It’s high art heist high jinks!
After paintings by Renoir, Cézanne and Matisse worth over $10 million were snatched in a three-minute heist in Italy, banker-turned-artist Nelson Saiers slipped a reproduction of one of the missing Cézannes into the lost and found at MoMA on Tuesday.
But he insists it’s art, not a prank.
Saiers left a print of the French painter’s “Still Life With Cherries” in a plastic box at the Midtow museum that has “Lost and Found” written on tape stuck to the front.
Brazen thieves had made their way to the Magnani Rocca Foundation outside Palma overnight between March 22 and 23, and made off with three pieces, “Fish” by Renoir, “Odalisque on the Terrace” by Matisse and the Cézanne, with the hopes of stealing a fourth.
But the museum’s security alarm sent them fleeing, according to Reuters.
The heist reportedly took less than three minutes, and authorities believe it’s the same organized gang that famously stole $100 million worth of France’s crown jewels from the Louvre in Paris five months ago.
Saiers told Page Six he was inspired because there are “a lot of museum thefts in the news… I’ve been intrigued by museum thefts.”
Saier says he chose to focus on Cézanne because Picasso described him as “the father of us all” and Matisse said he’s “the one that I owe most.”
Saiers is quick to point out he’s not a prankster. “I’m an artist. My main art is not these guerilla stunts. It’s paintings and sculptures…. My guerilla work is commentary on our society, and not a prank,” he said. “I’m not trying to get a rise out of everybody. I’m trying to have a serious conversation,” he added.
Pulling this one off proved to be a lot easier than his guerilla stunts in the past — like when he tied to bring attention to human sex trafficking by printing out fake Metropolitan Museum of Art brochures and placing them on the shelves next to the museum’s official literature.
This time he just approached the box at security and asked, “Can I put these this here?”
Saiers is inexplicably cagey about the museums’ responses to his work, but told us, “They’ve been very fair and reasonable. These institutions I respect immensely,” he said.
And even though he pulled off his latest the day before April 1. “It’s not an April Fool’s joke. The issues I’m dealing with are very important,” he said.
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