Eight Matisse collages stolen at gunpoint from an exhibition in São Paulo

It was the last opportunity to view Henri Matisse’s collages, part of the “Jazz” series, when two armed men stormed into São Paulo’s main municipal library on Sunday. At gunpoint, but without firing a shot, they stole eight artworks by the French artist and five by the Brazilian artist Cândido Portinari from the exhibition, which was receiving its first visitors on its closing day. The thieves entered and exited through the main door of the Mário de Andrade Library, fleeing through the bustling streets of São Paulo’s historic center. These Matisse works had been stolen years before. One of the thieves has already been identified, according to the newspaper Folha de S.Paulo.

The works were part of the exhibition “Do livro ao museu (From Book to Museum): MAM São Paulo and the Mário de Andrade Library,” which included some 20 pieces by Matisse in dialogue with other artists from the collections of both institutions. The exhibition was celebrating the centenary of the municipal library, which is named after the Brazilian poet and writer Andrade.

The thieves overpowered a security guard after one of them showed her a gun under his shirt. While one of them locked her in a room after taking her radio and cell phone, his accomplice entered the room where the artworks were displayed, intimidated an elderly couple visiting the exhibition, took the pieces down from the wall, put them in a cloth bag, and fled. The Portinari prints they also stole were part of the work “Menino do engenho” (Boy of the Sugar Mill).

The album Jazz was created by Matisse during World War II. “He makes these collages, paints the papers, cuts them out, and forms the images. You see how they look like collages; they are very powerful images, with that confusion of colors, very characteristic of Matisse, with all that ambiguity due to the war situation, where you don’t know if there is violence or not,” explained Pedro Nery, a museum curator at the municipal library, in a promotional video.

The artist was suffering from cancer when he created the works. Unable to paint or sculpt at that point, he created collages instead. These pieces were compiled into a book he titled Jazz, of which 250 copies were published. It was first published in 1947 in France.

The more than 25,000 surveillance cameras installed in Brazil’s most populous city have helped uncover the escape route of the perpetrators and identify one of them, although his identity has not been released. The van they used has already been located and inspected by investigators. Recordings from the Smart Sampa system—a type of facial recognition system —show one of the thieves on a street near the library carrying the largest pieces of the loot. At one point, he places the artworks on the ground, and the recording gets cut off, according to the aforementioned newspaper.

The scene of the theft is São Paulo’s main municipal library, a century-old cultural center in the historic district, a building with a constant flow of readers and visitors. The works from the album Jazz were returned to the Mário de Andrade Library’s collection a decade ago after a remarkable odyssey, as they had previously been stolen without the library even noticing. In 2006, they were located by Argentine customs agents at the border. For years, the library refused to acknowledge that they had been stolen, until it discovered that the pieces it possessed were copies, not the originals, which it recovered in 2015.

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