They were the last hours to contemplate the collages by Henri Matisse, part of the series Jazzwhen two armed men broke into the main municipal library of São Paulo (Brazil) this Sunday, where they were on display. At gunpoint, but without firing a shot, they took eight works by the French artist and five by the Brazilian Candido Portinari exhibited in an exhibition that received the first visitors of the closing day. The thieves entered and left through the main door of the Mário de Andrade library, fleeing through the bustling streets of the historic center of São Paulo. These works by Matisse were already stolen years ago. One of the thieves was arrested this Monday, the second is also identified, according to the newspaper The Globe.
The works were part of the exhibition From book to museum: MAM São Paulo and the Mário de Andrade Library (From the book to the museum), which included twenty pieces by Matisse in dialogue with other artists from the collections of both institutions. The exhibition celebrated the centenary of the municipal library, which bears the name of the Brazilian poet and writer Andrade.
The robbers overpowered a security guard after one of them showed her a gun under his shirt. While one locked her in a room after taking away her radio and cell phone, her accomplice entered the room where the works were hanging, intimidated an older couple who was visiting the exhibition, took the pieces off the wall, put them in a cloth bag and fled. The Portinari engravings that were also taken were part of the work Ingenuity boy.
The album Jazz It was created by Matisse during World War II. “Does those collagespaints the papers, cuts them out and forms the images. You see how they look collages“They are very powerful images, with that confusion of colors, very characteristic of Matisse with all that ambiguity due to the situation of the war, where you don’t know if there is violence there or not,” Pedro Nery, museologist at the municipal library, explained in a promotional video.
The artist was sick with cancer when he painted the stolen works. Since he could not paint or sculpt, he created collages. Pieces collected in a book titled Jazz and of which 250 copies were published. It was first published in 1947 in France.
The more than 25,000 surveillance cameras installed in the most populated city in Brazil have contributed to discovering the escape route of the perpetrators of the robbery. The detainee is 31 years old and has a history of robbery and drug trafficking. The van they used had been located earlier and inspected by investigators.
Recordings from the Smart Sampa system – a kind of big brother of facial recognition – show one of the thieves on a street near the library while carrying the largest pieces of the loot in his hands. At one point, he places them on the ground and filming is interrupted, according to the aforementioned newspaper.
The scene of the robbery is the main municipal library of São Paulo, a century-old cultural center in the historic center, a building in which the movement of readers and visitors is constant. The album works Jazz They returned to the collection of the Mário de Andrade library a decade ago, after a singular incident because they were previously stolen without the museum realizing it. In 2006 they were located by Argentine customs agents at the border. For years the library refused to acknowledge that they had been stolen, until it discovered that the pieces it owned were copies, not the originals, which it recovered in 2015.