Art Theft Goal: Mideast Peace?

When a Marc Chagall painting worth more than $1 million was stolen in June from the Jewish Museum in Manhattan, authorities said they believed the motive was what drives most art thieves: Money.

Now, investigators are exploring another possibility: that the painting was stolen in an attempt to further the Middle East peace process.

A few days after the theft, the museum received a letter mailed in the Bronx and signed by a group calling itself the International Committee for Art and Peace. It demanded peace between Israel and the Palestinians. The existence of the letter came to light this week.

Investigators said the letter contained information about the painting “Study for ‘Over Vitebsk’ ” that could have come from someone possessing the canvas, which shows an old man with a walking stick and a sack floating above a village.

Police and the FBI said they were unfamiliar with the supposed group.

“The receipt of the letter led us to hope for the possibility of the recovery of the painting eventually,” Anne Scher, a spokeswoman for the museum, said Monday. “We hope to hear from the person or people who wrote the letter again.”

Scher said the letter, whose contents were not revealed, was mailed to the museum and was postmarked June 12.

“I believe it came in the following day,” Scher said. “We turned it over to the authorities.”

The theft was discovered the morning of June 8, after museum members gathered the night before for a cocktail reception and guided tours of the exhibition, which contained 56 of Chagall’s works.

The stolen painting, completed in 1914, measures roughly 8 by 10 inches, so it could have been slipped into a bag or briefcase or smuggled out of the museum under clothing.

Police and the FBI have conducted laboratory tests on the envelope and letter and have questioned most of the 300 people who attended the event.

“It was the first time anything of this nature had happened,” Scher said. “A member of our operations staff was vacuuming and discovered the painting was missing. The distress continues to this day.”

Experts said thefts based on political ideology are rare. Profiles show most robberies are motivated by profit, and art thieves often sell works for much less than they are worth.

“The only two cases we are familiar with was the one in 1974 when the IRA stole a number of works, and a political demand that was made when the Edvard Munch painting ‘Scream’ was stolen in Oslo in 1994 on the eve of the Winter Olympics,” said Anna Kisluk of the Art Loss Register.

In 1974, members of the Irish Republican Army stole works by Dutch painter Jan Vermeer, English artist Thomas Gainsborough, Spanish painter Francisco de Goya and Flemish painter Peter Paul Rubens from a private collection.

The thieves demanded more than $1 million and the release of IRA prisoners. Kisluk said the paintings were found and most of those involved were arrested.

Five days after Munch’s painting was taken from Norway’s National Gallery, an anti-abortion group said it could help get the painting back if a film protesting abortion was televised. The painting was recovered in a sting operation by police; the anti-abortion activists had no role in the theft.

The Art Loss Register was established with the aid of the art community and insurance companies and began its operations in 1991. It maintains a database of more than 100,000 stolen works ranging from paintings, stamps, coins and Tiffany glass lamps to James Bond’s Aston Martin, which was taken from a collector in Florida.

Auction houses, dealers, art historians and others routinely check the register for stolen goods. More than 1,000 items have been recovered.

The Chagall on display was from a private collection in Russia. The Jewish Museum has offered a $25,000 reward.