The case of a missing Goldie oil painting has been captivating people all over the country. Sleep 'tis a Gentle Thing was taken along with other valuable artworks and antiques between 27 December and 3 January.
A lot of people have expressed surprise at an art theft in New Zealand, but we have a long history of it.
Penelope Jackson is the Author of Thieves, Fakers and Fraudsters: The New Zealand Story and Females in the Frame; women, art and crime.
Jackson tells Summer Times art crime falls into three main categories: theft, vandalism, and fraud. And it’s often debatable whether a crime has occurred.
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“I’ve just been researching a case that happened in November 1900 at Auckland museum where three little girls knocked over a plaster cast. They ran out of the museum and the one and only staff member took chase down Queen Street.
“It was completely destroyed, and the work was never replaced. Some might consider that an art crime, but others might say it was kids having fun, or not being supervised. It can be quite a hard thing.”
Art crimes aren’t necessarily high-stakes thefts like we seen in the movies. Jackson recalls the case of the man in Wellington who climbed the Len Lye sculpture on the waterfront causing a huge amount of damage to it.
She says Goldie paintings have been a target of thieves for a long time but they’re very difficult to sell and many of them end up returned.
“The beautiful thing about the internet is that as soon as a Goldie is taken, the image is out there for evermore so anyone who might be contemplating purchasing a Goldie can do a quick Google search and they’re going to see that.”
Art theft, it turns out, is just a lose-lose scenario for the thief and the owner or museum. Paintings can get badly damaged and Jackson says there have been cases where art is removed from the frame and rolled up which causes catastrophic harm to the work.
“If you take a high profile art work, or work that has become high profile because its been stolen and its all over the internet, what can you do with it? The answer is you can do very little.”
Most art theft, Jackson says, is opportunistic and typically thieves are there for other things but see the art and grab it.
“They don’t think beyond that, or they think we’ll take that and sell it, but they don’t actually think how, they haven’t got that part of the strategy worked out.”
Jackson is in favour of creating a national art register where people can log their artwork and then report it stolen so that a red flag will go up at auction houses and sales.
“It would be a really useful tool. If you think about wanting to buy a car, you can always find out whether that has been stolen… it’s really hard with artworks because we don’t have that register there.”
