Thieves stole and damaged Warhol’s prints in botched robbery

People watch Andy Warhol’s painting of Queen Elizabeth II at the Paleis Het Loo Museum in Apeldoorn, Netherlands, on Wednesday, October 9, 2024. Queen Elizabeth II, one of a series of sixteen prints of the four queens titled Elizabeth II’s Reigning Queens, 1985. He looks at a screen print depicting Elizabeth. Warhol’s work was stolen from a gallery in Oisterwijk, Netherlands, in the early hours of Friday, November 1, 2024.(AP)

THE HAGUE, Netherlands, November 2, (AP): Thieves burst through the door of an art gallery in the south of the Netherlands, stealing two works from American pop artist Andy Warhol’s famous screen print series and severely damaging two more works. The gallery owner said Friday that they were on the street fleeing the scene of the botched robbery.

Mark Peet Visser said thieves tried to steal all four works from a 1985 Warhol series called “Reigning Queens,” which included portraits of the then queens of England, the Netherlands, Denmark and Swaziland, a small landlocked kingdom in South Africa. it is now called Eswatini.

In a phone interview, Visser said the robbery at the MPV Gallery in the town of Oisterwijk early Friday was recorded on security cameras and described it as “amateurish.” “The bomb attack was so strong that my entire building was destroyed” and nearby stores were also damaged, he said. “So they did that part of it well, too well in fact.

They then ran to the car with the artworks and it turned out they wouldn’t fit in the car. … At that moment the works are removed from the frames and you know that they are damaged beyond repair, because it is impossible to remove them undamaged.”

Visser refused to value the four signed and numbered works, which he plans to offer as a set at an art fair to be held in Amsterdam later this month. Thieves, King of England II. Elizabeth and Danish King Charles II. He seized Margrethe’s portraits.

Visser said traces of Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands and Ntombi Tfwala, now known as the queen mother of Eswatini, were left on the street as the thieves escaped. Police appealed for witnesses as forensic experts examined the badly damaged gallery on Friday.