Louvre heist sparks worldwide art crime obsession
The Louvre experienced a theft on Oct. 19 when criminals used a truck-mounted ladder and power tools to access the Galerie d’Apollon and steal eight pieces of Napoleonic jewelry valued at millions of dollars. The items belonged to Empress Eugénie and Queen Hortense before the thieves escaped on scooters.
Cinema has explored art theft through multiple films that examine the subject from different angles. Kelly Reichardt’s The Mastermind follows an unemployed father who robs a Massachusetts museum and struggles with the consequences. William Wyler’s How to Steal a Million features Audrey Hepburn as a woman who must steal her father’s forged sculpture from a Paris museum.
Pierce Brosnan stars in The Thomas Crown Affair as a wealthy art thief who targets the Metropolitan Museum of Art for entertainment rather than profit. Sean Connery appears in Entrapment as a professional thief pursued by an insurance investigator played by Catherine Zeta-Jones.
The 1990 theft from Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum remains unsolved after more than 30 years. The criminals stole 13 works worth $500 million that have never been recovered.
