Warhol prints stolen and damaged in a botched heist in the Netherlands

Two screen prints from Andy Warhol’s 1985 Pop Art series The Reigning Queen were stolen from a gallery in the Netherlands – and two others were damaged – in a robbery gone wrong.

At 3.05 local time, in in the early hours of Friday morningresidents of a small, cobbled street in the village of Oiserwijk heard a huge explosion, followed by the sound of an alarm coming from the MPV Gallery. The criminals who had bombed the front of the building took the four signed and numbered silkscreens, which were to be sold at the PAN Amsterdam art fair in three weeks.

Experts believe it was a far from professional theft: two of the vulnerable fingerprints were damaged and abandoned. The other two, apparently too large to fit in the getaway car, were cut from their frames and probably damaged beyond repair.

“It’s awful,” says Mark Peet Visser, who kept the portraits – which depict the queens of the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Denmark and Swaziland (now Eswatini) – in his gallery in North Brabant. “It’s also unprofessional for a criminal to work like this, with explosives far too heavy and a getaway car too small for the job.”

he says Art newspaper that very few people knew that the works were hidden at the gallery—not in private storage—when the thieves broke into it. The damaged works are currently being analyzed.

“The (stolen) works can no longer be sold,” he says. “They are all documented, numbered and no longer tradable. It’s not really financially interesting to steal art and you can hardly hang them in your living room.”

Arthur Brand, an art detective who last year recovered a stolen Vincent van Gogh painting – the work handed in an Ikea bag – says it was unlikely the Warhol theft was a commission. “I think they were some criminals who are not really specialized in stealing art, they saw an opportunity and thought: first let’s steal them and then see what we can do … and it all went wrong,” he says he.

“Some of the pieces were (apparently) already destroyed or damaged by the bomb, then these idiots realized the car wasn’t big enough so they left two out and the other two out of frames on the street. People who have seen the security footage are sure those pieces are damaged as well – and with silkscreens, if they’re damaged or a piece is missing, it’s worth nothing.”

Mark Grol, director of PAN Amsterdam, says the prints would have been “one of the highlights” of the art fair at the end of November. Another ‘diamond-dusted’ set from the series – which is so vulnerable it can only be shown once every 30 years – is currently on display in an exhibition at Paleis Het Loo, Apeldoorn.

Hanna Klarenbeek, curator of the Paleis Het Loo exhibition, says these vulnerable paper prints are particularly popular in the Netherlands and Britain, where many people associate images of their former queen with Warhol’s portrait. “We store them face up, lying down, in our warehouses and take care to display them,” she says. “With this theft, where they left them on the pavement and ripped them out of their frames, I assume they are very damaged because they know how vulnerable ours are. You can’t really restore these cracks in the paper. So we’re very careful.”