8 Matisse Works, Looted from Library in Brazil, Are Recovered

 

 

The prints by the French master were taken in São Paulo last year in a brazen daylight heist.

 John Yoon 

The police in Brazil recovered eight stolen works by Henri Matisse on Thursday, officials said, months after armed men made off with them from a library in São Paulo.

The police tracked the pieces, which belong to the French master’s 1947 series called “Jazz,” to an apartment in the suburb of São Bernardo do Campo, the São Paulo city government and the police said.

One person was arrested at the apartment on suspicion of receiving stolen goods, according to the police.

The pieces were stolen in December from the Mário de Andrade Library, São Paulo’s largest, during public viewing hours. Along with the eight Matisses, the thieves also took five works by the Brazilian modernist painter Candido Portinari, the authorities said.

In the heist, the men overpowered a security guard and two bystanders, according to an emailed statement from Rodrigo Bezerra, a police spokesman. Soon after, they were seen carrying the pieces around on the street in security camera footage released by the authorities. At one point in the video, a man places a stack of frames next to a pile of garbage on a sidewalk, then returns to pick it up.

The authorities in Brazil alerted Interpol after the heist because they were concerned that the pieces might be smuggled out of the country.

The police said that they had arrested one suspect in the robbery the day after it took place. It said that two other suspects in the library heist had been arrested in April in a separate art-theft case: a woman and a man described as the organizer of the crime.

Totó Parente, an official in the São Paulo government, said on Thursday that recovering the Matisse works was of “enormous importance” to the city. The police said that they had yet to locate the Portinari pieces.

Matisse’s works are coveted by galleries, museums and collectors around the world. And by art thieves.

His “Odalisque on the Terrace” was one of three paintings stolen from a private art museum in Italy in March. The thieves broke into the Magnani-Rocca Foundation and made off with the three artworks in just three minutes, the police said.

And “Odalisque in Red Pants,” taken from a museum in Venezuela, was recovered in 2012 by F.B.I. agents in Miami, who arrested two people and said they were trying to sell the painting.

It was not clear when “Odalisque in Red Pants” was stolen from the Contemporary Art Museum of Caracas because a fake version of it was placed after the theft.

The eight pieces recovered in Brazil on Thursday were “The Clown”; “The Circus”; “Monsieur Loyal”; “The Nightmare of the White Elephant”; “The Codomas”; “The Swimmer in the Aquarium”; “The Sword Swallower”; and “The Cowboy.”

NEW YORK TIMES