The total value of the works stolen from the Mário de Andrade library this Sunday, in São Paulo, could reach 4.5 million reais. The eight engravings by Henri Matisse, from the famous “Jazz” series, from the 1940s, and the five by the modernist Candido Portinari, illustrations from the book “Menino de Engenho”, by José Lins do Rego, published at the end of the 1950s, would each be worth around R$500,000, in the case of the French artist, and R$100,000 each, in the case of the artist Brazilian, according to art specialists. walk. art.
This does not mean that the two men who entered the library in the center of São Paulo armed can sell their works at these prices on the nearest street corner: after all, these are very recognizable pieces from a theft that is not current.
Another point is that these are mutilations of a set of parts, which destroys any market value. “Jazz,” for example, is a series of 20 prints made from colored paper cutouts by a weakened Matisse at the height of World War II, while he was taking refuge from Nazi occupation in the south of France. It’s as if they stole a scene from a film, a piece from an album: it’s the whole that counts, because the work is a great allegory of the exuberance of life in the face of barbarism, and not separate and meaningless pieces.
There is a third question. Matisse, during his lifetime, authorized the publication of 50 copies of the set of 20 images. His heirs would later produce posthumous editions of the set, one hundred and then 250 copies. The works stolen from the Mário de Andrade Library were part of this larger edition, that is, less valuable, due to the rules of the art market, in which the rarity of a work, its aura, ultimately determines its value.
The complete album of the original edition of 50 copies, for example, was sold at auction for 1.1 million, or around 6 million reais, at Sotheby’s in New York ten years ago. One of the copies of the posthumous print run, of 250 copies, was sold at auction at the Bolsa de Arte, in São Paulo, for 200,000 US dollars, or 1.1 million reais, at the current dollar exchange rate.
However, this is not a butcher’s poster, where a kilo of fillet is worth a kilo of fillet: a quarter of meat is not the same thing as a beef, even less torn and stolen, shown on prime time television.
The positive side for thieves is that, unlike a unique work, engravings are much more difficult to find in the mazes of the market, because they are reproductions of the same work, and not a painting or drawing which has only one version, the original. A malicious buyer, unconcerned about the criminal origins of the piece, could be interested.
In any case, despite robberies like this or even that of the jewelry at the Louvre Museum in Paris two months ago, the art market, as opaque as it is, has mechanisms to prevent the illegal sale of works, a sort of Interpol of art. On the other hand, anyone who dares to buy for any amount would do so out of pure vanity, since the stolen work has no liquidity in the formal market, that is, it can never be sold at auction several times its value in the future.
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