TWO ARMED thieves stole a valuable painting by surrealist artist René Magritte yesterday during a daylight robbery at a museum in Brussels.
The men escaped with the 1948 oil painting Olympia after threatening an assistant at the Magritte museum with a pistol.
The portrait, of Magritte’s wife, Georgette, with a shell placed on her stomach, is estimated to be worth more than €750,000 and had been one of the museum’s most popular items.
“To us it is one of our major works at the museum. It is so well known that it cannot be sold in a public auction and was probably stolen to order by the robbers,” said Marthe Lemmens, an assistant at the museum, which is based in the house in the suburb of Jette, where Magritte lived between 1930 and 1954.
The thieves arrived at the museum just after 10am, pretending to want a tour of the house. When the door opened, one of them pushed a pistol against the head of one of the three staff and demanded that they all move to the back of the house.
The curator of the museum described the thieves as of Asian appearance, without elaborating. One of them spoke English and the other French, he said.
“I saw them running away with the picture tucked under the arm of one of the robbers before they got in a car,” said Amine Mentaoui, a local council worker.
“I hope they are caught quickly. People here are scared at what has happened.”
The Brussels police said the robbers knew what they were doing, and the entire raid took just two minutes to complete.
“They seemed to know which picture they wanted to steal and took the whole painting off the wall, including the frame,” said Johan Berckmans, a police officer working at the scene of the crime yesterday.
Magritte is probably Belgium’s most famous artist. He has influenced a host of well-known modern-day artists, including Andy Warhol, and has two museums dedicated to his work in Brussels.
His artistic style involved depicting ordinary objects displayed in unusual contexts. He is probably best known for painting bowler hats, pipes and green apples.
The robbery occurred just a few months after a new museum with some 250 original works dedicated to Magritte opened in another part of Brussels.
The loss of Olympia is likely to prove a heavy blow to the Magritte museum, which has a far smaller number of original works by the artist.