Lost or Stolen works of Art Part 2
1930s
Jan van Eyck’s Righteous Judges panel from the Ghent Altarpiece
Van Eyck’s Ghent Altarpiece holds the dubious distinction of being the most-stolen artwork in history.
The object of 13 crimes over six centuries, it has been burgled, all or in part, six times (dwarfing the runner-up, Rembrandt’s Portrait of Jacob de Gheyn at the Dulwich Picture Gallery, which was stolen a mere four times). All of the altarpiece’s 12 panels are now intact, but one is not the original.
The panel depicting the Righteous Judges was stolen in 1934 and never found. The mastermind behind its theft from the cathedral of St Bavo in Ghent was a tubby stockbroker obsessed with the novels of Maurice Leblanc and his gentleman burglar, Arsène Lupin – he modelled the heist on the plot of a story called The Hollow Needle. This panel hung for many years behind the rood screen of a small church in rural Belgium, but its current whereabouts are unknown.
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2018/may/18/lost-stolen-blown-up-and- fed-to-pigs-the-greatest-missing-masterpieces
1940’s
With all the unrest in the 1940’s due to the world war, there were a great deal of art thefts.
The Nazis plundered tens of thousands of artworks, from across Europe, with the goal of creating a ‘super museum’ in Hitler’s hometown of Linz in Germany.
The Jeu de Paume Art Museum in occupied Paris was used by the Nazis as a storage and sorting depot for stolen artworks from museums and private art collections throughout France.
The biggest storage facility turned out to be a salt mine in Altaussee, Austria, where over 6,500 paintings were stored, including works by Michelangelo, Rubens, Vermeer and Rembrandt, as well as the Ghent Altarpiece.
They also confiscated several thousand artworks from Jewish owners, many ended up in the hands of respectable collectors and institutions after the war. Many of these artworks have been returned to the surviving relatives of the families from whom they were taken. Many are, however, still missing.