Paintings worth millions stolen from Paris museum

A thief stole five paintings valued at more than $100 million, including major works by Picasso and Matisse, in an overnight heist Thursday at a Paris modern art museum with a broken alarm system, officials said.

The paintings disappeared early Thursday from the Paris Museum of Modern Art, across the Seine River from the Eiffel Tower in one of the French capital's most chic and tourist-frequented neighborhoods.

The museum's alarm system had been broken since March 30 in some rooms, Paris Mayor Bertrand Delanoe said in a statement. The security system operator ordered spare parts to fix it but had not yet received the equipment from the supplier, the statement said.

The museum reopened in 2006 after spending euro15 million and three years upgrading its security system.

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Christophe Girard, deputy culture secretary at Paris City Hall, said a single masked intruder was caught on a video surveillance camera.

Investigators are trying to determine whether the intruder was operating alone, Girard told reporters, who suggested the heist was carried out by a very "sophisticated" team or individual. He said three guards were on duty overnight, but "they saw nothing."

The intruder entered by cutting a padlock on a gate and breaking a museum window, the Paris prosecutor's office said.

The prosecutor's office initially estimated the five paintings' total worth at as much as euro500 million ($613 million) but later downgraded that to euro90 million ($112 million). Girard said the total value was "just under 100 million euros."

He said "Le pigeon aux petits-pois" ("The Pigeon with the Peas") an ochre and brown Cubist oil painting by Pablo Picasso, was worth an estimated euro23 million, and "La Pastorale" ("Pastoral"), an oil painting of nudes on a hillside by Henri Matisse about euro15 million.

The other paintings stolen were "L'olivier pres de l'Estaque" ("Olive Tree near Estaque") by Georges Braque; "La femme a l'eventail" ("Woman with a Fan") by Amedeo Modigliani; and "Nature morte aux chandeliers" ("Still Life with Chandeliers") by Fernand Leger.

Alice Farren-Bradley of the Art Loss Registry in London said the Paris theft "appears to be one of the biggest" art heists ever, considering the estimated value, the prominence of the artists and the high profile of the museum.

She added, however, that the value of the paintings would have to be confirmed, as museums and art dealers often value paintings differently.

She said it will be "virtually impossible" to sell such prominent paintings on the open market and that typically stolen art fetches lower prices on the black market.

"Very often they can be used as collateral to broker other deals" involving drugs or weapons, she said. "They are not necessarily going to be bought by some great lover of the arts."

While the thefts are often carefully planned, that's not always the case for the next step - selling the stolen paintings - which is why they are often recovered, she said.

(Copyright 2010 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)