Stephen Hahn Art Gallery 1969
Stephen Hahn was a renowned art dealer in the United States for a number of years getting his start by selling paintings out of the trunk of his car. He slowly built up his funds and his reputation in order to open the Stephen Hahn Gallery at 75th and Madison Avenue in New York. He was considered to be an expert on the likes of Degas, Picasso and several other master painters. During the height of his gallery in New York he was responsible for one of the most significant collections of 20th century masters in the world.
On November 17th, 1969 art thieves broke into the Stephen Hahn Art Gallery. They managed to pick a lock that Stephen Hahn had boasted was “unpickable” and then forced their way into the gallery. Inside they managed to grab seven master works, including paintings by Roualt (Christ et Deux Disciples), Pissarro (L’Hermitage Pontoise), Monet (Nympheas) and Cassatt (Mere et Enfant). Their value to the Madison Avenue art gallery was set at $500,000. In 1976, the four paintings mentioned above were recovered. The other three paintings stolen were Interior at Nice by Henri Matisse, Portait of a Woman by Berthe Morisot and Cart in the Forest by Marc Chagall.
Perhaps what makes this theft stand out from the others is the ironic twist in which at the time of the theft Stephen Hahn was away having gone to speak at the Art Dealers Association of America. The topic of the night was to discuss art theft in the city. As Stephen Hahn was speaking of his own efforts to thwart art theft, including mentioning his unpickable lock, his own gallery was being robbed. Stephen Hahn still kept his humor about the matter. He would later accuse the thieves as being very “conservative” for passing up some of the more expensive and stand-out pieces by Picasso for the conservative pieces of Monet and Pisarro.