Imagine entering an art gallery empty-handed, and leaving with a Picasso. It sounds unfathomable, but that’s exactly what happened in Melbourne a few decades ago.
In 1986, the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) made headlines for all the wrong reasons: Pablo Picasso’s painting Weeping Woman vanished one evening from the gallery’s wall.
It’s an incident some remember, but few know the full story. For this reason, journalist Marc Fennell and the team behind SBS’s new must-see documentary Framed decided to dive deeper.
News footage from the time shows Tom Dixon, the then NGV chief conservator, releasing a statement confirming the theft. Dixon is one of the subjects interviewed for Framed. As he and the other subjects explain in the series, the wildest part of this crime was the anonymous letters sent by the thieves.
“We have stolen the Picasso from the National Gallery as a protest against the niggardly funding of the fine arts in this hick State and against the clumsy, unimaginative stupidity of the administration and distribution of that funding,” the first letter begins.
The thieves, who called themselves the Australian Cultural Terrorists, sent multiple taunting letters to the media, Fennell says. “It meant the crime was playing out in newspapers over the course of many weeks, where the thieves were literally taunting the police minister and the gallery, in the press, day after day,” he says. “It was just … bonkers!”
There are few examples outside fiction where criminals engage so brazenly with their victims. Dixon says in Framed: “As I read it now, it’s hard to take it very seriously. But at the time, we were shaking in our boots.”
Authorities from all over were summoned to bring this group to justice – even Interpol got involved. But this was no straightforward investigation. The story just got wilder, as pressure mounted.
That pressure was intensified by the fact that the thieves weren’t just sending insults in these letters. They were sending demands.
“Two conditions must be publicly agreed upon if the painting is to be returned,” the self-professed terrorists stated. As ransom notes go, the demands were unusual. They sought not a briefcase full of cash, but more funding for the arts.
Incredibly, the minister responsible for the arts at the time was also the minister of police, Race Mathews.
Journalist Virginia Trioli tells the Framed team that it was “a ridiculous association of portfolios in any circumstance. But lo and behold, here comes an art theft and [Mathews] is parachuted right in the middle of it!”
The group was clear about the conditions of its demands. “Because the Minister of the Arts is also the Minister of Plod, we are allowing him a sporting seven days in which to try to have us arrested while he deliberates. There will be no negotiation.”
And if these demands weren’t met? The group was clear: the $2 million Picasso would be destroyed.
This story hooks you from the start, and just gets bigger and bigger. Fennell says: “We found so many things that have never been uncovered before. But there are still a lot of questions.”
The thieves, who called themselves the Australian Cultural Terrorists, sent multiple taunting letters to the media.
The team reached out to a wide range of subjects in an attempt to find answers, and received conflicting reports. The events are remembered very differently depending on who you hear from. The police, the NGV, the arts community, journalists: everyone has their own understanding of what actually went on.
“There’s a multiplicity of experiences within this crime,” Fennell says. “And they’re actually all valid. They don’t cancel each other out … they simply coexist.”
It’s easy to get swept up in the bizarre elements of this story and forget that this isn’t just a yarn. It was a crime, and like all crimes, there were victims. The team at Framed discovered there were very real, ongoing impacts, and was interested in showing the humanity that is sometimes overlooked in the true crime genre.
For some people, the effects were catastrophic. One man, in particular, was falsely accused. “It was a commonly held secret in the arts community that he had done it,” Fennell says. “But he didn’t know the community believed that, and it had a devastating impact on his career.”
As well as the human story behind the heist, the themes at the heart of it remain relevant today: cultural cringe, underfunding of the arts, a confused national identity.
The theft of Weeping Woman may raise more questions than answers, as Fennell suggests, and speaks more broadly to issues of cultural identity.
“Who gets to decide what is ‘good’ art?” he says. “Who gets to decide what it means to be Australian? Who gets to paint that story, of that history?
“And if someone was to paint a story of ‘being Australian’ … would we even notice its value?”
The story starts in the arts community, but opens a conversation about society on the whole, and indeed, national identity.
Ultimately, we are reminded that museum plaques are woefully inadequate at telling the full story. By listening to and spotlighting the voices we rarely hear from, a much-needed dialogue can begin.
The series is sure to be this Boxing Day’s most thought-provoking and unmissable binge watch.
Prepare to be stunned, and reminded that truth is always stranger than fiction.
Stream the complete four-part series Framed this Boxing Day, 26 December, on SBS On Demand. Also available with simplified Chinese and Arabic subtitles.
