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Theft of What?
Kenneth Baker, San Francisco Chronicle, March 26, 2009
When thieves make off with a celebrated artwork such as Edvard Munch's "The Scream" (1893), we suspect them of acting at the behest of a well-heeled, unscrupulous and very private collector. But why would someone steal the work of a contemporary painter little known outside the Bay Area?
Early Friday morning, burglars disabled the alarm system at the Michael Rosenthal Gallery on Valencia Street, took a door off its hinges and made off with four paintings, each on the order of 4 feet square, by Terry Hoff.
Hoff, 45, is an admired artist whose work has not yet enjoyed a high arc through the secondary market. Each stolen painting was priced at $12,000, but these—examples of a sort of whimsical abstract surrealism —would be hard to fence because they look like no one else's work, and only Hoff's name, plus the gallery's, supports their market value.
To deepen the mystery, the thieves left behind several more easily portable works by Hoff, as well as camera and computer equipment that might have been much easier to cash out than paintings. The criminals left no sign of having exited in haste.
Are we talking vendetta here? The sincerest form of art criticism?
"We have nothing to go by," Michael Rosenthal said Friday, "except maybe that someone knew the alarm code. The ones they took I thought were the best paintings."
Rosenthal sent out "an e-mail blast," he said. "We probably got national distribution in an hour. Someone could probably crate these paintings and send them to Germany and sell them pretty easily. I've taken them to Germany before. They like this Mission School work over there."
"It really is hurtful to Terry, though," Rosenthal said. "That's the sadness here. He's worked a year and a half on this body of work, and he was really looking forward to having people look at it."
Almost exactly 24 hours after the break-in, Rosenthal got a phone call at home from the San Francisco Police Department. A man had called the SFPD earlier to report that he had bought four paintings out of a van on Market Street for a total of $1,000. Seeing a story about the theft from the gallery on the evening TV news, he realized that he was unwittingly in possession of stolen goods.
"They all need to be repaired, but they're repairable," Rosenthal said of the paintings. "The police had stacked them face-to-face. I guess they thought that was the best way."
So will Hoff's gallery show continue?
"There are enough pieces here to go on with the show even if we replace the stolen ones," Rosenthal said. "I'm waiting for Terry to come down and decide what to do. I'd encourage him to hang the stolen paintings again with a little explanation of the story. They're the world's most famous paintings right now."
