SAO PAULO, Brazil — Brazil’s premier modern art museum had no insurance on paintings by Pablo Picasso and Candido Portinari stolen in a brazen burglary, the museum’s spokesman said Saturday.
Three thieves, armed with nothing more than a crowbar and a car jack, took three minutes to break into the Sao Paulo Museum of Art before dawn Thursday and steal Picasso’s “Portrait of Suzanne Bloch” and Portinari’s “O Lavrador de Cafe.”
“None of the museum’s 8,000 works of art are insured,” Eduardo Cosomano said. “Insuring all them would be financially unviable.”
Cosomano said that to protect its collection, the museum has always relied on “unarmed guards patrolling the interior of the museum 24 hours a day,” and security cameras that on Thursday produced only blurred images of the heist.
“Alarms and movement sensors have never been part of our security system,” Cosomano said, contradicting earlier police reports that said the alarms failed to go off. “Obviously we will now have to rethink our entire security system.”
The Folha de Sao Paulo newspaper says the museum’s collection is worth more than $1 billion.
The museum will reopen to the public Wednesday, Cosomano said.
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