Stephanie G. Mathis Marc Santia of NBC New York reports that the police are still looking for the thieves responsible for a heist in the Carlton Fine Arts Gallery located in Midtown Manhattan.
Three individuals entered the Madison Avenue Gallery in the early morning hours of September 25. One of the three smashed a glass door on the front with a hammer and ran in to grab an artwork from a display easel. It was a Marc Chagall lithograph worth $100,000.
The thieves removed the artwork from the gallery and carried it out into the rain to a Honda Accord that was waiting. The footage from the surveillance cameras shows the thieves struggling to load the work into the sedan. At one point, they set it down on a wet surface. Adam Schrader of Artnet reports that no one was hurt during the break-in.
The artwork is still missing almost two months after the video was taken, and authorities are still trying to find the three suspects.
Charles Saffati, gallery owner in New York City, says: “It is a high-end neighborhood.” There are a lot of police officers in the area as well, so it would take a very bold person to do such a thing.
NBC New York reports that Saffati considers Chagall to be one of three masters of 20th-century art, along with Pablo Picasso and Joan Miro.
The gallery added a new security-glassed storefront, an upgraded alarm, and armed guards on duty 24 hours a day in the wake of this crime. Saffati told NBC New York that the cost was “huge.” “It’s unacceptable. Madison Avenue is a dangerous place; we need to be protected. “We have the best police forces in the world, but they are unable to do anything.”
Saffati told Hyperallergic Rhea Nhayyar that the stolen print of Eve is the seventh edition of fifty lithographs Chagall created of the titular character in the Garden of Eden. Eve is reclining nude beneath a tree, holding an apple. Angels are watching her from above. The drawing is in Chagall’s signature style, which blends artistic influences like Surrealism and Expressionism to defy a single label.
Chagall said, “art, seems to me above all to be a state or soul”.
Many of Chagall’s works, such as Eve, incorporate religious themes and symbols. Hyperallergic writes that “Chagall’s general subject was deeply entwined to his identity and experience as a Jewish Man.” The artist was also inspired by his study of the Bible and spent decades of his artistic practice illustrating its stories in printmaking and paintings.
