More Than $400,000 In Art Stolen From A Truck In Colorado • SketchFestNYC

Last month, thieves stole five expensive works of art from a truck stuck in the parking lot of a hotel in Boulder, Colorado.

Someone walked away from the artwork while the people carrying it slept in hotel rooms. According to Boulder police, an unidentified man broke the lock on the truck and stole several tools and five works of art valued at more than $400,000.

Police in the 20th Century has included many photos of the lost artwork of the Taos Artists Association in Taos, New Mexico, at the turn of the 20th century. They describe small fragments of life in the American West as if that life had almost disappeared.

You may be wondering: why leave those expensive paints in a parked truck? It turns out that elite art is not transported as gracefully as you might think.

For example, in 2006, a fine art service company in Florida hired former employee Patrick McIntosh to transport millions of dollars' worth of artwork to New York . Instead, Mackintosh escaped with art that was later found intact in a trailer park in Gainesville, Florida. That same year, a 228-year-old painting intended for the Guggenheim Museum was stolen from a truck in the parking lot of a similar hotel in Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania. In 2016, a painting worth $250,000 was stolen from a trailer parked on a Los Angeles street.

Car theft is a well-known problem that collectors and museum directors deal with to prevent it. From the Observer Art magazine:

Take, for example, this bizarre historical fact: Nick Lawrence is the artist whose work gets stolen the most. Talented but not as well known as some of the others at the top of this unfortunate list, Lawrence saw his 557 works suddenly disappear when they were removed from storage without his permission. What happened after the works were removed is not clear.

When three masked thieves recently stole a truckload of 28 paintings from a Madrid warehouse, including works by Picasso, Fernando Botero and Eduardo Chillida, they knew exactly what they were doing.

Although lenders always seek insurance when a valuable work is donated for display at another museum, the protocol for securing a work can be as varied as the works themselves. For example, it is not uncommon for a trucking company to mark their truck with their company name, which indicates that thieves know the trick. Also, it would be wrong to think that the drivers and their friends were armed. They are not trained guards. They are skilled artists.

Fortunately, responsible art organizations often use the "back-end machine" for higher-value works. This ensures that art directors can go wherever they want and if something happens, they'll have extra eyes until law enforcement arrives. It is clear that the future of advanced transportation security will depend on small, trackable GPS devices on moving trucks and packaging equipment. While thieves can get away quickly, they cannot get around the satellite.

A new career goal: to become a chauffeur who takes care of the great works of art being transported. Strange things like the human heads that disappeared from a truck in Denver last year were definitely stolen from trucks.

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