On Sunday, February 10, 2008, at 4:30 in the afternoon, three men in dark raincoats and balaclavas walked through the front doors of the Foundation E.G. Bührle on Zollikerstrasse in Zurich. One drew a pistol and ordered fifteen visitors and staff members onto the parquet floor; the other two pulled four framed canvases off the ground-floor walls and carried them to a white sedan idling on the curb outside. The entire operation took under three minutes.
The four paintings, catalogued by the museum at 180 million Swiss francs (roughly $163 million), made the raid one of the highest-value art robberies in European history. Among them was Paul Cézanne's landmark Post-Impressionism canvas The Boy in the Red Vest (1888–1890), valued on its own at 100 million Swiss francs, alongside Edgar Degas's Count Lepic and His Daughters (c. 1871), Claude Monet's Impressionism masterwork Poppies near Vétheuil (1879), and Vincent van Gogh's Blossoming Chestnut Branches (1890).
The Logistics of an Impossible Sale
The thieves had seized the four canvases nearest the gallery doorway rather than curating a targeted list: they walked right past larger Cézannes and a Manet on the adjacent wall because their getaway car lacked luggage space. Eight days later, on February 18, an attendant found the white sedan sitting unlocked in the parking lot of the Burghölzli psychiatric clinic, five hundred meters up the hill from the museum. The Monet and the Van Gogh lay on the rear bench seat completely intact behind their protective glass; the Cézanne and the Degas had been removed and smuggled across national borders.
Once across the border into Serbia, the painting confronted the central paradox of high-value art theft: an artwork famous enough to carry a nine-figure insurance valuation cannot be shown to an auctioneer, hung in a legitimate collector's home, or registered with any international carrier without immediately triggering an Interpol red notice. Led by Ivan Peković, the Belgrade gang spent four years shifting the canvas across a chain of safehouses in Serbia and Montenegro, watching its market value collapse as every attempt to broker a private transaction stalled against the impossibility of authenticating stolen property.
By 2012, Peković had negotiated a black-market buyer in Belgrade willing to pay €3.5 million ($4.6 million), a 96 percent discount against the museum valuation. The buyer had already wired €2.8 million in advance installments before Serbian police and Swiss cantonal investigators closed the trap.
On April 11, 2012, officers from the Serbian Service for Combating Organized Crime (SBPOK) boxed in Peković's vehicle following a high-speed pursuit through the streets of Belgrade. Hidden flat inside the vehicle's customized roof upholstery lining, wrapped in protective sheeting, sat Cézanne's 79.5 by 64 centimetre canvas. Concurrent raids in Belgrade and the central Serbian city of Čačak yielded €1.49 million in cash and a cache of illegal firearms.
Miljko Radisavljević, the Serbian Special Prosecutor for Organized Crime, detailed the raid at a press briefing in Belgrade:
"The suspects were arrested during the handover of the last installment of money. They had planned to sell the painting for 3.5 million euros, and we found 1.49 million euros in cash during the operation."
The Canvas and Its Reconstruction
Between 1888 and 1890, working inside his rented studio on the Rue du Val-de-Grâce in Paris, Cézanne hired an Italian adolescent named Michelangelo di Rosa to sit for six portraits: two in watercolor and four in oil. Three of the oil versions now belong to American institutions: the Museum of Modern Art in New York (65.7 × 54.3 cm), the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. (89.5 × 72.4 cm), and the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia (81.2 × 65 cm). The Zurich version is neither the biggest nor the smallest of the four, and it is the one everybody knows.
The boy's left arm runs longer than anatomy allows, dropping past his hip toward the edge of the table while his right elbow props up his head. The elongation is doing structural work rather than anatomical: it lays down the long diagonal that the draped curtain behind him answers, and the red waistcoat sits at the crossing, pitched against the blue cravat and the grey drapes. Cézanne had a standing phrase for what he was after in ordinary rooms like this one. He wanted, he said, "to make of Impressionism something solid and durable like the art of the museums."
Emil Georg Bührle had acquired the canvas on August 28, 1948, paying 400,000 Swiss francs to German art collector Gottlieb Friedrich Reber, who had himself bought it from the Hungarian collector Marczell de Nemes in Paris in 1913. It remained the anchor of the Bührle Collection for forty-eight years until the Sunday afternoon break-in.
Lukas Gloor, director of the Foundation E.G. Bührle Collection, flew directly to Belgrade on April 12, 2012, to inspect the retrieved artwork at police headquarters. Having examined the back of the canvas, the accession markings, and the delicate oil glazes, Gloor announced that although the edges showed minor tears from being roughly handled without a frame, the picture surface had escaped serious structural loss: "Repairs would take time, but I am confident it can be restored to its former state."
Swiss and Serbian authorities later confirmed something they had been sitting on for nearly three years: the stolen Degas, Count Lepic and His Daughters, had been recovered in Serbia long before the Belgrade raid. They said nothing, so that the men holding the Cézanne would go on believing nobody was looking.
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