Five paintings taken from a Paris museum

In the night of 19 to 20 May 2010, a man got into the Paris Museum of Modern Art, a municipal museum in the 16th arrondissement, near the Eiffel Tower. Outlets differ on how. The BBC says he broke a window. Deutsche Welle says he removed the glass without breaking it. Sources also say he cut a padlocked gate. He entered between about three and half past three. Three guards were on duty. Nobody saw the loss until a guard made a round the next morning.

The man took five paintings owned by the City of Paris: Picasso’s Le Pigeon aux petits pois, Matisse’s La Pastorale, Braque’s L’Olivier près de l’Estaque, Léger’s Nature morte au chandelier and Modigliani’s La Femme à l’éventail. The alarm and the motion detectors were out of order. Reuters says investigators later found the system defective. The sources disagree on how long it had been broken, from several weeks to several months. The Art Newspaper reports that a report cited by the defence said the windows had not been touched since the building went up in 1937. Paris later spent 3 million euros on a new system. No member of staff was sanctioned.

The burglar was Vjeran Tomic, a burglar the French press called “Spider-Man”. By his own account, he went in for the Léger. Reuters adds the Modigliani. Finding no alarm, he took the other works too. He passed them to Jean-Michel Corvez, an antiques dealer. Corvez told the court he had a buyer. The Art Newspaper reports that this buyer was a Saudi who wanted a Léger and perhaps a Modigliani. The buyer was never named. He vanished after the press storm, and the paintings were not sold. Yonathan Birn, a watch and clock expert, took charge of the works.

Tomic was arrested in May 2011, according to The Guardian and Artnet. Le Point says only that it was in spring 2011. The trial opened at the Paris criminal court on 30 January 2017. Birn said he kept the Modigliani in a bank deposit box and hid the other four behind a metal closet in his flat. He said that in May 2011, after police searched his home over another theft, he panicked, broke the stretchers and threw the canvases in a rubbish bin.

The court did not accept this. It said it had no certain evidence that the works were destroyed. Investigators and the other defendants did not believe Birn either. Investigators think the paintings left France, but no proof of this has been published.

On 20 February 2017 the court gave its verdict. Tomic was convicted of theft and sentenced to eight years in prison and a fine of 200,000 euros. Corvez, found to be the real instigator acting for a sponsor, got seven years, a fine of 150,000 euros and a five-year ban on trading in antiques. Birn was convicted of receiving the works and got six years and a fine of 150,000 euros. The three were ordered jointly to pay the City of Paris 104 million euros. Outlets put the value of the paintings between 100 million and 109 million euros. These are estimates, not sale prices.

By July 2025, Le Point reports, all three men were free. The five works have not been found. They remain on the database of the French cultural-property police and on Interpol’s database.