Police Looking for 'Amateurish' Thieves Accused of Bombing Dutch Gallery in Heists of Warhol Prints

About two weeks after the art gallery advertised the “unique” showing of Andy Warhol’s “complete series” of “Reigning Queens,” the Netherland’s MPV Gallery was robbed in an art heist in which thieves made off with two of the pop artist’s 1985 prints and ruined the rest of the four-piece set.

Mark Peet Visser, the gallery owner, confirmed the costly caper in an interview with the Associated Press on Friday, Nov. 1, saying that in the early hours that day, burglars had bombed the gallery in an attack “so violent that my entire building was destroyed” in an attempt to steal all four queen prints.

Citing security camera footage of the theft, Visser told the AP the burglary was “amateurish,” noting that with the four queens in tow “they ran to the car with the artworks and it turns out that they won’t fit in the car.”

He said the thieves “ripped” the prints from the frames, damaging them “beyond repair, because it is impossible to get them out undamaged.”

Police have called for witnesses to come forward in the case, per the AP.

Visser had planned to sell the four screen prints – which Warhol had signed and numbered in pencil – together at the art fair PAN Amsterdam 2024 later in November, per the advertisement, which noted that interested buyers could offer up purchases upon “request.”

He declined to release to the AP the total value of the prints, which, per his advertisement, depict the world’s four reigning queens at the time: Elizabeth II of the U.K, Beatrix of the Netherlands, Margrethe II of Denmark and Ntombi Twala of Swaziland.

Want to keep up with the latest crime coverage? Click here to get breaking crime news, ongoing trial coverage and details of intriguing unsolved cases in the True Crime Newsletter.

According to the advertisement, each of the queens were made aware that Warhol planned to reimagine their likenesses in bold colors and shapes. George Mulder, an Amsterdam gallery owner who commissioned the works in 1983, reportedly claimed, per the advertisement, that the reigning royals had all reacted differently to the project: Elizabeth was positive about the rendering of her likeness, Margrethe griped about the King of Pop Art’s bad influence on youth, Beatrix was enthusiastic and Ntombi Twala said she had never heard of the artist.

Warhol based his silkscreens off of existing photographs of the queens, creating four portraits of each for a combined 16 works, making up his largest screen print portfolio, per the advertisement.

The queens – most sold separately – were soon scattered across the globe, and Visser claimed in the release that: “It is unknown how many Reigning Queens series have been broken up and how many remain intact.”

The reunion of the four queens to be displayed and sold together at the art fair later this month was one “offered only sporadically on the art market,” the gallery owner said in the release, adding: “This makes the Reigning Queens series one of the most sought-after series for art collectors, bringing record amounts time and again.”

Early Friday, the thieves ultimately fled with queens Elizabeth and Margrethe. Unable to get the other royals inside the vehicle, the gallery owner told the AP that Beatrix and Ntombi Tfwala had been discarded on the street.