Up For Grabs

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Although large museums have had their share of embarrassing robberies — in 1911 the Mona Lisa was taken from the Louvre — the greatest problem is small institutions like the Munch Museum or private homes open to the public. Neither can afford elaborate security. Large museums attach alarms to their most valuable canvases, but a modest alarm system can cost $500,000 or more. Some museums are looking into tracking devices that would allow them to follow stolen items once they leave the premises. "But conservators are concerned that if they have to insert something, it might damage the object," says Wilbur Faulk, former head of security at the Getty Museum.

Meanwhile, smaller museums can barely afford enough guards, relying instead on elderly docents. Just last month A Winter Landscape by the Dutch painter Esaias van de Velde was stolen from the Wallraf Richartz Museum in Cologne, Germany. The thief testified at trial that, after finding only two guards for three floors, he simply slipped the painting, valued at $240,000, under his shirt and went out the door. He told the court, "It's probably more difficult to steal a T shirt."

Now that they have The Scream, what can the thieves do with it? The very thing that makes some paintings especially valuable — fame — makes them very difficult to fence on the black market. The Scream, an image nearly everybody knows, is not the kind of thing an unscrupulous buyer could hang in his mansion in plain sight. For that matter, it's hard to imagine some Russian kleptocrat or Colombian drug lord lusting to own anything by the gloomy, sepulchral Munch, not so long as there's an Impressionist landscape to be had instead.

Thieves sometimes try using artworks as collateral for other underworld deals. The masterminds of the 1986 robbery of Russborough House near Dublin, who snatched 18 canvases, tried in vain to trade them for Irish Republican Army members held in British jails. Others demand a ransom from the museum that owns the pictures. Ten years ago, thieves in Frankfurt, Germany, made off with two major canvases by J.M.W. Turner that were on loan from the Tate Gallery in London. The paintings, worth more than $80 million, were recovered in 2002 after the Tate paid more than $5 million to people having "information" about their whereabouts. Though ransom is illegal in Britain, money for leads in an investigation is not, provided that police agree the source of the tipoff is unconnected to the crime. All the same, where information money ends and ransom begins is often a gray area.

Famous pictures usually surface in the end, after whoever took them realizes how hard they are to sell. But along the way the thieves can devastate a delicate image. The one who snatched Vermeer's Love Letter from a Brussels museum in 1971 crammed it under his bed, leaving creases that required restoration. The Scream is especially vulnerable because it was painted on cardboard, which is less supple than canvas and also does not absorb paint as well. The slightest bend could cause pigment to flake away. If that happens, the anguished little man in Munch's picture won't be the only one who feels like screaming.