Over the past two decades, Arthur Brand has gained acclaim for his work as an art detective, recovering a stolen Picasso painting Buste de Femme; a pair of Nazi-era bronze horses by Josef Thorak, one of Hitler’s favourite artists; a 1941 Salvador Dali; and a 1929 Tamara de Lempicka.
He does so working closely with police forces in different countries. Strapped for expertise and manpower, they are only too happy to get his help. At first, he says, he was anxious about coming face to face with the perpetrators. “But I thought, why is the mafia boss in front of me sweating too? I started to realise they always think that, wherever I am, the police are somewhere hidden in a tree, which is not true. When I realised that they are more afraid of me than I am of them, I started to relax.”
When people think of art theft, their minds may wander to the world’s most valuable collections, or recognisable paintings and statues. But if you’re looking to make money – and for your crimes to maybe even go unnoticed – it’s far more difficult to do so by stealing rare items. “If you steal a Van Gogh, who are you going to sell it to? It’s in newspapers everywhere, it’s easily recognisable,” he says. “But if you steal a golden Roman ring, there are tens of thousands, which you cannot recognise.”
‘The problem is far bigger than we realise’
The British Museum attracts millions of visitors every year. But the items out on display, thought to be about 80,000, represent roughly 1% of the institution’s collection of objects. The rest, roughly 8m items, are held in storage.
While there will likely be more calls for the museum to improve its security after this incident, Brand is keen to stress that thefts like this “happen in every museum in the world”. That said, this doesn’t mean it is a trivial problem. “I think the problem is far bigger than we realise, that far more items have been stolen. This is just the tip of the iceberg,” he says. “We should prepare for worse, because more cases like this will pop up.”
The problem, he says, stems from the fact that there isn’t an inventory system of what items the museum has in its possession, many of which – as mentioned above – are far from instantly recognisable. “There are hundreds of thousands of small objects [in storage] and many of them have not been categorised,” he explains. “So sometimes nobody finds out [if something is stolen]. They just put it in a pocket and they go away … if pieces have been categorised, and we know that they are missing, and there are pictures, then you can go hunting for them. You can publish them and say, ‘Who has seen this piece?’ But if you don’t have them, not even an art squad can do anything.”
Moreover, in London, there are only two officers dedicated to cultural heritage crimes, according to Art Recovery International. In the Netherlands, where Brand is based, there are also just a handful of officers. “The problem is that art crime is not a priority,” he says. “Drugs is, terrorism is, killings; those are a priority, art is not a priority. But if you steal gold from a museum, it’s still theft.”
‘You have to trust people’
Investigations continue into whether or not the senior curator took the items, which are small, lesser-known pieces of jewellery as well as glass and stones.
Brand explains that these would be the easiest items to take, in order to sell them on or repurpose them. “Gold, silver, you can melt that down, and jewellery from whatever era, if there are diamonds in it, you can dismantle it and sell them separately,” he says.
While most jewellers run a reputable business, there are some who would look the other way. “So imagine that you steal something from a museum that has not been categorised, that will be dismantled or be melted down by a corrupt jeweller, it doesn’t matter if you have a million police officers working at the art squad, or one – there is no difference,” Brand says.
There is, he adds, a limit to how much security a museum can have: “You also have to trust people. You cannot do a full body search every time your senior curators leave the building.”
Even after categorising every object in its collection – a huge feat in itself – an organisation such as the British Museum would then need to employ regular checks, all while its collections grow. “Stuff keeps coming in, from diggings and people who leave stuff to them,” says Brand.
An $8bn-a-year problem
The theft at the British Museum may have come as a shock to many, but Brand says it shouldn’t. “The world of art is a very interesting, very beautiful world, but there is also a dark side to it: forgeries and theft. We are talking about $8bn a year in art crime.”
Brand describes the lure of gold as a disease – and ultimately a curse. In 2019, he recovered Oscar Wilde’s stolen friendship ring. “For 5,000 years, people have been killing each other for gold. I put it on my finger and I felt like I was in Lord of the Rings. I could hardly get it off.”
