We was framed

One thing you can count on in the movies is that if art theft is involved it will be called a ‘heist’ or a ‘caper’.  Last Sunday's Doors open on UKTV was a classic in the caper category starring Stephen Fry as your typical bumbling curator (sic).  

The promo pic shows the cuddly crims holding what we assume to be the loot from some English art museum or stately home. They might just as well be coming out of a Dunbar Sloane auction with works by Charles Barraud, Raymond McIntyre, and practically any abstract painter showing at the New Zealand Academy up on Buckle Street in the early sixties. 

You can see a preview trailer for  Doors open here and links to other museum crime movies, a bunch of new ones plus a few we have covered in the past.
 
Images: top, promo for Doors open movie. Lower, OTN’s highly skilled Photoshop division re-jig distorted picture held by criminals as if by magic.

Art Heist: Yes, it's a steal the original, copy original, burn the copy, give original to evil collector movie

The art of stealing: A couple of bad hats are paid to nick a Van Gogh from an abandoned farm owned by an Argentinean countess. Watch the trailer here

Double trouble: Security guards from two Chinese cities join forces to catch art thieves. Trailer here

Dr No: A Classic. James Bond meets the evil cat stoker who owns the stolen portrait of the Duke of Wellington

Entrapment: Catherine Zeta-Jones snakes through those nifty red laser beams to steal a $40 million Rembrandt

Gambit: Statue stealing and a fake Monet with Colin Firth as the curator

The good thief: Nick Nolte steals a fortune in rare paintings from a Monte Carlo casino. Trailer here

Headhunters: HR operative by day, art thief by night

Ocean's Twelve: Vincent Cassel's climbs through more nifty red beam to steal a Fabergé Egg

Trance: After an art heist caper a hypnotist is called in to find a missing stolen painting (seriously).

The Thomas Crown Affair (1999): thieves pinch Monet’s landscape The island of San Giorgio Maggiore at dusk from the Met

The Train: Immaculately uniformed Germans are on the rails with hundreds of paintings from French museums but don’t reckon on Burt Lancaster. Trailer.

Talking books

“And for ten days and nights I wrenched and slapped and sanded until, with the flood still running through my head, the canvas put the holy fear of God in me, made the bloody hair on my bloody neck stand up on end.”

Artists Butcher Bones describing the production of his McCahon-like painting If you have ever seen a man die in Peter Carey’s Theft: a love story

Goners

In the story of gold frames there's probably none sadder than those hanging in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. New Zealanders might be forgiven for thinking they've stumbled on a Julian Dashper installation but this image is in fact a reminder of the day in 1990 when thieves stole $US500 million worth of artworks from the museum. You can see them here on the FBI’s stolen art site. Now the Gardner is offering a $US5 million reward for information leading to the return of the works and today the FBI has announced it knows who stole the works, but doesn't know where they are. You can read this amazing true art-crime story here.

Image: once were paintings at the Stewart Gardner Museum

Stop thief... whoever you are

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One of our readers (thanks D) has pointed us to the recently published finale of the theft alluded to in Dr No. The portrait of the Duke of Wellington by Goya seen in the movie was stolen from the National Art Gallery in London and eventually recovered. Kempton Bunton, a 61-year-old unemployed bus driver, confessed to the crime and spent three months in jail although he was eventually found not guilty of nicking the painting only of stealing the frame. It now appears that it was in fact his son John who did the deed. Friday’s Guardian tells all:

“Just before dawn on Monday 21 August 1961, John Bunton – a temporary van driver living not far away in digs off Tottenham Court Road – stood on a parking meter to get over the gallery's back wall. He then used a six-metre ladder left by builders to climb through the unlocked window of a men's toilet to get into the main building of the gallery.

"The painting was standing on an easel in a roped-off enclosure at the top of the main stairs. 'I went up to it, took hold of it, and carried it back to the gents toilet,' he told the police. He climbed back out of the window, down the ladder, and retraced his steps to the back wall by St Martin's Street. 'I climbed over the wall, still holding the picture in one hand ... I put the picture on the back seat of the car and drove back to [his furnished room in] Grafton Street. I then put the picture under my bed.'"

Bunton said that he hadn't carried a jemmy and if the toilet window had been shut he would have had to give up. He had to push-start the small black Wolseley that he used as a getaway car.

You can read more of this strange art story here.

Images: Look and Learn magazine illustrations for a story on the theft. Thanks to this new information we now know they got the thief wrong and that the painting wasn’t taken off a wall. The illustrations Recovery of the stolen Goya portrait of the Duke of Wellington are by Andrew Howat / Private Collection / © Look and Learn / The Bridgeman Art Library