Amateur Burglary

Stealing art is a branch of burglary suitable only to the most skilled criminal, who can recognize the best work, lift it without damage, and--hardest of all--dispose of it through intermediaries, either to a collector who will keep the secret, or back to the owner or the insurance company. But with all the news of high prices at art auctions and of recent art burglaries all over, a lot of crooks of the wrong kind are getting into art theft. Last week the police were looking for the vandalous and amateur burglar or burglars who jimmied the front door of the house of Pittsburgh's famed art buyer, Steelman G. David Thompson, and ransacked his collection.

Working crudely, the burglars gave Matisse's Woman at the Fountain a hole in the head, tore a new twist in a cubist Picasso, Lady with a Hat, made off with four-fifths of a Miro, and, in seizing Leger's Composition with Three Sisters, left behind a patch of the girls' background. Ignorantly mistaking a paper strip of a Picasso collage for the whole work of art. they tried to rip it off and ruined a work valued at more than $100,000. They got away with six Picassos, two Legers, a Miro and a Dufy. Loss, between damage and loot: $1,000,000.

Thompson, crushed that while going out for the evening he had forgotten to turn on his elaborate burglar alarm, took the crudity of the theft to mean that no professional burglar had been at work. Only a fat reward, with no questions to be asked, he decided, might bring back the loot, and he at once offered $100,000.

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