Three suspects in the theft of seven masterpieces from the Kunsthal Museum in Rotterdam have been arrested in Romania, but there is still no word on where the stolen art might be, the BBC reported. The paintings, which include works by Monet, Picasso, Matisse and Lucien Freud, were taken from the Dutch gallery on Oct. 16. A spokeswoman for the Rotterdam police, Yvette van den Heerik, said that the suspects’ involvement was still being investigated.
In another part of the world, law enforcement officials have made more progress in closing a years-old Venezuelan art theft case. On Tuesday, two people, Pedro Antonio Marcuello Guzman and Maria Martha Elisa Ornelas Lazo, were sentenced in Miami to 21 months in pison for trying to sell a 1925 painting by Matisse that had been stolen from the Caracas Museum of Contemporary Art, Reuters reported. The pair offered the work, “Odalisque in Red Pants,†to an F.B.I. agent in July. Museum officials discovered in 2002 that the genuine Matisse had been replaced by a forgery. It is still unclear who engineered the switch or how the pair ended up with the painting.
