News – Rio Robberies and St. Louis Recoveries - World

During the weekend, Rio de Janeiro’s Chácara do Céu Museum was hit by thieves who successfully absconded under the cover of those chaotic Carnival crowds. A little more sophisticated than those Edvard Munch lifters with the classy hatchback car, these guys were armed and managed to flee with several works, including Picasso’s ‘The Dance’ (left), Dali’s ‘Two Balconies’, Matisse’s ‘Garden of Luxemburg’ and Monet’s ‘Marine’. Now, each one of these pieces is a masterpiece, which beckons the obvious question of, where did they go? After all, these aren’t exactly what you'd call small time, easy to shift, paintings. Either way, whatever the case on their whereabouts, someone has somewhere special planned for them; let’s just hope it’s not a vacant space on a damp old bus like their stolen forerunner, ‘The Scream’. Still, it’s not all bad on the disappearing art front. Over the border in the US, the FBI has recovered over twenty works taken from a storage facility in 2002. These, rather ironically, include paintings by Picasso and Matisse.