First off, the Mona Lisa is not on the list. Once you see it, you really can’t get over how dinky it is. At least we get to view it, under plastic, with a zillion other people. No one got the chance to have her and view her in Da Vinci’s lifetime. Leonardo held tightly on to it. He then gave it to the king of France as a gift when he moved there in his old age. So France has it for keeps. Meanwhile, centuries later, back at the Louvre, Vincenzo Peruggia, a worker there, just up and snitched it. He simply walked into the gallery, took it off the wall, went into the stairwell, took it out of its frame and case, tucked it under his smock, and walked out with it. Two years later he tried to sell it to an antiques dealer in Florence, Italy, for half a million lire. The dealer, one Mr. Geri, caught on quick, and Peruggia was nabbed. Peruggia claimed Napoleon had stolen the Mona Lisa and he wanted it back in Italy, not in France. The painting toured Italy after the cops got it back, and our Vincenzo got only seven months for being a patriotic art thief. Notwithstanding the fact that Napoleon hadn’t actually stolen it. It had been in France for hundreds of years as the property of the French Crown. The moral is this: stealing is bad, and art theft is a terrible crime. Don’t do it. Let’s just pretend. First rule of Proops Art Theft Club: Pretend big or go home.
Georges Seurat painted A Sunday Afternoon for two years, and then went back and added a border to work with his white frame. There is a monkey on a leash and a Woman fishing, which may be an allusion to the fact people picked up prostitutes on the island. It is an absorbing and active painting, changing texture and color depending on where one stands. It is of course made up of thousands of dots of paint, the technique that would be called pointillism. Seurat died quite young at thirty-one. This burglary would be most tricky, as the piece is almost seven feet tall and ten feet wide. It is as big as a movie screen smack dab in the Art Institute of Chicago. It is also upstairs. We’d have to move at night by tempting the guards with drugged brownies. Then we’d lift the painting frame and all (Seurat designed the frame as well, need that), and march our asses down Michigan Avenue pretending we are a performance art project. Then we jump in the van we have signaled by flashlight. Chance of success: less than 5 percent.
Ellsworth Kelly worked with a camouflage unit during WWII and eventually became an abstract painter and sculptor; he works in shapes and monochromatic canvas. He is a brilliant colorist, and this orange rectangle—one of a series—is in a hallway just at the top of a staircase. It would go perfectly in a home, say, like mine. Right near the fireplace and above my faux-tiger rug just to the right of my thimble collection. We pretend to choke on a souvenir magnet while you grab this canvas and go arse over teakettle out the back. Confederates would be waiting in a black Escalade and off we go. Down to the South Side, where we know a dude to do the deal, then some sinful duck fat fries and a red-hot Chicago-style with a dill pickle spear. We earned it. Chance of success: like the Cubs winning the World Series three times in a row.
The Rose is an impressively unwieldy work of art. It spent years hidden in the San Francisco Art Institute because there was no space massive enough to put the bugger. Twelve feet by nine feet, eight inches thick in places. Covered in jillions of gallons of lead-based paint. The Rose weighs over a ton. It took Ms. DeFeo close to eight lengthy, drinking, chain-smoking years to finish and had to be hoisted out of her flat in San Francisco with a forklift. The paint probably contributed to Ms. DeFeo’s early shuffling off. It lives now in the Whitney Museum in New York. We’d meet in the cute restaurant, which does brunch. Bloody Marys for nerve, then slowly using our spoons, we’d dig a tunnel under the wall that holds The Rose until we undermine the foundation. The weight of the piece will force it to fall onto a bunch of air mattresses we have placed there. This whole plot will take about seventeen years to hatch, so we must guard against impatience. We also need a great big wall to hang it on, so make some inquiries. Chance of success: as small as this work is epic.
Everyone who visits Venice goes to St. Mark’s and gazes at the magical cathedral. On top are four bronze horses stamping, rearing, majestic. The horses used to live in the Hippodrome in Constantinople. That means they decorated the ancient racetrack in Istanbul. Cast during the Roman Empire, they stood until the Venetians who got to Constantinople in the Fourth Crusade saw them and just had to have them. Enrico Dandolo, the blind, ninety-some-odd-years-old doge (Venetians called their leader a doge, pronounced doje), led the sack of Constantinople personally as well as arranged for Venice to fund and supply the whole giant undertaking. Everyone ended up in debt to Venice, and Venice ended up with a good chunk of the Byzantine Empire, which was never again quite as strong. Our ancient, crafty, art thief doge sent the horses back, and they were placed on top of St. Mark’s. Napoleon stole them when he got there and stuck them on top of his triumphal arch; they got given back after he was exiled. Pollution was wasting them, so they were taken down for their own good, and now they stamp and brood inside the church. We would have to distract everyone with a diversion. You’d go in front and yell, “Chocolate.” In the massive confusion of why someone would holler “Chocolate,” we’d move in. The horses are simply too huge to move. This is one time art steals us and we are forced to live in situ. Que sera and lasciate i bei tempi rotolo. Let the good times roll. Chance of success: infinitesimal with a hope of miraculous.
Louise Bourgeois worked for over seventy years. She was finally given her due and recognized by the art world in her seventies. Sculptor, educator, LGBT rights activist, feminist, and confessional artist, she was traumatized as a child by her overbearing dad’s affair with her English nanny. This giant spider created from bronze, marble, and stainless steel stands over thirty feet tall with a huge sac of marble eggs. It symbolizes her mother, who died when Louise was twenty-one. This did not go down well with Louise, and she tried to drown herself and was saved by the very same father. Maman is French for “mother,” and she felt her mother was helpful and protective and could spin and nest. We’d slide into Bilbao like any other tourists, save we have arrived in a crane marked Art Helpers. We would pull up in front of the Guggenheim during siesta and gently lift the spider and slowly drive away into the surrounding mountains. When they awake, it will take some time for them to notice the giant empty space where once clambered a titan-sized arachnid. The Basques celebrate us and create a sexy new rice dish in our honor. After the festivities, we feel guilty and return the ginormous statue the next day. Nothing screams guilt like a symbolic Mother/Spider. It casts its own web of remorse. Chance of success: physically slight, but emotionally we need this.
Picasso was a pervy fortysomething when he started an affair with seventeen-year-old Marie-Thérèse Walter. She is the subject of this Fauvist piece; its title translates as The Dream, which he knocked off in one day. Picasso of course dropped Walter for the photographer and poet Dora Maar. The old swine actually watched them fight it out for him and thought it was one of the best moments of his life. Some artists, huh? It initially went for $4,000, but time and greed pushed the price to the heavens. Steve Wynn is one of those Vegas tycoon types, a billionaire whose understanding of class is to have a dancing waters fountain in front of his hotel that giant bison people from cornfed places ooh and aah at. He bought a gajillion dollars’ worth of art a while back: Turner, Picasso, etc. He snorfed up La Rêve and put it in a fancy-schmancy gallery in his hotel, which closed due to lack of slot machines and sex workers in the viewing area. One fine, starry, idiotic-rich-people night, while showing the painting off to his famous Hollywood-type friends, Mr. Wynn stuck his elbow through La Rêve. This was blamed on his lack of peripheral vision, not to mention lack of supervision. He had agreed the day before to sell it to hedge fund manager and renowned felon Steven A. Cohen for $139 million. Now he owned a torn Picasso of his own making. Something Dalí might have smirked at. He had the painting repaired and sued his insurance company for the price it was devalued at after he clotheslined it. They settled out of court, and Mr. Cohen ended up buying the painting for $155 million. Then Mr. Cohen had to pay the government a billion-dollar fine for being a crooked hedge fund hog, so there is a happy ending. Once this painting hung in a casino, now in a criminal banker’s house. Doesn’t this work of art deserve to hang somewhere less shady? Say, your house. We’d dress as pizza delivery professionals and when we are inevitably shown to the servants’ entrance, you run in and grab it off the wall and put it in the pizza box while sparklers are lit to sidetrack the domestics. We would all go global with this heist, so be prepared to sell this to a middleman of low repute and dwell in Belize under an assumed name for at least fifteen years. We’d go by Mr. Van Deterich and assume a limp and a slight Dutch accent. Since Dutch is a difficult accent, a slight one will serve. Chance of success: realistic. If the non-gifted can be rich and stupid, why can’t we?
The Leshan Giant Buddha is enormous, towering over the confluence of the Minjiang, Dadu, and Qingyi Rivers in China’s Sichuan province. A monk named Haitong started this colossal project in 713. He ran out of money and apparently pulled his eyes out in grief. Funding came back, and it was finished some seventy years later. This sitting Buddha is 233 feet tall, and you can perch on its little toenail with loads of room for friends. The mountain above has spectacular sunsets and clouds sailing all around like a dream. There are also loads of feisty and mischevious macaques running about, the red-faced monkeys that are so often used by people as test animals. They are rife with herpes, which they don’t suffer from. But they do not make good pets, so do not touch or otherwise accost them. The Leshan Buddha is far too big to steal, so we will have to work quickly with mirrors. The place is heaving with pilgrims and tourists and assuredly phalanxes of Red Army as well. You shine the reflected sun in their eyes, and we will hypnotize everyone instantly using opiated incense. Then when they are lulled, we change the course of the river and just float on by. But wait. Better yet, let’s just make this a Zen theft: we see the Buddha, we want to possess the Buddha, we come to the realization that we cannot attain the Buddha, we have been dishonest with ourselves. We let it go and go get Chinese food. Chance of success: as good as anything in the universe has.
Leonora Carrington was a painter as well as a spiritualist, sculptor, novelist, historian, and sometime alchemist. Born into a wealthy family in England, she moved to Europe and joined the Surrealist movement. She had an affair with the famous German artist Max Ernst, but she lost him to rich art patron and full-time artist chaser Peggy Guggenheim. This did not help her mental state. She broke down and was given horrible drugs and electroshock therapy. But she managed to come out on the other side and escaped from the mental hospital. She then wrote a novel about her experience, Down Below, and moved to Mexico where she spent a good deal of the rest of her long ninety-four-year life. What was it about Women artists of that generation? Louise Bourgeois lived to be ninety-eight, Agnes Martin to ninety-two. Anyway, they dug her in Mexico, and she had many shows and was considered a Mexican artist. She was given a commission to do a mural about the pre-white-people history of Mexico and went to Chiapas to study the area. She was introduced by the anthropologist Gertrude Blom to the curanderos, or healers, from the awesomely named town of Zinacantán (the land of bats). They normally didn’t do their thing for outsiders, but Ms. Carrington had such a vast knowledge and respect for mysticism and healing, they let her sit in. She studied the Popol Vuh, or people’s history, which is the Mayan sacred book of mysteries before the conquistadors. From this time she painted The Magical World of the Mayas. This painting resides in Chapultepec Park in Mexico City, so we should take a shamanistic dose of psychoactive mushrooms that we have bought from a lady named Carmelita we met in a bodega. You get too high and start to freak, so we stop for refrescos at a stand. The afternoon is still and we can hear children playing, so your sense of dread abates somewhat, and we sally to the museum. There in the warm glow of altered perception, we become overwhelmed by the astounding colors and fantastical motif. Imbued with a sense of belonging to the universe, we abandon our notion of physical theft and decide to have an unlikely escapade in a brightly colored cab. Later, when we are coming down, we have seafood enchiladas and revel in our refound sense of cosmic morality. So goes the flow. Chance of success: mythical, like the Lizard God returning.
Why not? Everyone else has stolen it. There are five Screams, and they have been taken time and time again. They were heisted in the recent past, and the thieves wrote a note saying thanks for the bad security. Everyone is incarcerated now, but The Scream is waiting for another larcenous visit. This time we’d do it right. We all go in and scream in abject existential terror, and while the staff puzzles this out, we run for the snack bar where—we kid thou not—there are Scream-themed cakes. A Scream cake fight is started, and in the ensuing kerfuffle, we back our tourist bus up to the front entrance and roll on down the hill. A waiting boat on the fjord takes us to one of a million little islands where we sit drinking aquavit and ponder why we just did that. Munch would approve, as he was a depressive drunk. Who else would experience a lovely summer sunset on a bridge as a moment of wailing futility? Chance of success: actually better than any other plan.
Florence is bursting with fabulous art, including Michelangelo’s David, Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus, and of course Brunelleschi’s astounding Duomo. All too obvious and well guarded. The line alone at the Uffizi will kill any urge to view art, much less purloin. Then why Donatello’s David? For one thing, it is small compared to the other David. Just around five feet tall. Michelangelo made his hero boy fifteen feet tall. Plus there is a full-sized plaster cast in the V&A in London and a full-sized marble in the Royal Botanic Gardens in Surrey. So they have backups.
Donatello’s David stands in perfect contrapposto, which Donatello certainly learned from looking at ancient Greek and Roman sculpture. That means he looks like a Woman and has his sassy hand on his hip. He wears a small helmet and has a giant sword that represents exactly what you think it does. We make small talk with the guards about the weather and the price of designer leather goods. Then two drunken colleagues enter with a nude man wearing a helmet. We knock David off his pedestal, and the drunks hurry him out on either side with a loud excuse: “He’s always like this after lunch, doesn’t know his limit.” The sight of the nude man in a hat with a sword should be enough for us to make our escape in a late-’90s model Fiat Punto. Then it’s off to a secluded crib in Tuscany for Chianti and goose prosciutto. Chances of success: slim and biblical, like our hero.
Lord Elgin, who was ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, nicked the marbles—meaning statues and reliefs of heroic heroes being heroic—from the Parthenon and other temples in Greece. The Turks had been running Greece for 350 years. Elgin thought the Turks were wrecking the art and sculpture and received permission from the government to start lifting them. On the way, some sank in a boat and had to be recovered. Was it a curse? Greece has been petitioning to get them back for a long while. The British Museum refuses to part with them. Time for us to get them back for Greece. This one we don’t do for gain but for immortality. The British Museum website states they were “acquired,” which means pilfered. The museum bought them from Elgin after much ado, and they low-balled him on the price. We’d come disguised as a moving company and say we are taking the statues out for a wash. We’d load up the van and speed to the coast, where we have hired a Greek vessel with a ne’er-do-well captain named Stavros. We would then sail back the same route the marbles came, and when we hit Greece, we’d alert the New Acropolis Museum, where they already have a room prepared for the treasures awaiting their return. We’d dine in triumph; you get the mullet, and I get the lamb. We’d send the plaster casts back to the British Museum with a note saying the cleaning was free. Chance of success: hang the success; we did this for the gods.
George W. Bush was almost voted president twice during the terror/war/depression boom of the 2000s. Dick Cheney was nominally vice president, but in reality he was the shot caller. Since his retirement from public life, W has been pursuing his goal of being the worst artist who ever held office since Hitler. His portraits of world leaders he has met are a tribute to the primitive school of art brut, or outsider art, usually meaning art made by people from without the art world, such as children or mental patients. Cheney’s house in Wyoming is filled with trophies and war crime memorabilia. We’d pitch up as an honor guard with a band, uniforms, and everything. We would perform a number on the lawn and ask to use the facilities. On our way to the loo, we’d steal the Putin portrait off the refrigerator and drive like fury. We can be at the Devil’s Tower (non-ironic) before noon and then, freedom. Win/win. Chance of success: like winning a war in Afghanistan.