Fourteen years after they vanished from an Israeli art collector’s home, two works by Pablo Picasso and Marc Chagall were unearthed in a cellar in the Belgian city of Antwerp.
Artworks by Picasso’s cubist Tête and Chagall’s L’homme en prière, depicting a man praying, were taken from the Herzikovich family’s Tel Aviv property in February 2010.
Priced at $900,000 (£710,000) each, the two paintings were quite valuable back then. Burglars also stole $680,000 worth of jewellery from a safe during the same crime; the valuables have since gone missing.
Image Courtesy Euronews
At the tail end of 2022, after a ten-year hunt, Belgian authorities got a tip that an art dealer in Namur, the capital of Walloon, was selling the two paintings. This was the first significant development in the case.
The suspect, a 68-year-old Israeli trader of high-end watches named “Daniel Z” by Belgian authorities, was the subject of a clandestine operation that lasted for months.
Last week, at the prosecutor’s request, federal agents raided the suspect’s residence and discovered a substantial quantity of cash, but the artwork was missing.
The suspect was found to be in possession of the sought-after works and could be at his home or a relative’s, according to police officials who spoke to the French-language Belgian newspaper Le Soir. This information was obtained through the checks and police resources that were put in place in 2023.
“Even though he admitted to having the paintings, the suspect still wouldn’t reveal their whereabouts.”
Expanding their investigation to include Antwerp, authorities found two wooden boxes with screwed-down lids that contained the stolen artwork. The premises had been home to an art dealership that had been associated with prior instances of stolen paintings.
According to the authorities, the artworks were wholly unharmed and preserved in their original frames. The primary suspect was apprehended and held on charges of obtaining two works of art.
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