Museum Heist

It was a bold caper in broad daylight and now "The Scream," a modern art icon, is missing.

By Scott Berinato

November 01, 2004 — CSO — ROBBERY It was a bold caper in broad daylight and now "The Scream," a modern art icon, is missing.

In September, we published a feature on museum security ("The Art of Securing Pricelessness," www.csoonline.com/printlinks), which was written prior to but published just days after the smash-and-grab theft of Edvard Munch's masterpiece "The Scream" from a museum in Oslo. (Along with "The Scream," another Munch masterpiece, "Madonna," was taken).

In our feature, we detailed the sophisticated layers of security that go into keeping priceless works of art secure yet still accessible to the public. However, in a disturbing trend, this heist was anything but sophisticated. According to a New York Times report, two men in ski maskswielding pistols to prevent anyone (including unarmed guards) from interruptingused wire cutters to wrench the pieces from the wall.

The latter efforts triggered silent alarms, but by the time police could react, the men had fled in an Audi station wagon driven by a third masked man.

Ironically, the brutish job is in some ways a byproduct of today's sophisticated museum security, says Steven Keller, the museum security consultant who helped us with our September feature. Since subtler, advanced kinds of theft, including insider jobs after hours or during "gray hours" when museum staff is changing what hangs in an exhibition space, have been deterred so well, thieves are shifting tactics and attacking where they perceive more vulnerability. In museums, that vulnerability lies in the understandable desire of curators to avoid violence at all costs.

"We hope armed robbery is not a trend in museums," Keller says. "And homeland security-like electronic screening procedures could help solve the problem of guns getting inside the premises." Keller says such screening is showing up at some museums, and so are armed guards at entrances and exits.

According to the Museum Security Network, about $10 billion in art and treasures are stolen and traded each year.