‘Amateur’ thieves steal 2 Warhol prints, damage 2 more in botched heist at Dutch gallery

THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AP) — Thieves blew open the door of an art gallery in the southern Netherlands and stole two works from a famous series of screen prints by American pop artist Andy Warhol and left two more badly damaged on the street in while they were running away. the scene of the botched robbery, the gallery owner said Friday.

Mark Peet Visser said the thieves tried to steal all four works from a 1985 Warhol series called “Reigning Queens,” which features portraits of the then-queens of the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Denmark and Swaziland, a small kingdom landlocked South Africa. which is now called Eswatini.

In a phone interview, Visser said the theft early Friday at the MPV Gallery in the city of Oisterwijk was caught on security cameras and called it “amateur.”

“The bombing was so violent that my entire building was destroyed,” and nearby shops were also damaged, he said. “So they did that part of it well, too well in fact. And then they ran to the car with the artwork and it turns out they won’t fit in the car. … At that moment the works are torn from the frames and you know they are damaged beyond repair, because it is impossible to remove them undamaged.”

Visser declined to put a value on the four signed and numbered works, which he had planned to offer for sale as decor at an Amsterdam art fair later this month.

The thieves escaped with portraits of ELISABETH II of the United Kingdom and Margrethe II of Denmark. The prints of Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands and Ntombi Tfwala, who is now known as the Queen Mother of Eswatini, were left on the street as the thieves fled, Visser said.

Police appealed for witnesses as forensic experts examined the badly damaged gallery on Friday.