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Picasso One of Three Paintings Stolen from National Gallery

Three works of art were stolen during a dawn break-in at the National Gallery in central Athens on Monday, among them an extremely valuable painting by Picasso, according to the latest announcement issued by Greek Police.
The other exhibits stolen were another highly valuable 1905 landscape in oil by the Dutch painter Piet Mondrian, depicting a windmill by a river, and a pen and sepia sketch on paper by the 17th-century Italian painter Guglielmo Caccia (Moncalvo), depicting the ecstasy of St. Diego de Alcala with the Holy Trinity and the symbols of faith.
The culprit or culprits also tried to take a fourth painting, a second Mondrian owned by the Gallery depicting a farmhouse, but dropped this in the courtyard outside the gallery while making their escape.
The stolen Mondrian was bought and donated to the gallery by Alexandros Pappas in 1963, while the Caccia sketch was donated by Grigoris Maraslis in 1907.
Police said the burglars had actually forced a back door of the gallery and deactivated the alarm-system circuits on the last day of an exhibition entitled “Unknown Treasures from the National Gallery Collection”. The gallery was closed to the public on Monday for restoration work. The stolen Picasso was identified as the 1939 “Woman’s Head” that was presented as a gift to the Gallery by the artist himself in 1940, in recognition of the Greek peoples’ resistance to the Nazi occupation; it was the only Picasso in the Gallery’s collection.
A police investigation showed that the culprits laid the groundwork for the break-in on Sunday evening at 19:58, forcing the aluminium balcony door and deactivating the alarm but leaving the door closed. Though the alarm had sounded at the time, a guard that went to investigate saw no one on the scene nor any sign of a break-in and simply turned off the alarm.
The culprits then proceeded to trigger several false alarms without actually entering the gallery, so that each time the guard went to investigate there was no one there. The guard then disabled at least one alarm due to what he believed to be a malfunction of the system.
In the final stage of the break-in, they opened the balcony door they had already forced open, entering the building from the back and removed the paintings from their frames.
The police announcement said that the Gallery’s motion sensor alarm went off at 4:30 a.m. on Monday and the security guard that went to investigate gave chase to one man that he saw running out of the building, but failed to catch him. Police estimate that approximately seven minutes elapsed from the moment the perpetrator or perpetrators entered the gallery until their departure.
Police have taken footage from the museum’s surveillance cameras for investigation and issued international warrants for the arrest of the suspects and the recovery of the stolen works of art.
(source: ana-mpa)

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