Thieves with a taste for Pop Art literally blew the doors off of MPV Gallery in Oisterwijk, Netherlands Friday before stealing two screen prints from Andy Warhol’s “Reigning Queens” series, one of the UK’s Queen Elizabeth and the other depicting Queen Margrethe II of Denmark.
According to the German art publication Monopol, the two screenprints were broken out of their frames and may have been “severely damaged” during the heist. The gallery told Monopol that the group of pictures was rare “because they all had the same numbering” and that it’s a “terrible shame” that the series has been separated.
In a case of biting off more than one can chew, the thieves, it seems, had originally meant to steal all four of the “Reigning Queens” prints that were on view at MPV in the southern Netherlands but, according to the gallery’s surveillance footage, the looters’ car wasn’t big enough for all four pictures. The images of Dutch Queen Beatrix and Queen Ntfombi Twala of Swaziland were left on the street as the robbers made their getaway.
MPV’s owner, Mark Peet Visser, didn’t give Monopol an estimated worth for the stolen pictures, which, including the two left behind, were meant to be sold during the PAN Amsterdam art fair at the end of November.
However, four numbered and hand-signed prints of Queen Beatrix sold at auction in The Hague in 2021 for more than $235,000. In 2022, at Heffel Fine Art Auction House in Toronto, Warhol’s Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom, from Reigning Queens, Royal Edition (F.S.II.337A) sold for just over $856,000.
