where the criminal, having said no, changes his mind and growls, “I’m in,” but I was feeling more agreeable. When an old friend approached me about one more job with a big payday, I decided to say yes before I’d finished the email. And so, for weeks, I read and watched nothing but stories about stealing art.

In time, they began to blend together, until I felt I was investigating a single elaborate crime: dozens of old friends recruiting hundreds of thieves, quintuple-crossing each other out of lush portraits, gold statuettes, Fabergé eggs both real and holographic. I encountered lots of art presented as a symbol for sex or a metaphor for immortality, but not enough art presented as worthwhile for its own sake. I met people who seemed constitutionally incapable of standing in front of a beautiful object without having a flashback. I saw champagne flutes, dinner jackets, rakishly raised eyebrows. I caught Faye Dunaway playing one thief’s lover and moonlighting as another’s therapist. I heard the words “Don’t you fart!” and wrote them down in the solemn certainty that they were destined to appear in my article.

The occasion for all this was Artifacts, a novel by Natalie Lemle, out in May, about a thirtysomething woman who gets herself into some glamorous trouble concerning an ancient Roman cup and the Calabrian mob. But the real occasion was: It’s the 21st century. Art thefts, real and fictional, are rarely less than a subject du jour. As I write this, the French police have yet to determine what happened to the jewels snatched from the Louvre last fall; there are not one but two Ocean’s movies in production; a Renoir, a Matisse, and a Cézanne have gone missing from the Magnani-Rocca Foundation in Parma; and Dan Brown’s research team is surely toiling away at another upper-lowbrow treasure hunt. Centuries from now, historians of our era will study footage of Vincent Cassel breakdancing through the Villa Borghese and wonder what was going on with us.

I was in it for the money, obviously, but not just. In these kinds of stories, the main characters usually have some abstract motive to distinguish them from common crooks. Mine was a question that’s been bothering me more than usual of late: How can a country that’s world famous for philistinism care so much about possessing art—care to the point where the people are willing to spend billions of dollars on beautiful objects and billions more on entertainment about stealingthem? It’s as though a nation of teetotalers chooses, year after year, to hang out in bars.

IF YOU ARE A fictional character and youhappen to be stealing art, odds are excellent that you’re in a heist movie. At this point, the genre is so famous, and mocked, that plumbing it for serious lessons about art and the art market may seem quixotic. Before I took this assignment, I knew How to Steal a Million (1966) was directed by William Wyler and starred Audrey Hepburn and Peter O’Toole. Nobody bothered to tell me it’s one of the triumphs of postmodern American cinema. Am I exaggerating this film’s true value? Silly question—if How to Steal a Million is about anything, it’s about how “true value” doesn’t exist. Naturally, the first scene is set at an auction.

It’s almost too perfect that in this early trendsetter—the one so many art-robbery films have robbed—people steal art not because it’s valuable but because it’s worthless. The jovial forger Charles Bonnet, played by Hugh Griffith, has been auctioning off phony masterpieces for years, but now museum officials are running a pro forma authenticity test on the little bronze CelliniVenus he’s lent them, and everything is about to be ruined. His daughter Nicole, played by Hepburn, convinces the cat burglar, Simon Dermott, played by O’Toole, to save the family’s reputation, which they do by swiping a key, hiding in a closet, and replacing the statue with a wine bottle.

Even the frauds are fraudulent here. Simon turns out not to be a real cat burglar, and even the non-forged masterpieces in this movie are bogus paintings commissioned by 20th Century Fox. “A superb Rembrandt!” Simon yells while scoping out the museum. Well … no—it looks a little like Portrait of Jacob Trip (c. 1661), assuming the Dutchman hated impasto and sawed away one of the sides. In other words, artworks in How to Steal a Million are either knockoffs or they’re knockoff knockoffs, which seems only appropriate for a Paris-set film in which nobody sounds French, starring a Belgian and an Irish-Scot who became movie stars by affecting posh British accents. Look for reality under the surface of an art heist movie and you find further layers of bullshit.

The final twist in How to Steal a Million: Bullshit sells. Simon gives the statue to the gormless American collector Davis Leland, played by Eli Wallach, in exchange for a small fortune and the promise that it never be exhibited. Value is a function of certainty, not quality, and thus, as with fairies in Peter Pan or NFTs in 2021, people’s belief that something is real makes it so.

WHY DOES LELAND care about this particularartwork? How to Steal a Million offers no explanation beyond the fact that the statue looks like Audrey Hepburn, which is a very heist-movie kind of answer. Consider other objects people steal in films: a Fabergé egg in Ocean’s Twelve; a quartet of Arthur Dove abstractions in The Mastermind (2025); an emerald-coated Ottoman dagger in Topkapi (1964); Egon Schiele portraits in Inside (2023); the Declaration of Independence in National Treasure (2004); a Cartier necklace in Ocean’s Eight (2018); a Monet landscape in The Thomas Crown Affair (1999); nudes by Trouillebert and Modigliani in Once a Thief (1991). The pattern holds for novels, too: a cursed Hindu diamond in Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone (1868); a delicate little cup depicting Cupid and Psyche in Artifacts.

There are exceptions, of course, but you’ll notice that the main categories are twinkly jeweled stuff and likenesses of women—objects so inertly feminine they might as well be damsels in distress. The occasional Ocean’s reboot notwithstanding, stories of art theft are as reliably gendered as World War II movies: macho thieves helping themselves to pretty, demure loot. When characters steal a painting, it’s likely to be on the lovely or beautiful end of things, rather than grand or imposing—a “secret whisper,” to quote a much-Instagrammed line from Donna Tartt’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Goldfinch (2014), which begins with the theft of Carel Fabritius’s decidedly non-grand canvas of the same name. (The subtle gendering holds for nonfiction, too: Lynn H. Nicholas’s 1994 study of Nazi art-plundering was titled The Rape of Europa, for instance.) Fictional art-thieves never bother with Bacon’s popes or Giacometti’s charcoals, though either seems like a savvier investment than a Trouillebert, and I for one would give anything to watch a movie about a gang of glamorous crooks nabbing Piss Christ.

Clearly these characters are willing to go to some lengths to get their hands on loot. Less clear is whether they care about what they’re stealing. The one Hollywood archetype who can be counted on to enjoy art for art’s sake is the villain, or, failing that, the doofus. Midway through Dr. No (1962), we get a glimpse of Portrait of the Duke of Wellington (1812–14), an honest-to-god Goya that had gone missing from the National Gallery a year earlier—the implication being that a Bond villain has taken a break from world domination and organized a museum heist for the sole purpose of decorating his lair. How to Steal a Million ends with a burst of pure Stendhal Syndrome in the form of a gushy ode to that little statue: “I want it! I just want to take it out of the vault, all alone just look at it now and then. Know that it’s mine, that I own it, that I can touch it.” Alas, the speaker is Leland, this film’s stupidest character.
The heroes are harder to impress.In the opening credits of The Thomas Crown Affair (1999), Pierce Brosnan burbles over his favorite Van Gogh but may only be trying to establish an alibi. The Ocean’s movies similarly punt on whether Danny Ocean values French art or only wants to flirt:

Danny: I always confuse Monet and Manet. Now which one married his mistress?
Tess: Monet.
Danny: Right, and then Manet had syphilis
Tess: They also painted occasionally.

Artworks that are widely loved, protagonists who don’t particularly love them—heist movies offer a mixed message; but then, the average American moviegoer has a violently mixed relationship with art. We are talking, don’t forget, about status symbols that everyone recognizes, the highest point on a greasy pole most of us are trying to climb. We are also talking about the playthings of the most despicable people on the planet. Some desire, and some contempt, is to be expected.

THERE IS MORE than one way to steal art, as long as we’re on the subject of despicable people. Individual burglars sneak a few paintings out the door; an army breaks it down. In 2022 Russian troops took well over 10,000 works from the Kherson region of Ukraine alone, in some cases locking up museum employees while they lifted paintings off the walls in the name of Putin. Few journalists covering last year’s Louvre jewelry heist considered the exquisite irony of their subject: The museum itself would barely exist if revolutionaries hadn’t raided Versailles and Napoleon hadn’t plundered Italy. These kinds of grand-scale robberies occupy a blind spot in fiction as well as nonfiction, for reasons that aren’t terribly hard to understand. To paraphrase another Russian tyrant, one theft is a heist movie; 10,000 thefts is a statistic.

Artifacts doesn’t hesitate to dive into this difficult territory. Our hero, Lena, is a lawyer and former academic whose firm gets involved with the repatriation of that cup, a priceless treasure that has come to Fordham University’s art museum dragging a long and dubious provenance behind it. Her lover, the dashing drug dealer Giamma, may have been involved in stealing it from a Swiss warehouse and falsifying a record or two, unless the real culprit was her mentor, the dashing archaeologist Cyrille.

Lemle’s debut novel is filled with smug Wiki-factoids of the kind Dan Brown readers will recognize (including one that really does appear in a Dan Brown book), and there are hundreds of elegant sentences like, “There was something contrived and pretentious about even the title” and “I winced, not yet having considered the logistical implications of this news.” All the same, here is a rare novel that tells the truth about art theft. By far the biggest crooks in art history are institutions, not individuals: governments, corporations, museums, organized crime. In Artifacts, the big bad turns out to be the ‘ndrangheta, an Italian crime syndicate with tentacles in politics and a nasty habit of looting dig sites: the cup, we learn, was stolen by the mob to use as collateral, but later re-stolen by a young idealist, sold to a private collector, and donated to Fordham in the hopes of freeing it from endless black-market deals. The ethics of repatriation aren’t as straightforward as they seem, and one ancient cup is merely a drop in the illicit ocean.

There really should be more fiction on this subject. Art-crime stories have trouble keeping their eyes on the real scale of crime, and fair enough. The individuals are too engrossing, the particulars too glamorous. The Monuments Men, Robert Edsel and Bret Witter’s 2009 history of the Allied operatives who recovered stolen artworks like the Ghent Altarpiece (1432) during World War II, is one of the few texts that manages to thread the needle. But then, it’s a work of nonfiction and the criminals are the Nazis, raiding the museums of invaded countries as Napoleon’s troops had the century before and Putin’s would the century after. The Moonstone is surprisingly sophisticated on the morality of art theft—today the novel reads more like a Saidian reproach to the genre than one of its earliest examples. The night after receiving a diamond for her 18th birthday, the plucky Brit Rachel Verinder discovers she’s been robbed. And yet Collins is unambivalent about the fact that the diamond was stolen to begin with: Rachel’s repugnant uncle committed murder to bring it out of India. Somewhere behind every art theft there is a bigger one.

WATCHING ENOUGH frothy capers back-to-back would make a Marxist of Clarence Thomas. You begin to long for a little more class warfare, champagne flutes trampled on the floor, anything to disrupt the smarmy gleam. This probably explains my affection for John Woo’s Once a Thief (1991). The burglars in this one are a lovable trio of Hong Kong street kids, and their object is Trouillebert’s The Harem Servant Girl (1874)—or at least a cropped reproduction that hides the figure’s breasts but preserves her headdress, necklace, earrings, pouty lips, and overall Orientalist razzle-dazzle. The exoticized East is a motif throughout—Joey, the thief played by Chow Yun-Fat, is an amateur painter who recreates Rousseau’s The Snake Charmer (1907)—which adds a nicely postcolonial twist to the finale, during which the Trouillebert explodes with a sizzle worthy of the future director of Face/Off.

Once a Thief is one of the goofiest films I know (it is, readers may have guessed, the source of the line, “Don’t you fart!”) and among the few to put art theft in its proper context: Early on, the gang’s heist is revealed to be a double-cross designed to ratchet up the price of the stolen goods. So it goes in real life, too. Tempting though it is to see art theft as a challenge to the evils of private ownership, the numbers don’t lie: Whatever criminals think they’re doing, stealing is fabulous for the market. The police regularly inflate the value of stolen art when dealing with the press, the idea being that higher valuations make loot-selling harder; but there are other beneficiaries. In no small part, the Mona Lisa became the world’s most recognizable painting because its theft in 1911 led practically every newspaper on the planet to print a reproduction. Art heists can be, in effect, commercials—reminders that this product must be very, very valuable if people will risk jail time for it.

Here, as with so many things cinematic, Hong Kong set the trend. Over the last decade or so, the deliberately inelegant heist movie—too pissed off about the state of the world to bother with the sleekness or sexy banter that once defined the look and feel of the art heist—has mutated into a genre of its own. You could probably attribute some of this to the sheer number of directors who grew up watching Ocean’s movies on TNT; genres always birth anti-genres when they get clichéd enough (you don’t get anti-Westerns like The Wild Bunch, for instance, without decades of things like Stagecoach). But we’ve also reached a point where even Fox News anchors feel obliged to decry wealth inequality; what isn’t too left-wing for Rupert Murdoch should be fair game for Hollywood.

These new, gamey art heist stories seem haunted by their glamorous predecessors. As Willem Dafoe attempts to rob a New York penthouse in Inside, you might compare him to Thomas Crown and Danny Ocean, neither of whom was ever reduced to licking the inside of a freezer for sustenance. Certain critics dismissed Vasilis Katsoupis’s Ballardian debut feature as a heavy-handed parable, but if anything, it’s terrifyingly literal: The burglar breaks into a Pritzker Prize-winning architect’s apartment, gets locked inside, and spends the next few months enduring tooth decay and a broken leg while artworks by Fontana and Clemente smirk down from the walls, reminding him they’re ageless and he’s not. The presence of a photograph of Maurizio Cattelan’s A Perfect Day (1999), from the time the artist duct-taped his gallerist to the wall for a day, adds bitter ironies to an already acrid affair, particularly if you’re familiar with the artist’s other work. If this burglar wanted millions of dollars, why did he bother breaking into a penthouse? Couldn’t he just … tape a banana to the wall and sell it for $6 million?

“Now what?”—the question most heist films avoid at all costs—is, in Inside, the only question. It’s an anti-trope of this growing anti-genre: Getting your hands on the goods is the breezy part, over in a few minutes; everything else is lingered on with the same taut attention Wyler once devoted to stealing a fake Cellini. In Kelly Reichardt’s The Mastermind, the slacker carpenter JB Mooney lifts some nice Arthur Doves from the nonexistent Framingham Museum of Art and then spends the next hour hiding the goods in a farmhouse, lying to his family, lying to the cops, running from the cops, and trying to flee the country. The year is 1970. It is remarkably easy to leave a museum with a valuable painting but harder to avoid a bludgeoning, even if you happen to look like Josh O’Connor.

Mooney is no political agent. There are times when Reichardt makes him seem like the only young person in seventies America who wasn’t. Just because you’re apolitical doesn’t mean it’s not a corrupt world. Call this the final twist—the final double-cross, even—of these quietly furious films: The thief is no Robin Hood, but his amorality only draws attention to the sociopathy all around him. At the end of The Mastermind, we’re reminded of what the little brat has spent 110 minutes ignoring: While he’s been trying to get away with theft, Americans in uniform have been getting away with murder (that a street sign in this film’s final shot says “Watts” cannot be a coincidence).

Sooner or later, it will occur to anyone watching Inside that a dozen homeless kids could be sleeping in this empty penthouse, dining for free on the proceeds of a single Cattelan—obscenities at least as queasy as the sight of Willem Dafoe eating dog food. Contempt and desire, the same old art-heist emotions, have gotten more violently mixed than ever. In the final scene, the thief piles dozens of sculptures and paintings into a huge mound and climbs to freedom, or possibly death. He leaves behind a message for the architect who owns the place: “I’m sorry if I destroyed it, but maybe it needed to be destroyed.” Yes, maybe. But he saves a few artworks on his way out.