World View : Picture This: Art Thievery Is Thriving : In Europe, only drug smuggling and illegal arms trade earn more for criminals.

In late July, two thieves hid in Frankfurt’s Schirn Kunsthalle until the gallery’s closing time, then overpowered the sole security guard before he could activate the night alarm system. They handcuffed and gagged him, stuck him in an anteroom and patiently removed three paintings from the walls. Then they carried their booty out the back door to a waiting car.

The haul: two magnificent oils by English Romantic painter J.M.W. Turner and a landscape by the German master Caspar David Friedrich. The three paintings were insured for $45 million. There has been no word from the thieves.

A few hours after the Frankfurt theft, someone broke through the main door of the Rembrandt House Museum outside Amsterdam and made off with two paintings by Rembrandt’s tutor, Pieter Lastman. Again, no word from the culprits.

In February, Norway’s most famous painting, “The Scream” by Edvard Munch, was stolen from the National Gallery in Oslo. This time the thieves made contact, asking for more than $1 million in ransom for the painting, which was valued at $10.5 million. Police cracked the case, recovering the painting before the money was paid. Two men were arrested.

Last fall, in November, paintings by Picasso and Braque, valued at $60 million, were taken from Stockholm’s Modern Museum. The paintings have been recovered and two men arrested.

In the last five years, 38 works by master painters have been stolen from French museums. Last month, a pastel portrait by the 17th-Century painter Robert Nanteuil was stolen from the Louvre, between rounds of the guards. In Budapest last December, about 200 art objects worth $85 million were stolen from the main synagogue, repository of the largest Jewish collection in Europe.

Art theft, always an intriguing crime because of the familiarity and history of many of the pieces, is becoming rampant. Police in Europe now list art and antique thefts as the third most profitable criminal activity--after drug smuggling and the illegal arms trade.

“There’s no question, art thefts are very much on the increase, involving millions and millions of dollars,” said Detective Inspector Jill McTigue of Scotland Yard’s crack art and antiques squad. “Staggering,” agreed London insurance adjuster Mark Dalrymple.

The Turners stolen in Frankfurt--”Shade and Darkness” and “Light and Color”--were painted in 1843 and, said Nicholas Serota, director of the Tate Gallery in London, which had loaned them to the Schirn, “are masterpieces of European Romanticism. Their theft represents a major loss for the Tate Gallery and for European painting.” The Friedrich, “Wafting Mist,” was on loan to the Schirn from a museum in Hamburg.

Between 1991 and early 1994 in Italy alone, an estimated $500 million in artworks were stolen, with thefts doubling to reach about 2,000 instances. Said Jean-Michel Mimerand, director of the Office for Repression of Art Thefts in Paris: “France and Italy, closely followed by Spain, are the most pillaged countries. The criminal networks are well organized to get the merchandise out to transit countries very quickly.”

In St. Petersburg, sitting in his office in the Federal Counterintelligence Service, Nikolai Musinsky spread photos of stolen objects on his desk and said: “These are almost all Faberge works. Weapons and drugs smuggling are dangerous, but in a way the theft and shipping abroad of cultural treasures is far worse. Who can say what loss the government takes if, say, someone steals a Titian from our Hermitage Museum?”

The Russian National Library is still trying to figure out what’s left of one of the world’s greatest collections of ancient Jewish documents. At last count, 38 were missing. Librarians believe they were stolen over a period of years and have been offered at private auctions in Jerusalem and New York.

Russia is an art thief’s dream. Museums are packed with works--some commissioned by the czars, others confiscated by the Communist regimes--and then there are the Russian Orthodox Church’s riches, most of which are unprotected by sophisticated security systems.

One effect of the crime spree is a growing reluctance among museum directors to let treasures leave the building. “I hope thefts won’t mean a major clampdown on lending paintings,” said David Brown, curator of the Turner collection at the Tate. “We’re borrowers as well as lenders.”

Sometimes thefts show ingenious planning and inside knowledge, as in the Frankfurt heist; sometimes, as in a case at the Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery in Britain last December, a theft is a simple rip-off. The Birmingham thief lifted off the wall a small painting by 15th-Century Flemish painter Petrus Christus, “The Man of Sorrows,” and stuck it in his pocket. Five months later, London detectives recovered it from an art dealer in Zurich.

Why the upsurge in art thefts?

“Partly, it’s the publicity given these days to works of art,” Detective Inspector McTigue said. “Everyone realizes the value of art. Further, a criminal who robs a bank risks getting shot by police, and if caught faces a very long prison sentence for a crime with violence.

“A robber taking things from an art gallery or country mansion does not run the same risks. If he is caught, we still have to prove where the property comes from. Our biggest problem is finding where artistic loot is stolen from.”

London’s arts and antiques squad is recognized as an authority in the field, partly because an estimated 60% of stolen paintings wind up in the British capital.

McTigue and others point out that fine art, particularly paintings, has become a form of international currency, and as such can serve as coin for big drug deals.

“Art has become a favorite method of laundering money,” said Philip Saunders, managing director of the art magazine Trace. “Let’s say you have a lot of cash from a drug deal. Cash deposits of a certain amount in banks are monitored by police. But you could go into an auction house and buy a painting for hundreds of thousands of dollars, no questions asked.

“You then take the painting out of the country and sell it to a dealer in Amsterdam, Zurich or Los Angeles. You may lose a little on the transaction, but now the money is clean. In the same way, you can pick lesser-known works to steal and pay for them with dirty money and sell them for clean money.”

The cleverest thieves target paintings below world-class levels because they are not as familiar and can be taken to other countries and sold as “school of” works--paintings in the manner of a master--at reduced prices but for cash.

Some thieves steal paintings for the reward invariably offered by insurance companies, a delicate matter because while it is illegal to deal with criminals, the insurance companies naturally want the works back--as do owners. Thus thieves might arrange to give “information”--and collect the reward--for paintings they stole.

More puzzling is the rationale for stealing paintings such as the Turners or the Munch, so well known that they would be recognized by any dealer or buyer.

Often, thieves plan to ransom back the works to the museum from which they were taken--or to the insurance companies that otherwise would have to pay off millions of dollars.

“The problem is that the whole process is going to turn into a form of terrorism, cultural terrorism,” said Eric Shanes, head of London’s Turner Society. “Art theft could become a major form of kidnaping, art-naping.”

Art thefts, of course, have occurred since the first art objects were made, and there are differences over what constitutes art theft. Archeologists have long stripped ancient tombs of their artifacts.

The Elgin Marbles were taken by Lord Elgin, the British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, from the Parthenon in Athens in the early 19th Century. He said he took them for safekeeping during hostilities. But the sculptures still reside in the British Museum, though Greece insists they were illegally removed.

And the audacity of thieves knows few bounds. In 1911, the world’s most famous painting, the “Mona Lisa” by Leonardo da Vinci, was stolen from the Louvre in Paris by an Italian workman. He returned it two years later. During World War II, Adolf Hitler and other top Nazis looted treasures in occupied Europe. Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi forces plundered Kuwait’s national museum, which housed some of the world’s finest Islamic art.

As of now, only about 15% of stolen art is recovered. What can be done?

First comes increased security inside museums and other collections, but this is expensive. Japan, where thefts were frequent after World War II, has tightened security systems and has significantly reduced thefts.

Increasingly, authorities are urging collectors to catalogue and photograph their works, with detailed descriptions that can be traced.

The wealth and expertise of the Getty Museum in Los Angeles are now being brought to bear with the Getty Art History Information Program, which seeks to cut down the illicit trade in art and the looting of archeological sites by accurately describing and depicting the objects themselves.

Yet great art remains irresistible. The mystery surrounding major thefts invokes the vision of the rich collector, who orders paintings stolen for his own private viewing.

Frankfurt police chief Karl-Heinz Gemmer said the works stolen from the Schirn were too well known to be sold in the art market. Perhaps, he suggests, they were ordered by an obsessive collector who wanted “to enjoy them under cover of night.”

Contributing to this article were Scott Kraft and Christine Black, Paris; Matt Bivens, St. Petersburg; Beth Knobel, Moscow, and Chiaki Kitada, Tokyo.