Stealing renowned art like this is an interesting phenomenon as it becomes largely impossible to ever display it or claim it let alone sell it. There are some cases whre the motive doesn't seem to be theft for the black market (eg the ransom case mentioned).
So the psychology is that someone with a lot of money wants to pay to take an artwork and put it in a vault, never displaying it. So the reward is to know something other people don't (ie the art's location) and to exert power over people by denying them the ability to see that art. That paints what seems to be a fairly accurate psychological profile of the ultra-wealthy as a whole.
The other side of art theft is looting, usually in war and particularly by the Nazis in WW2. The interesting part of this one is how the art and auction world enabled and profited off this trade where they willingly participated in the resale of stolen artwork even though there's clear provenance back to the original owners that no one involved in auctions seemed inclined to ever research and find out. Never ask a question you don't want the answer to. Greed is such a powerful motivator.
A number? Likely all of them. These paintings in the end are only important enough for those who can buy it, or who can steal them for themselves (museum employees).
That's not really true. You know about the Elgin marbles precisely because they're vigorously contested - unlike 90% of artefacts that left Greece, Egypt, Italy, etc in perfectly legal circumstances.
It's true that colonial powers (chiefly Britain and France) have a particularly bad record, but not "all museums" contain looted stuff.
but a lot of the artefacts left their countries in circumstances which sounded legal but were not.
Consider the example of Euphronios Krater[0] which the Metropolitan Museum of New York "legally" acquired, and it took 40 years to convince the museum that it was not actually legal.
Or the Ishtar Gate[1] parts which were smuggled out of Egypt by the germans and then bits were sent off to museums in the US, Denmark, Canada etc.
Or the parthenon marbles owned by the Vatican and recently "gifted back".
And that's big stuff! The smaller stuff is just less noticeable, but it's obvious if you think about it that a lot of stuff acquired before 1900 has not being acquired in a way that would be considered "proper" today.
I remember an article/documentary about a criminal, who explained he wanted to have a piece of art as his personal insurance.
A highly valued piece of art is irreplaceable. No matter how much money you spend, you won't get that specific piece back. Logic of this person was, that governments could go to extremes in order to get such work back to the museum so this could act as his "get out of jail" -card.
> So the psychology is that someone with a lot of money wants to pay to take an artwork and put it in a vault, never displaying it.
From what I've read, much contemporary art is purchased with that in mind. Some collectors have warehouses filled with artwork that nobody sees. It's like collecting baseball cards.
Do you blame only one person for the popularization of national socialism in Germany (nazism)? Because one person couldn't pull it off. A large group of people did this. The fact that one person from this group was born in Austria, but lived in Germany since his early 20's, changes nothing.
It's like saying that Stalin (who also wasn't Russian) was the only person responsible for the horrors of communism, but in reality, there were lots of like-minded people near him.
Germans who supported nazism were elected by german citizens by a democratic vote. Nazis came to power in a democratic system. Millions of germans voted for them.
Not entirely, the elections were influenced by considerable street violence where people in unfavorable places were threatened and beaten.
> Nazis came to power in a democratic system.
Actually, the constitution was broken. Also actual move to take complete power was parliamentary vote where brownshirts came to the room and surrounded it. It was, again, literal threat of violence.
Like, yes, nazi had a lot of support, but democratic is not exactly how they gain complete power.
I wasn't there, so I don't know who was threatened by who. There are a lot of sources that do support the claim that no law was broken, and that judges could challenge the nazi agenda. But they didn't. Were they bought, intimidated, convinced? It's not really my job to prove it.
Literal historical books written by historians describe these events in details.
> There are a lot of sources that do support the claim that no law was broken,
Not really, there are not. Most sources just simply do not go into details.
> and that judges could challenge the nazi agenda. But they didn't. Were they bought, intimidated, convinced?
In the actual stage I am writing about, no they could not oppose anything. Violent crack down on any political opposition happened right after takeover of power. The first nazi victims were pro-democratic and left wing politicians or sympathisers.
Moreover, lower government was overfilled by ex-soldiers, per law. That made them biased toward whoever they perceived patriotic and generally right wing.
> Not really, there are not. Most sources just simply do not go into details.
The question is do such details even matter. Even Stalin's communism can be disregarded if we'll start detailing it out: we can arrive at the conclusion that it was not real communism, therefore communism is good.
> The first nazi victims were pro-democratic and left wing politicians or sympathisers.
And not communists? Unless you think communism is leftwing and pro-democratic, I know there are people who think this way.
So it was just a regular ordinary political party, with a few extremist agendas in their campaign platform.
Rose to dominance doing whatever it takes, not entirely by popular demand.
Used a political machine to leverage growing new mass-media availability, to craft a cult-of-personality whose rhetoric over the media creates a feedback loop, empowering the cult to grow, simply in blind support of the figurehead. The followers gain a sense of belonging, and are constantly reinforced and assured they need to follow their idol's wishes, wherever that may lead. Ending up following way beyond the extent which could be in the citizens' best interest.
Another day, another misguided political party, and their attention-seeking media-exaggerated influencer acting as if they possess leadership ability.
They lied, didn't implement most of their program except the racist and nationalist parts, and still weren't the majority party in the end. The bourgeoisie, as usual, when in front of the choice to govern with fascists or socialists/union leaders, will always (almost always) choose the fascists. The only time they didn't was because they saw what happened in Germany and Italy a few years prior (it didn't end well either, but at least Spain can say they didn't choose Franco).
> didn't implement most of their program except the racist and nationalist parts
So if they would implement the other parts of the program, then the existence of the "racist and nationalist" part would be all fine?
I mean, Germany had a lot of profit from the wars anyway. The construction of Autobahns, for example, was heavily accelerated during Nazi rule, in order to help to move nazi tanks across the country. I don't recall anyone complaining about autobahns today.
> So if they would implement the other parts of the program, then the existence of the "racist and nationalist" part would be all fine?
I did not say that. Forgot "anticommunist" though in the list.
The racist part of their program was actually not their main point, and it was as racist as all non-communist parties, in most western countries (the Front Populaire was probably the less racist of all, and it was still pretty racist). Germans did not vote for Nazis because they were particularly racists.
The nationalistic part might have been a reason they caught some vote, but the true reason they got 33% of the vote was because they would "save the economy" by unspecified means, and remove the communist party, which pushed small business owners, landlords/slumlords and well as big land owners in their arms.
The Soviet-directed communists (not all communists, but all German elected communists) did not help their case, being droned around by Moscow to do stupid shit (They also shat the bed in Spain. Better to have as enemies than as allies to be frank).
Still, Nazi only got 33%, it wasn't a majority. They they did a coup, and the rest is well known, but they absolutely did not have a majority: 33% of the voting population, with most of those convinced by populist lies about economics and moral panics.
Wikipedia tells me that they got 44% and had the ability to form a coalition (so, a like-minded other party was there to support them). One can argue that this isn't the majority, but I guess this is open to interpretation. Also I know that Germans didn't support Nazism in order to build gas chambers, but rather because they wanted to have their country fixed in the first place, but enabling degenerates to fix something by any means seems like a degenerate action to me.
So the psychology is that someone with a lot of money wants to pay to take an artwork and put it in a vault, never displaying it. So the reward is to know something other people don't (ie the art's location) and to exert power over people by denying them the ability to see that art. That paints what seems to be a fairly accurate psychological profile of the ultra-wealthy as a whole.
The other side of art theft is looting, usually in war and particularly by the Nazis in WW2. The interesting part of this one is how the art and auction world enabled and profited off this trade where they willingly participated in the resale of stolen artwork even though there's clear provenance back to the original owners that no one involved in auctions seemed inclined to ever research and find out. Never ask a question you don't want the answer to. Greed is such a powerful motivator.