Brazilian Police Recover Eight Stolen Matisse ‘Jazz’ Works Worth $193,000, Arrest One Suspect

Brazilian authorities have recovered eight prints from Henri Matisse’s iconic “Jazz” series (1947), the New York Times reports.  

Two armed men stole the works on December 7 from the Mário de Andrade Library in São Paulo during public hours at the city’s largest library. In addition to the recovered Matisse works, they also took five paintings by Brazilian modernist Candido Portinari.

The English edition of Folha de S. Paulo reported the value of the eight works—The Clown, The Circus, Monsieur Loyal, The Nightmare of the White Elephant, The Codomas, The Swimmer in the Aquarium, The Sword Swallower, and The Cowboy—to be more than 1 million Brazilian reais (around $193,000). They had been on view as part of “From Book to Museum: MAM São Paulo and the Mário de Andrade Library.”

“The recovery of these eight works represents news of enormous importance for the culture and heritage of São Paulo,” Totó Parente, the municipal secretary of culture and creative economy, said in a statement. “These are works that belong to the city and to the memory of the people of São Paulo.”

Parente added that the “Secretariat has adopted measures to reinforce the security protocols of the Mário de Andrade Library and expand the protection of its heritage. Our commitment is to ensure that these works are preserved and return to fulfilling their cultural function, as part of the public heritage and memory of the city.”

A police spokesperson told the Times that the thieves overpowered a security guard and two visitors; security footage shows them carrying the works on the streets of São Paulo. “At one point in the video, a man places a stack of frames next to a pile of garbage on a sidewalk, then returns to pick it up,” per the Times.

Authorities located the Matisse works in an apartment in the São Paulo suburb of São Bernardo do Campo. At the apartment, police said they arrested one person “on suspicion of receiving stolen goods”; one suspect had been arrested the day after the robbery, while two others, “described as the organizer of the crime,” were arrested in April, according to the Times.

The recovery of these Matisse pieces came a day before another major police investigation in Europe. Authorities recovered three works that had been stolen from Italy’s Fondazione Magnani Rocca, which included Matisse’s work on paper, Odalisque on the Terrace (1922). The other two stolen pieces were Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s Les Poissons (1917) and Paul Cezanne’s Still Life with Cherries (1890). The three works, which were stolen during a three-minute heist, were collectively valued in excess of $10.4 million.