‘Amateur’ thieves steal two Warhol prints, damage two more in botched robbery at Dutch gallery

THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AP) — Thieves blew open the door of an art gallery in the southern Netherlands and stole two works from a famous series of screen prints by American pop artist Andy Warhol, leaving two more badly damaged in the street as they fled the scene of the failed robbery, the gallery owner said on Friday.

Mark Peet Visser said the thieves tried to steal all four works from a 1985 Warhol series called “Reigning Queens,” featuring portraits of the then queens of the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Denmark and Swaziland, a small landlocked country kingdom in southern Africa. which is now called Eswatini.

In a telephone interview, Visser said the robbery early Friday at MPV Gallery in Oisterwijk was captured on security cameras and called it “amateurish.”

“The bombing was so violent that my entire building was destroyed” and nearby shops were also damaged, he said. “So they did that part well, too well actually. And then they ran to the car with the works of art and they turned out not to fit in the car. … At that moment the works are ripped out of the frames and you know also that they are damaged beyond repair, because it is impossible to get them out undamaged.”

Visser refused to attach a value to the four signed and numbered works, which he wanted to offer for sale as a set at an art fair in Amsterdam later this month.

The thieves made off with portraits of it Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom and Margrethe II of Denmark. The prints of Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands and Ntombi Tfwala, now known as the Queen Mother of Eswatini, were left in the street as the thieves fled, Visser said.

Police called for witnesses as forensic experts examined the badly damaged gallery on Friday.