Recap: Picasso Blue-Period 3-Minute Theft Has Brazil Museum Red-Faced, Yazzy's at www.williamverdult.com

According to Bloomberg News -- A crowbar, a hydraulic jack, a wooden block and three minutes.

That was all it took for persistent thieves to break into the Sao Paulo Museum of Art last week and swipe Pablo Picasso's `` Portrait of Suzanne Bloch,'' valued at as much as $50 million. They also took Brazilian painter Candido Portinari's ``Coffee Worker.''

The heist is becoming an embarrassment for the museum, which houses Brazil's most expensive art collection, with a value of more than $1 billion. The museum doesn't have an alarm system, and neither painting was insured, fueling calls for the government to take control of MASP.

``It's appalling that anyone with half a brain would be able to walk into one of Latin America's most important museums and steal a Picasso,'' said Jones Bergamin, head of Art Bourse, an auction house in Rio de Janeiro. ``The guardians of art in Brazil nearly invited these thieves to rob them.''

During security guards' shift change around 5 a.m. on Dec. 20, three men pried open a steel gate, smashed a glass door and snagged the artworks, said Marcos Gomes de Moura, the police chief handling the case in Sao Paulo. None of the four MASP guards heard or saw anything, he said.

Police said they suspect the thieves are the same men who tried to break in at least twice before. On Oct. 29, a group overpowered two security guards who didn't have the keys to the museum's painting section. On Dec. 17, security guards chased off would-be thieves who were using a blowtorch to try to break through one of the back doors. The guards didn't report the second incident to police.

Officials are investigating whether one of the museum's 140 staff members was involved in the burglary.

Monet, Degas

The MASP building, which is suspended in the air on four red pillars, is one of Sao Paulo's most recognizable landmarks. It houses 8,000 items including works by Claude Monet, Edgar Degas and Vincent Van Gogh, said Art Bourse's Bergamin.

Picasso's ``Portrait of Suzanne Bloch,'' measuring about 60 by 50 centimeters (24 by 20 inches), is from the Spanish master's so-called blue period. Bergamin valued the painting at about $50 million and the museum's entire collection at $1 billion.

Portinari, born in 1903 in coffee-producing Sao Paulo state, is a prominent Brazilian neorealist painter. His oils and watercolors are among the most sought-after modernist art in Latin America, said Ricardo Camargo, who owns an art gallery in Sao Paulo that has Portinari works.

`It's a Crime'

``It's a crime to allow something like this to happen,'' Camargo said. ``The directors of the museum should be criminally charged for this loss.''

Museum financing comes from entrance fees and from companies that sponsor exhibits, such as Petroleo Brasileiro SA and Pirelli SpA. About half a million people visit MASP a year, though most don't pay because they are students, according to the museum Web site. Maintenance costs are partially covered by the Sao Paulo city government, which provides 1 million reais ($560,000) a year.

While the MASP building is insured, the paintings aren't, said a man who answered the museum's press office telephone and declined to give his name. This was its first theft of an artwork, he said.

The heist is raising doubts about MASP's ability to protect its other treasures, triggering a campaign pressuring the management to hand over control to the city or state government.

Government Steps In

Ronaldo Bianchi, deputy culture secretary of Sao Paulo state's Culture Secretariat, said the government may create a partnership with an association of elected board members to manage the museum, O Estado de S. Paulo newspaper reported Dec. 23. Directors of the privately run museum now can make decisions without being held accountable, Estado reported Bianchi saying.

Brazil has the world's fourth-highest number of art thefts, after the U.S., France and Iraq, said Jose do Nascimento Junior, director of museums at Brazil's Institute of Heritage and National Arts, known as Iphan.

In February 2006, during Carnival celebrations in Rio de Janeiro, four heavily armed men overpowered two guards at the Chacara do Ceu Museum and stole Salvador Dali's ``Les Deux Balcons,'' Henri Matisse's ``Le Jardin du Luxembourg,'' Picasso's ``La Danse'' and Monet's ``Marine,'' according to Rio de Janeiro's Security Secretariat.

Brazilian museums don't place a high priority on protecting their works, making it ``the perfect place'' for easy thefts, Bergamin said.

``It's obvious now that anyone with minimal observation skills could have planned a robbery like this,'' he said. MASP ``is obviously not prepared to deal with even the least sophisticated of thieves.''