The painting by Salvador Dali "Don Juan Tenorio", written in 1949 and estimated by specialists at 150 thousand dollars, was stolen from the Manhattan gallery in New York on June 19, 2012.
Known circumstances and the ending of this story make you look at it exclusively with humor. Surely the Spanish genius himself would have laughed at her, since there is more than enough surrealism in her.
Imagine a guard who has crumbled from the silence of an art gallery, whom a visitor asked to photograph one of the paintings. The NY Daily News reporting the incident does not indicate why, but the security guard, having allowed photographs to be taken without a flash, went off to the side and apparently abstracted from the outside world.
At this time, the attacker, who was not hiding his face from numerous surveillance cameras, took Dali’s watercolor from the wall, put it in a large black bag, went down the elevator from the third floor and calmly went outside. The owner of the gallery Adam Lindemann only spread his hands, unable to comment on the incident.
Police analyzed all the videos made on the streets in the Medisson Avenue area. Guards tried to determine if the thief had visited a cultural institution in advance. As a result, it was not even possible to establish the identity of this person, whom the cameras captured in good quality, and the photos were then replicated by the press.
But the story continued unexpectedly. Museum staff suddenly received an email in which it was reported that the robber or robbers were returning the painting. Further, the police, notified of the letter, accepted the parcel directly at Kennedy Airport - it was sent from Europe with a fictitious return address. An examination confirmed the authenticity of the painting, after which it took its former place. Most importantly, the masterpiece returned in the same condition in which it was stolen.
Such a finale is probably due to the fact that the abductors failed to sell the picture, and this is not so rare. The more famous the work and its author, the more difficult it is to find the person who dared to buy it. It is good that the thieves have now gone civilized.
