![](\"https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/MCDHOTO_FE012.jpg?w=400\")
<\/div>\n<\/div>IF YOU ARE A <\/strong>fictional character and youhappen to be stealing art, odds are excellent that you\u2019re in a heist movie. At this point, the genre is so famous, and mocked, that plumbing it for serious lessons about art and the art market may seem quixotic. Before I took this assignment, I knew How to Steal a Million <\/em>(1966) was directed by William Wyler and starred Audrey Hepburn and Peter O\u2019Toole. Nobody bothered to tell me it\u2019s one of the triumphs of postmodern American cinema. Am I exaggerating this film\u2019s true value? Silly question\u2014if How to Steal a Million <\/em>is about anything, it\u2019s about how \u201ctrue value\u201d doesn\u2019t exist. Naturally, the first scene is set at an auction.<\/p>\n \n\tIt\u2019s almost too perfect that in this early trendsetter\u2014the one so many art-robbery films have robbed\u2014people steal art not because it\u2019s valuable but because it\u2019s worthless. The jovial forger Charles Bonnet, played by Hugh Griffith, has been auctioning off phony masterpieces for years, but now museum officials are running a pro forma authenticity test on the little bronze CelliniVenus he\u2019s lent them, and everything is about to be ruined. His daughter Nicole, played by Hepburn, convinces the cat burglar, Simon Dermott, played by O\u2019Toole, to save the family\u2019s reputation, which they do by swiping a key, hiding in a closet, and replacing the statue with a wine bottle.<\/p>\n \n\tEven the frauds are fraudulent here. Simon turns out not to be a real cat burglar, and even the non-forged masterpieces in this movie are bogus paintings commissioned by 20th Century Fox. \u201cA superb Rembrandt!\u201d Simon yells while scoping out the museum. Well \u2026 no\u2014it looks a little like Portrait of Jacob Trip<\/em> (c. 1661), assuming the Dutchman hated impasto and sawed away one of the sides. In other words, artworks in How to Steal a Million <\/em>are either knockoffs or they\u2019re knockoff knockoffs, which seems only appropriate for a Paris-set film in which nobody sounds French, starring a Belgian and an Irish-Scot who became movie stars by affecting posh British accents. Look for reality under the surface of an art heist movie and you find further layers of bullshit.<\/p>\n \n\tThe final twist in How to Steal a Million<\/em>: Bullshit sells. Simon gives the statue to the gormless American collector Davis Leland, played by Eli Wallach, in exchange for a small fortune and the promise that it never be exhibited. Value is a function of certainty, not quality, and thus, as with fairies in Peter Pan <\/em>or NFTs in 2021, people\u2019s belief that something is real makes it so.<\/p>\n WHY DOES LELAND <\/strong>care about this particularartwork? How to Steal a Million <\/em>offers no explanation beyond the fact that the statue looks like Audrey Hepburn, which is a very heist-movie kind of answer. Consider other objects people steal in films: a Faberg\u00e9 egg in Ocean\u2019s Twelve<\/em>; a quartet of Arthur Dove abstractions in The Mastermind <\/em>(2025); an emerald-coated Ottoman dagger in Topkapi <\/em>(1964); Egon Schiele portraits in Inside <\/em>(2023); the Declaration of Independence in National Treasure <\/em>(2004); a Cartier necklace in Ocean\u2019s Eight <\/em>(2018); a Monet landscape in The Thomas Crown Affair <\/em>(1999); nudes by Trouillebert and Modigliani in Once a Thief <\/em>(1991). The pattern holds for novels, too: a cursed Hindu diamond in Wilkie Collins\u2019s The Moonstone <\/em>(1868); a delicate little cup depicting Cupid and Psyche in Artifacts<\/em>.<\/p>\n \n\tThere are exceptions, of course, but you\u2019ll notice that the main categories are twinkly jeweled stuff and likenesses of women\u2014objects so inertly feminine they might as well be damsels in distress. The occasional Ocean\u2019s <\/em>reboot notwithstanding, stories of art theft are as reliably gendered as World War II movies: macho thieves helping themselves to pretty, demure loot. When characters steal a painting, it\u2019s likely to be on the lovely<\/em> or beautiful<\/em> end of things, rather than grand <\/em>or imposing<\/em>\u2014a \u201csecret whisper,\u201d to quote a much-Instagrammed line from Donna Tartt\u2019s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Goldfinch <\/em>(2014), which begins with the theft of Carel Fabritius\u2019s decidedly non-grand canvas of the same name. (The subtle gendering holds for nonfiction, too: Lynn H. Nicholas\u2019s 1994 study of Nazi art-plundering was titled The Rape of Europa<\/em>, for instance.) Fictional art-thieves never bother with Bacon\u2019s popes or Giacometti\u2019s charcoals, though either seems like a savvier investment than a Trouillebert, and I for one would give anything to watch a movie about a gang of glamorous crooks nabbing Piss Christ<\/em>.<\/p>\n \n\tClearly these characters are willing to go to some lengths to get their hands on loot. Less clear is whether they care about what they\u2019re stealing. The one Hollywood archetype who can be counted on to enjoy art for art\u2019s sake is the villain, or, failing that, the doofus. Midway through Dr. No <\/em>(1962), we get a glimpse of Portrait of the Duke of Wellington<\/em> (1812\u201314), an honest-to-god Goya that had gone missing from the National Gallery a year earlier\u2014the implication being that a Bond villain has taken a break from world domination and organized a museum heist for the sole purpose of decorating his lair. How to Steal a Million<\/em> ends with a burst of pure Stendhal Syndrome in the form of a gushy ode to that little statue: \u201cI want it! I just want to take it out of the vault, all alone just look at it now and then. Know that it\u2019s mine<\/em>, that I own<\/em> it, that I can touch<\/em> it.\u201d Alas, the speaker is Leland, this film\u2019s stupidest character. Danny<\/em>: I always confuse Monet and Manet. Now which one married his mistress? \n\tArtworks that are widely loved, protagonists who don\u2019t particularly love them\u2014heist movies offer a mixed message; but then, the average American moviegoer has a violently mixed relationship with art. We are talking, don\u2019t forget, about status symbols that everyone recognizes, the highest point on a greasy pole most of us are trying to climb. We are also talking about the playthings of the most despicable people on the planet. Some desire, and some contempt, is to be expected.<\/p>\n THERE IS MORE <\/strong>than one way to steal art, as long as we\u2019re on the subject of despicable people. Individual burglars sneak a few paintings out the door; an army breaks it down. In 2022 Russian troops took well over 10,000 works from the Kherson region of Ukraine alone, in some cases locking up museum employees while they lifted paintings off the walls in the name of Putin. Few journalists covering last year\u2019s Louvre jewelry heist considered the exquisite irony of their subject: The museum itself would barely exist if revolutionaries hadn\u2019t raided Versailles and Napoleon hadn\u2019t plundered Italy. These kinds of grand-scale robberies occupy a blind spot in fiction as well as nonfiction, for reasons that aren\u2019t terribly hard to understand. To paraphrase another Russian tyrant, one theft is a heist movie; 10,000 thefts is a statistic.<\/p>\n Artifacts<\/em> doesn\u2019t hesitate to dive into this difficult territory. Our hero, Lena, is a lawyer and former academic whose firm gets involved with the repatriation of that cup, a priceless treasure that has come to Fordham University\u2019s art museum dragging a long and dubious provenance behind it. Her lover, the dashing drug dealer Giamma, may have been involved in stealing it from a Swiss warehouse and falsifying a record or two, unless the real culprit was her mentor<\/em>, the dashing archaeologist Cyrille.<\/p>\n \n\tLemle\u2019s debut novel is filled with smug Wiki-factoids of the kind Dan Brown readers will recognize (including one that really does appear in a Dan Brown book), and there are hundreds of elegant sentences like, \u201cThere was something contrived and pretentious about even the title\u201d and \u201cI winced, not yet having considered the logistical implications of this news.\u201d All the same, here is a rare novel that tells the truth about art theft. By far the biggest crooks in art history are institutions, not individuals: governments, corporations, museums, organized crime. In Artifacts<\/em>, the big bad turns out to be the \u2018ndrangheta, an Italian crime syndicate with tentacles in politics and a nasty habit of looting dig sites: the cup, we learn, was stolen by the mob to use as collateral, but later re-<\/em>stolen by a young idealist, sold to a private collector, and donated to Fordham in the hopes of freeing it from endless black-market deals. The ethics of repatriation aren\u2019t as straightforward as they seem, and one ancient cup is merely a drop in the illicit ocean.<\/p>\n \n\tThere really should be more fiction on this subject. Art-crime stories have trouble keeping their eyes on the real scale of crime, and fair enough. The individuals are too engrossing, the particulars too glamorous. The Monuments Men<\/em>, Robert Edsel and Bret Witter\u2019s 2009 history of the Allied operatives who recovered stolen artworks like the Ghent Altarpiece (1432) during World War II, is one of the few texts that manages to thread the needle. But then, it\u2019s a work of nonfiction and the criminals are the Nazis, raiding the museums of invaded countries as Napoleon\u2019s troops had the century before and Putin\u2019s would the century after. The Moonstone<\/em> is surprisingly sophisticated on the morality of art theft\u2014today the novel reads more like a Saidian reproach to the genre than one of its earliest examples. The night after receiving a diamond for her 18th birthday, the plucky Brit Rachel Verinder discovers she\u2019s been robbed. And yet Collins is unambivalent about the fact that the diamond was stolen to begin with<\/em>: Rachel\u2019s repugnant uncle committed murder to bring it out of India. Somewhere behind every art theft there is a bigger one.<\/p>\n WATCHING ENOUGH <\/strong>frothy capers back-to-back would make a Marxist of Clarence Thomas. You begin to long for a little more class warfare, champagne flutes trampled on the floor, anything to disrupt the smarmy gleam. This probably explains my affection for John Woo\u2019s Once a Thief<\/em> (1991). The burglars in this one are a lovable trio of Hong Kong street kids, and their object is Trouillebert\u2019s The Harem Servant Girl<\/em> (1874)\u2014or at least a cropped reproduction that hides the figure\u2019s breasts but preserves her headdress, necklace, earrings, pouty lips, and overall Orientalist razzle-dazzle. The exoticized East is a motif throughout\u2014Joey, the thief played by Chow Yun-Fat, is an amateur painter who recreates Rousseau\u2019s The Snake Charmer<\/em> (1907)\u2014which adds a nicely postcolonial twist to the finale, during which the Trouillebert explodes with a sizzle worthy of the future director of Face\/Off<\/em>.<\/p>\n Once a Thief<\/em> is one of the goofiest films I know (it is, readers may have guessed, the source of the line, \u201cDon\u2019t you fart!\u201d) and among the few to put art theft in its proper context: Early on, the gang\u2019s heist is revealed to be a double-cross designed to ratchet up the price of the stolen goods. So it goes in real life, too. Tempting though it is to see art theft as a challenge to the evils of private ownership, the numbers don\u2019t lie: Whatever criminals think they\u2019re doing, stealing is fabulous<\/em> for the market. The police regularly inflate the value of stolen art when dealing with the press, the idea being that higher valuations make loot-selling harder; but there are other beneficiaries. In no small part, the Mona Lisa<\/em> became the world\u2019s most recognizable painting because its theft in 1911 led practically every newspaper on the planet to print a reproduction. Art heists can be, in effect, commercials\u2014reminders that this product must be very, very valuable if people will risk jail time for it.<\/p>\n \n\tHere, as with so many things cinematic, Hong Kong set the trend. Over the last decade or so, the deliberately in<\/em>elegant heist movie\u2014too pissed off about the state of the world to bother with the sleekness or sexy banter that once defined the look and feel of the art heist\u2014has mutated into a genre of its own. You could probably attribute some of this to the sheer number of directors who grew up watching Ocean\u2019s <\/em>movies on TNT; genres always birth anti-genres when they get clich\u00e9d enough (you don\u2019t get anti-Westerns like The Wild Bunch<\/em>, for instance, without decades of things like Stagecoach<\/em>). But we\u2019ve also reached a point where even Fox News anchors feel obliged to decry wealth inequality; what isn\u2019t too left-wing for Rupert Murdoch should be fair game for Hollywood.<\/p>\n \n\tThese new, gamey art heist stories seem haunted by their glamorous predecessors. As Willem Dafoe attempts to rob a New York penthouse in Inside<\/em>, you might compare him to Thomas Crown and Danny Ocean, neither of whom was ever reduced to licking the inside of a freezer for sustenance. Certain critics dismissed Vasilis Katsoupis\u2019s Ballardian debut feature as a heavy-handed parable, but if anything, it\u2019s terrifyingly literal: The burglar breaks into a Pritzker Prize-winning architect\u2019s apartment, gets locked inside, and spends the next few months enduring tooth decay and a broken leg while artworks by Fontana and Clemente smirk down from the walls, reminding him they\u2019re ageless and he\u2019s not. The presence of a photograph of Maurizio Cattelan\u2019s A Perfect Day<\/em> (1999), from the time the artist duct-taped his gallerist to the wall for a day, adds bitter ironies to an already acrid affair, particularly if you\u2019re familiar with the artist\u2019s other work. If this burglar wanted millions of dollars, why did he bother breaking into a penthouse? Couldn\u2019t he just \u2026 tape a banana to the wall and sell it for $6 million?<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cNow what?\u201d\u2014the question most heist films avoid at all costs\u2014is, in Inside<\/em>, the only question. It\u2019s an anti-trope of this growing anti-genre: Getting your hands on the goods is the breezy part, over in a few minutes; everything else <\/em>is lingered on with the same taut attention Wyler once devoted to stealing a fake Cellini. In Kelly Reichardt\u2019s The Mastermind<\/em>, the slacker carpenter JB Mooney lifts some nice Arthur Doves from the nonexistent Framingham Museum of Art and then spends the next hour hiding the goods in a farmhouse, lying to his family, lying to the cops, running from the cops, and trying to flee the country. The year is 1970. It is remarkably easy to leave a museum with a valuable painting but harder to avoid a bludgeoning, even if you happen to look like Josh O\u2019Connor.<\/p>\n \n\tMooney is no political agent. There are times when Reichardt makes him seem like the only young person in seventies America who wasn\u2019t. Just because you\u2019re apolitical doesn\u2019t mean it\u2019s not <\/em>a corrupt world. Call this the final twist\u2014the final double-cross, even\u2014of these quietly furious films: The thief is no Robin Hood, but his amorality only draws attention to the sociopathy all around him. At the end of The Mastermind<\/em>, we\u2019re reminded of what the little brat has spent 110 minutes ignoring: While he\u2019s been trying to get away with theft, Americans in uniform have been getting away with murder (that a street sign in this film\u2019s final shot says \u201cWatts\u201d cannot be a coincidence).<\/p>\n \n\tSooner or later, it will occur to anyone watching Inside <\/em>that a dozen homeless kids could be sleeping in this empty penthouse, dining for free on the proceeds of a single Cattelan\u2014obscenities at least as queasy as the sight of Willem Dafoe eating dog food. Contempt and desire, the same old art-heist emotions, have gotten more violently mixed than ever. In the final scene, the thief piles dozens of sculptures and paintings into a huge mound and climbs to freedom, or possibly death. He leaves behind a message for the architect who owns the place: \u201cI\u2019m sorry if I destroyed it, but maybe it needed to be destroyed.\u201d Yes, maybe. But he saves a few artworks on his way out.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n [analyse_source url=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/art-in-america\/features\/art-heist-perfect-day-the-mastermind-how-to-steal-a-million-lemle-1234791022\/”]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" [analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/MCDINSI_UC026.jpg?w=1024″] I didn\u2019t take much convincing. In movies, there is always that scene where the criminal, having said no, changes his mind and growls, \u201cI\u2019m in,\u201d but I was feeling more agreeable. When anold friend approached me about one more job with abig payday, I decided to say yes before I\u2019d finished the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,226],"class_list":["post-2029024","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-artnews-com","tag-crawlmanager"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2029024","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2029024"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2029024\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2029024"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2029024"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2029024"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![](\"https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/TOPKAPI-Gilles-Segal-Maximilian-Schell-Peter-Ustinov-1964.jpg?w=400\")
<\/div>\n<\/div>
The heroes are harder to impress.In the opening credits of The Thomas Crown Affair <\/em>(1999), Pierce Brosnan burbles over his favorite Van Gogh but may only be trying to establish an alibi. The Ocean\u2019s<\/em> movies similarly punt on whether Danny Ocean values French art or only wants to flirt:<\/p>\n
Tess<\/em>: Monet.
Danny<\/em>: Right, and then Manet had syphilis
Tess<\/em>: They also painted occasionally.<\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/artifacts-9781668068342_hr.jpg?w=400\")
<\/div>\n<\/div>![](\"https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/OCEANS-8-from-left-Helena-Bonham-Carter-Mindy-Kaling-2018.-ph-Barry-Wetcher-U003A-Warner-Bros.-Pictures-U003Acourtesy-Everett-Collection.jpg?w=400\")
<\/div>\n<\/div>![](\"https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/THE-MASTERMIND-Josh-OConnor-2025.-MUBI-U003ACourtesy-Everett-Collection.jpg?w=400\")
<\/div>\n<\/div>