There is No Enemy Like the Past: How a Painting in a Kitchen Cupboard Convicted a Notorious Art Thief

It all started on a beautiful spring afternoon on the 24th of May, 2018. Tourists and locals alike filed through the classical and rocaille set façade of the Musée de Beaux-Arts de Nancy and up its imperial, marbled staircase. As the avid museum-goers walked through the museum’s galleries, they took in the “broad panorama of art in Europe from the 14th up to the 21st century” that the museum boasts, including the paintings of Rubens, Caravaggio, and Picasso, the sculptures of Raymond Duchamp-Villon and César Baldaccini, and glass works by the Daum brothers. Suddenly, the peaceful museum ambience changed. A thundering of footsteps echoed throughout the galleries as a swarm of museum security guards swept down the halls, yelling at visitors to move aside in rapid-fire French. Once they reached their destination, however, gasps filled the room as the crowd shifted their eyes to an unmistakably white patch on the wall and realization set in: one of the paintings had been stolen! Though all that remained of the painting was dangling pieces of ripped canvas and an intact wooden frame, the little white placard to its side seemed to be in the spotlight, reading Paul Signac, La Porte Rochelle, 1915.

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There one second and gone the next, the theft of this painting was breaking news all over the world in 2018, but it soon became a cold case as all leads led to dead-ends. 

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Let’s go back to the past for a moment. The year is 2019 and onstead of a palatial museum in northeastern France, we are now in a neighborhood in Kyiv, Ukraine. Ukrainian police have just entered the house of a man they believe to be the murderer of a jeweler. While they were able to find the man and take him in for questioning, they never expected what he would say next. He guided them to his kitchen-cupboard, where authorities found the missing Signac painting. When the murder suspect was questioned, he said the painting was “stolen only because it was very simple” and even “advised France to check its museum security measures.” Even more, he gave the full name and identity of the mastermind who stole the piece—64 year-old Vadym Huzhva, a Ukrainian art-dealer, who was currently serving a prison sentence in Austria for the 2018 theft of a Renoir. 

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In an age when museums utilize cutting-edge technology to guard their precious masterpieces, how was this painting stolen so quickly and quietly? According to a statement that the museum’s public prosecutor, François Pérain, gave to Le Monde, “The operating mode - speed of execution, precise cutting of the painting, meticulous identification, since the stolen painting was out of the field of the cameras - suggests that we are dealing with seasoned criminals who are particularly well organized.” 

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And seasoned criminals they were! When the security footage was reviewed during the museum’s primary investigation in 2020, François Pérain noted that the theft was “unsophisticated” and the thieves “wore headgear but they acted with their faces uncovered, entered by the main entrance and left through the same door.” In this broad daylight theft, the three men who were caught on the museum’s security cameras seemingly cut the painting out of its frame with a boxcutter, rolled it up carefully, and then exited the museum through the front doors with the rolled up canvas tucked under one man’s raincoat. Richard Dagorne, the director of the museum, described the theft as “traumatic,” not only for the museum but also for the painting itself. 

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After Huzhva was released from Austrian prison in 2020, he was immediately extradited to France, the only member of the four-person group of thieves to do so. His court case began on 30 January 2023 and was expected to last only two days, as French authorities favored “the hypothesis of an operation carried out by a gang falling within international organized crime.” In a comment to the AFP, Ukrainian police official Sergiy Tykhonov said that “we received information about a group of people looking for buyers for paintings stolen in Europe last year. Several works of art have been discovered, including this painting, as part of a series of searches.” As such, there was no doubt that the Ukrainian art dealer would be found guilty. The questions everyone seemed to be asking were: How long will he spend in prison? How much will he have to pay in damages? What new information will be revealed?

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The art dealer initially denied any association with the theft, boldly saying to the Specialized Interregional Court that “I don't see how I have anything to do with this. You have no proof of your allegations.” Recall that the museum’s security footage only recorded three accomplices, not four, and since their faces were uncovered, according to Périan’s statement, it is clear that Huzhva’s was not among the immediate thieves. 

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Nevertheless, as the investigation was entrusted to the Regional Judicial Police Service of Nancy and France’s Central Office for the Fight Against Trafficking in Cultural Property, there was relentless examination into the painting’s theft and Huzhva’s shady past. The two agencies had documented that “this Ukrainian "Arsène Lupin" was responsible for a total of at least five thefts in France” (Arsène Lupin is the protagonist of Maruice Leblanc's book series Arsène Lupin: Gentleman-Thief). Furthermore, the investigation revealed that Huzhva was “implicated” in at least five other thefts—aside from the Signac—including the theft of a rare book with 12 gouaches from the Hôtel Drouot auction house (a renowned French auction house that is also known for its abundance of internally masterminded art thefts), the theft of Giorgio de Chirico’s Composition with Self-Portrait from the Fabrégat Museum in Béziers, the theft of a painting by Eugène Boudin, and another by Eugène Gallien-Laloux, both stolen from the Chateau de Versailles auction house in Versailles in 2018.

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CCTV footage from Huzhva’s related 2018 theft of the Renoir painting from the Dorotheum in Vienna, Austria. (Image Courtesy of Dumskaya)

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To add to the hubbub, the investigation revealed that Huzhva was also implicated in thefts from prominent museums in Ukraine. He was allegedly involved in the theft of a painting from the Odessa Art Museum in 2005, which authorities found “rolled up and sealed in a bag, and stuffed under the seat of his Opel-Astra in 2006.” These charges, however, were dismissed—not because of Huzhva’s Oscar-worthy performance in court where he challenged Ukrainian authorities and claimed he was part of a wild conspiracy—but because there wasn’t enough proof even though Huzhva was suspected to be responsible for many other thefts at the time. 

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Back in Nancy, in a statement to Le Parisien, Huzhva’s lawyer supported the art dealer by asserting that as “he’s not on the CCTV… All the video shows is the time the painting was stolen… The fact that he is in France each time a theft takes place is a coincidence, not proof.” Nevertheless, as News in France reports, “anyone who presents himself as an independent antique dealer between Ukraine and Russia has the answer to everything, in particular to explain his presence on the premises and on the dates of the flights.” As such, this notion was included the prosecutors’ main argument: “Guzhva's flights into the country coincided with the periods of each of the theft incidences occurred, as did his hotel reservations near each of the intended targets.” The primary investigation also revealed that Huzvha targeted museums with little to no security—if there were security cameras during the time of the heist, they all showed the same modus operandi in that the “targets were often quite similar.” Moreover, pictures of works of art found on Huzhva’s phone along with the contact details for the associates whose faces matched those of the CCTV footage were crucial pieces of evidence that bolstered the prosecution’s case. 

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Huzhva was enraged at this and could be heard shouting “Slander!” throughout the trial. He also attempted to replicate the “I’m part of a conspiracy!” argument, but clearly this did not sit well with the judge. 

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On January 31st, 2023, Huzhva was sentenced to five years in prison for masterminding the theft of La Porte Rochelle. The judge also found him guilty of the earlier thefts of four other paintings (including the aforementioned Renoir) and rare book and ordered him to pay €300,000 ($323,265) in damages. While Huzhva’s two male accomplices are in a Ukrainian prison and the whistleblower/murder suspect was “handed a three-year sentence in absentia by the French court on Tuesday [31 January 2023] for his role as an accomplice in the Signac case,” French and Ukrainian authorities believe that the fourth, female accomplice remains unidentified. 

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So how is the painting doing and where is it now? In April 2019, after the painting was  recovered in the murder suspect’s Kyiv house, Arsen Avakov, Ukraine’s interior minister, held a ceremony where he unveiled the recovered work of art. Accompanied by the French ambassador to Kiev, Isabelle Dumont, Avakov symbolized his country’s return of the painting as he handed it back to the French ambassador. At the time of its arrival to the museum, it was most likely restored through a combination of special technologies and techniques—often used after “traumatic” thefts of famous works of art—and entrusted to the museum’s finest art restoration experts. In a Facebook post from September 15th, 2022, the museum wrote that “after restoration by Noëlle Jeannette, “Le port de La Rochelle” by Paul Signac can once again be seen in the museum's permanent collections.” The painting has been reinstalled in one of the museum’s many winding galleries, on its own white wall and much closer to security cameras. 

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(Image Courtesy of Musée de Beaux-Arts de Nancy)

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In terms of the painting’s recovery, this is a rather unusual happy ending. According to Arthur Brand, a Dutch detective who is deemed the “Indiana Jones of the art world” by the BBC, it is quite “rare for stolen art to be recovered—most estimates put the figure below 10 percent.” Ukrainian authorities truly lucked out with their incredible find: the murder suspect could have died, leading the painting to not have been discovered or sold again in the black market, or the painting could have been destroyed during its perilous journey from Nancy to Kyiv, among many different scenarios. 

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Nevertheless, it is indeed serendipitous that the painting was found and is able to be displayed in the museum once more. Sails up, the boat of La Porte Rochelle seems to languidly navigate the blue, pink, and green hues of the river it is perched upon, a triumphant force of red and white that cuts through the otherwise pastel paints of the French Impressionist painting. In the background,  the light blue, white, and pink dotted towers, which are the real-life towers of Saint-Nicolas, the Chain, and the Lantern which guard the port of La Rochelle in France, stand imposingly, their flags fluttering in the invisible wind. While these towers no longer serve their medieval purpose of defending La Rochelle against capable invaders, they are, as Le Monde writes, “more formidable than the security of the Nancy museum.”