It’s rare for the visual arts to make headline news, and it’s unfortunate when they do in a story like this one. On the night of May 19, a masked man entered the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris through a window and stole five oil painted pictures, removing them from their frames and escaping without setting off an alarm. The story quickly made headlines, partially because of the crime’s lurid intrigue and partially because of the estimated value of the words – over $120 million. Since then, we’ve all seen a picture of the painting Le pigeon aux petits pois by Picasso or of La Pastorale by Matisse alongside an article. Those two landscape portraits are usually the only ones mentioned, as the significant but lesser known Modigliani, Léger, and Braque works are often unfortunately lumped together as “three other paintings”.

What can this man possibly be planning to do with his contraband? Plenty of art thieves actually count on simply ransoming the stolen goods back to the owner. More strangely, after a painting has passed through several different owners, it can often be sold to an unknowing customer who is led to believe that the painting is a very high quality reproduction – not the work itself but a skillful oil painting from a picture of the original. What’s most likely in this situation is a third option. Although the value of a stolen painting is markedly less than the official value, the underground art market is unfortunately very healthy. The authorities seem to suspect that this is what’s happening with the five stolen oil portraits, as Interpol has issued a global alert, implying they believe the works may already have been removed from France.

Portrait of Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, painting by Pablo Picasso

Cubism is synonymous with Pablo Picasso, but it wasn't this legendary artist alone who began the movement of cubism. Cubism was also jointly pioneered by french artist, George Braque. This avant garde art era was seen as radical, but was also highly influential in it's day, and continues to be. The cubist artist breaks up the object he is painting, disassembling it into an abstraction of (cube-like) pieces splayed all over the canvas. This was done so the artist could display the object in a multitude of arrangements, angles and representations, viewable all at once. It was common cubist form that all faces of an object would be painted, this revolutionized the way objects could be depicted in painting. It was also said to be a cheeky response to ambiguity in painting, and an attempt to engage the viewer in seeing the painting as a man-made construction.

The first school of Cubism was Analytical Cubism. These are the famed Picasso's that appear to be masses of intricate gray, beige and black from far away, but up close are closely detailed and structured. These paintings were not about use of color and were usually of scenes of nature, the scenes were taken apart and analyzed, the artist putting them back together in a new way.