AFTER thieves broke into the Kunsthal Museum in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, on Monday night and stole a king’s ransom’s worth of paintings by the likes of Picasso, Monet, Matisse and Gauguin, the public and the press were shocked. As usual, a combination of master art thieves and faulty security was blamed. But this seductive scenario is often, in fact, far from the truth.

Most of us envision balaclava-clad cat burglars rappelling through skylights into museums and, like Hollywood characters, contorting their bodies around motion-detecting laser beams. Of course, few of us have valuable paintings on our walls, and even fewer have suffered the loss of a masterpiece. But in the real world, thieves who steal art are not debonair “Thomas Crown Affair” types. Instead, they are the same crooks who rob armored cars for cash, pharmacies for drugs and homes for jewelry. They are often opportunistic and almost always shortsighted.

Take the 1961 theft of Goya’s “Duke of Wellington” from the National Gallery in London. While all of Britain believed that the Goya was taken by cunning art thieves, it was actually taken by a retired man, Kempton Bunton, protesting BBC licensing costs. (He apparently stole the painting by entering the museum through a bathroom window.) In 1973, Carl Horsley was arrested for the theft of two Rembrandts from the Taft Museum in Cincinnati. Later, after serving a prison term, he was arrested for shoplifting a tube of toothpaste and some candy bars.

The illicit trade of stolen art and antiquities is serious, with losses as high as $6 billion a year, according to the F.B.I. There have been teams of thieves who have included art among their targets, like the ones who stole a Rembrandt self-portrait from the National Museum in Stockholm in 2000. (The only buyer they found was an undercover F.B.I. agent.) But in general, it is incredibly rare for a museum to fall victim to a “professional” art thief. The reason is simple: the vast majority of people who steal art do it once, because it is incredibly difficult and because it is nearly impossible to fence a stolen masterpiece.

The wide attention that a high-value art heist garners makes the stolen objects too recognizable to shop around. And there are very few people with enough cash to purchase a masterpiece — even for pennies on the dollar — that they can never show anyone. Once an art thief realizes this, he turns to other endeavors. Meanwhile, the stolen treasures lie dormant in a garage or crawl space until he figures out what to do with them.

It’s easy — and sometimes justified — to criticize security systems as flawed or inadequate, but securing a museum is uniquely challenging. Consider this: The goal of an art museum is to make priceless and rare art and antiquities accessible to the public. They are among society’s most egalitarian institutions. Contrast that with a jewelry store or a bank, where armed guards and imposing vaults are the norm. No one expects to be able to be alone with diamonds worth thousands, but museumgoers do expect an intimate experience with masterworks worth millions. Clearly, it is a daunting task to provide robust security without disturbing the aesthetics of the artwork and its environment.

So what is the remedy for the all-too-frequent scourge of art theft? Museums must build systems that cannot be compromised by a single error or failure. Thieves should have to overcome several layers of security before they can reach their target and several more on the way out. At the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, we took such an approach after the 1990 theft of several masterpieces — a crime that hasn’t been solved. This not only makes it more difficult to steal and get away with stolen art, but it gives the police precious extra minutes to respond to alarms, especially if, as in Rotterdam, they sound at night.

When art is stolen, local law enforcement should focus on the right sort of criminals rather than conjecture about multinational art theft rings. The key to finding these missing needles in the haystack is to make the haystack smaller; homing in on the most likely suspects quickly is essential to recovering the stolen item. The F.B.I.’ s Art Crime Team has gathered impressive intelligence on who steals art and what becomes of it. For instance, they’ve learned that upward of 90 percent of all museum thefts involve some form of inside information. So often the best approach is to look at active local robbery gangs, and to investigate connections between past and present employees and known criminals. Enhanced employee background checks and discreet observation of visitor behavior also help to deter thefts.

Confronting these realities is essential to preventing more pieces of our cultural heritage from being lost.

PARIS — With impeccable timing and taste, thieves in the wee hours of Tuesday morning plundered an art museum in the Netherlands that was celebrating its 20th birthday and made away with seven borrowed paintings, including valuable works by Picasso, Monet, Gauguin, Matisse and Lucian Freud.

The Kunsthal museum in Rotterdam — which was exhibiting a private collection owned by the Triton Foundation — was closed to the public after the theft, but the bare spaces on its walls were visible to photographers through windows in its modern building by Rotterdam’s museum park and busy Maasboulevard.

The theft was the latest alarm about museum security in Europe, now a prime hunting ground for art thieves. In 2010 five paintings, including a Picasso and a Matisse, together valued at about 100 million euros, or about $130 million, were stolen from the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris; they are still missing.

Police investigators combed the grounds of the museum and studied surveillance video for clues to the burglary, which they said happened about 3 a.m. and set off an alarm linked to a security agency. But by the time police arrived soon after, the works had vanished.

The art, part of a collection amassed by a Dutch investor, Willem Cordia, who died in 2011, was exhibited in public for the first time last week at the Kunsthal, which does not have a collection of its own. The stolen paintings span parts of three centuries: Meyer de Haan’s “Self-Portrait” of 1890 and Gauguin’s 1898 “Girl in Front of Open Window”; Monet’s “Waterloo Bridge, London” and “Charing Cross Bridge, London,” both from 1901; Matisse’s 1919 “Reading Girl in White and Yellow” and Picasso’s 1971 “Harlequin Head”; and Freud’s haunting 2002 portrait “Woman With Eyes Closed.”

The theft “was carefully thought out, cleverly conceived and it was quickly executed, so that suggests professionals,” said Charles Hill, a retired Scotland Yard art detective turned private investigator who went undercover to retrieve a version of “The Scream,” by Edvard Munch, after it was stolen in 1994 in Oslo.

“The volume,” he added, “suggests that whoever stole it owes somebody a lot of money, and it’s got to be a major-league villain.”

“My best guess is that someone doesn’t have the cash to repay a loan,” he said.

Marc Masurovsky, a historian and an expert on plundered art in Washington, noted the possibility that the theft was “a contract job,” adding: “These works were picked out. Could it be they had been targeted well before the theft, and the exhibit was the opportunity to strike?”

Willem van Hassel, the chairman of the Kunsthal’s board, announced the closing of the museum on Tuesday and later held a news conference to declare that adequate security measures had been taken.

At the same conference, the museum’s director, Emily Ansenk, said that night measures involved “technical security,” with no guards but camera surveillance and alarms. Museum officials said that the police had arrived on the museum grounds within five minutes of the alarm.

Ms. Ansenk told reporters that the burglary “has hit the art world like a bomb” and described it “as a nightmare for any museum director.” Kunsthal officials declined to estimate the value of the stolen works, though experts say they are collectively worth many millions of dollars, possibly hundreds of millions. Still, it would be difficult for thieves to sell such easily identifiable artworks, contributing to suspicions about underworld finances.

“I think it’s a form of repayment in kind, a barter — 'I don’t have cash, but I have these paintings,’ ” said Mr. Hill, the art investigator.

Kunsthal officials vowed that the museum would reopen on Wednesday.

-By DOREEN CARVAJAL

Banker Herb Allen's family plans to auction one of Monet's water lily paintings for between $30 million and $50 million. Collectors are buying famous works on hopes they retain their value in the current economy.

In another sign that the smart money set is selling art this auction season, Christie's plans to auction off a Claude Monet painting of a water lily pond for between $30 million and $50 million. The painting was donated to a school by the family of investment banker Herb Allen.

The planned sale next month comes as prices for Monet's watery scenes continue to climb, buoyed by interest from emerging collectors in China and Europe who think values for name-brand artists will hold up during times of economic uncertainty even if prices for lesser-known painters plummet.

Monet's Water-Lily series—the artist painted more than 160 views of his garden pond at Giverny, France between 1905 and his death in 1926—seem particularly popular. Five of the artist's priciest paintings at auction depict his garden, including "The Lily Pond," a 1919 example that Christie's auction house sold to a European buyer for $80.4 million at the peak of the last market in 2008.

"Water Lilies," a painting that dates from 1905 and shows mint-green lily pads bobbing atop a periwinkle pool, will be offered at Christie's evening sale of Impressionist and modern art in New York on Nov. 7.

Christie's specialist Conor Jordan said Chinese interest is already piqued by "Water Lilies," so he's shipping it to Hong Kong next week so potential bidders can take a closer look.

Mr. Allen, the founder of the annual mogul-fest in Sun Valley, Idaho, said his father bought the painting in 1979 with his wife, Ethel Strong Allen. After Mr. Allen's father died in 1997, the painting remained in the collection of his stepmother, who died in June.

Mr. Allen said the school is also auctioning off a pair of Impressionist paintings by Camille Pissarro and Alfred Sisley that were included in his stepmother's bequest.

Pissarro's 1895 landscape, "Apple Trees and Haymakers, Eragny," shows a pair of women using pitchforks to rake hay into piles in an apple orchard near Pissarro's home in Eragny, France. Christie's estimates the work will sell for at least $2.5 million.

Pissarro's performance at auction has been patchy lately, with several works going unsold, but collectors tend to pay a premium for scenes like this one that show Pissarro's signature way of painting long, afternoon shadows.

Christie's also expects to get at least $2.5 million for Sisley's "Alley of Poplars at Moret on the Bank of the Loing," an 1890 view of a poplar-lined path near a riverbank in the French town of Moret. Sisley's auction record is similarly hit and miss these days, but his poplar series still seems to find plenty of takers: Seven of the artist's priciest works at auction feature riverbank views of Moret—including an 1891 example that broke the artist's auction record when it sold for $5.7 million at Sotheby's five years ago.

Mr. Allen said his stepmother's will bequested all three paintings to his prep-school alma mater, Hackley School, in Tarrytown, N.Y.

-By Kelly Crow

LONDON—British authorities are searching for a man who took responsibility for defacing a valuable Mark Rothko canvas with black paint at the Tate Modern museum on Sunday afternoon.

The man walked up to one of Rothko's murals—an untitled 1958 painting often referred to as "Black on Maroon"—and tagged it with the words: "Vladimir Umanets '12, a potential piece of yellowism." The vandal then quickly left the building.

The incident was witnessed by Tim Wright, a 23-year-old marketing executive from Bristol, England, who said he "turned around and heard this scratching sound," only to see a young man finishing his letters on the Rothko painting.

"It was all very surreal," Mr. Wright said. "One minute he was sat down, and the next he had climbed over a little barrier and was knelt down doing his tag." Mr. Wright snapped a picture of the defaced painting—marked with the black letters in the bottom corner— and uploaded it to Twitter.

Vladimir Umanets, an artist working in London who has published a "Manifesto of Yellowism," claimed in several British media outlets on Monday, including ITV and the Guardian and Evening Standard newspapers, that he had defaced the painting, describing his act as art. Mr. Umanets told the Guardian that the incident would increase the value of the Rothko canvas.

"I don't want to spend a few months, even a few weeks, in jail." Mr. Umanets told ITV News. "But I do strongly believe in what I am doing, I have dedicated my life to this."

Mr. Umanets declined to comment to The Wall Street Journal.

A spokesman for the Metropolitan Police said authorities are looking for a suspect described as a white man in his 20s and have taken note of reports in the British media naming the alleged suspect.

Rothko, a Russian-American painter known for his abstract color fields, painted the murals in the late 1950s for the Four Seasons restaurant in New York's Seagram Building. The artist's decision to accept the commission was subversive, according to a Harper's Magazine piece by the late editor John Fischer, who famously recounted Rothko's hope that the art would "ruin the appetite of every son of a b— who ever eats in that room."

The paintings were never exhibited in the New York restaurant because Rothko decided to keep them. He gave a set of the now-famous murals to the Tate in 1969, just before he committed suicide.

The murals are an important part of Rothko's oeuvre because they mark the first time he created multiple paintings designed to surround the viewer, according to David Anfam, a Rothko expert and commissioning editor of fine art at British publisher Phaidon. Mr. Anfam says he thinks conservators will be able to repair the Tate's damaged canvas, which he says is likely worth tens of millions of dollars. In May, Rothko's 1961 painting "Orange Red Yellow" was sold at Christie's in New York for $86.9 million, becoming the most expensive Rothko work ever sold.

The Tate declined to comment on potential restoration.

"With the Seagram Murals, this was Rothko's first and seminal bid to create an entire environment—which is absolutely key—rather than just isolated individual works on canvas," Mr. Anfam said.

The incident Sunday served as a reminder of how vulnerable prized paintings can be when on display in high-traffic museums.

At the Tate on Sunday, two staffers who had been manning the room ran to summon security, but the vandal had left by time the guards arrived, Mr. Wright said. He said the museum soon evacuated the entire building, located across the Thames River from St. Paul's Cathedral.

The Tate confirmed in a statement that a visitor defaced one of Rothko's Seagram murals "by applying a small area of black paint with a brush to the painting." The museum declined to comment further.

Rothko's children, Kate Rothko Prizel and Christopher Rothko, also issued a statement, saying: "The Rothko family is greatly troubled by yesterday's occurrence but has full confidence that the Tate Gallery will do all in its power to remedy the situation."

The Rothko mural isn't the first work of art to be attacked in the name of art. In 2000, also at the Tate Modern, two performance artists urinated on Marcel Duchamp's sculpture "Fountain," itself a urinal. Four years earlier, Canadian artist Jubal Brown ate blue foods and purposefully vomited on a Piet Mondrian painting at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. A few months before, he had vomited in red hues on a different painting in Toronto.

-By Paul Sonne

Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden

Ai Weiwei will probably be regarded as the most important artist of the past decade. He is certainly its most newsworthy and arguably its most inspiring. Over the repressions of Chinese authorities, he has used a wide range of resources to broadcast a message of freedom.

Through his art, he has spoken with a voice that also includes those who have been silenced. A dissident under a capricious regime, he has endured trials that have captivated world attention while galvanizing an underground culture at home.

The arrival this week of Mr. Ai's first North American retrospective, "Ai Weiwei: According to What?"—which begins at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington and travels to three other cities, concluding at the Brooklyn Museum in 2014—is itself newsworthy. That this exhibition largely fails to inspire not only speaks to Mr. Ai's own limitations but also to the challenges and missteps in exhibiting this increasingly multifaceted artist.

It bears remembering that following his youth in a Chinese labor camp and his punk bohemian immersion in 1980s New York, for several years Mr. Ai, now 55, was a member of Beijing's cultural elite. A sly thinker and adept designer, he emerged in the late 1990s along with the booming market for contemporary Chinese art to become a sanctioned and profitable ambassador of the modernized socialist state. In 2008, he even served as the artistic consultant on National Stadium, the "Bird's Nest" centerpiece of the Beijing summer Olympics.

It was the Sichuan earthquake in May of that year that turned Mr. Ai from cultural purveyor to iconoclast. He rightly believed that the tragedy of this event, a thousand miles from Beijing in the heart of rural China, was magnified by the state's refusal to investigate its particularly tragic circumstances: the death of more than 5,000 children due to shoddy school construction.

In the years that followed, Mr. Ai put this belief into action. He visited the devastation, documenting the sites in photos and videos, and organized what he called a "citizens' investigation" to identify and memorialize each child killed in this disaster.

As he pursued this project, Mr. Ai increasingly faced off with the Communist state. He came under surveillance and sustained a beating at the hands of local police, a life-threatening brain injury, the destruction of his studio in Shanghai, 81 days of imprisonment and psychological torture, a state-driven campaign of intimidation, multimillion-dollar charges and fines, and the stripping of his freedom to leave the country—including his plans to attend this North American retrospective.

The Hirshhorn show is an update of the one at Tokyo's Mori Art Museum in 2009, which was organized largely before Mr. Ai's dissident chapter. While the current exhibition brings in some important new pieces, it still feels weighted toward the state-sanctioned years. Even the recent selection largely follows the earlier formula.

Much of this work falls under what I call the Salon style of contemporary Chinese art: Oriental idioms, passed through Pop-art sensibilities, processed into large works with a factorylike finish. Mr. Ai can be particularly taken with Western art's historical references. Several examples here are minimalist-inspired sculptures with flourishes of Chinoiserie. "Cube in Ebony" (2009), carved with a traditional rusticated surface, recalls Tony Smith's "Die." "Moon Chest" (2008), created through traditional cabinet-making techniques, riffs off Donald Judd's "specific objects." "Cube Light" (2008), which is a recent acquisition by the Hirshhorn and also the most oversized, underwhelming piece in the show, is minimalism transformed into a kitschy chandelier.

Too much real estate gets taken up by these large works. The Mori's Mami Kataoka, who also curated this show, calls the art a "warm" minimalism for existing "between formalist and contextual methodologies"—in other words, Western work with an Eastern twist.

It is true that Mr. Ai includes personal, social and political references in his sculptures. At times they can seem like the coded messages of a prisoner tapping on his cell wall. "Surveillance Camera" (2010), a marble sculpture that turns an object of oppression into a work of art, is ominous and poignant. But often the sculpture, outsourced to inexpensive Chinese artisans, is a lot of effort for not much return. Sculptures that require lengthy explanations—that one was inspired by a small wooden box left by the artist's dissident poet father, Ai Qing, or that one was inspired by the shaking of the chandelier in Sergei Eisenstein's 1928 film "October"—are not so much "warm" as warmed over. One exception is "Straight" (2008-2012), a new floor installation made up of 38 tons of rebar recovered from Sichuan after the earthquake that is a rough and powerful work regardless of what else we know about it.

Mr. Ai has always been a conceptual artist. The challenge of a conventional museum exhibition is that his output has become more and more immaterial. It could be that Mr. Ai is now best reflected in other ways—for example in Alison Klayman's inspiring documentary "Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry." Blogging, Twitter and the Internet itself, to which Mr. Ai devotes eight hours a day, have become his genuine new media and his most consequential work. Unfortunately, this traditionally mounted show tells us little about that. Walls of photographs—with both wonderful snapshots from his New York years and thousands of digital images from his Internet feed—could offer extra context, but they are so poorly labeled and hung so high that they serve as little more than decoration.

For a retrospective, there is also regrettably little about his involvement in the Beijing avant-garde of the late 1970s—he was part of the "Stars" group during a brief thaw known as the "Beijing Spring." Nor are there examples of his underground books published in the mid-1990s.

A deep humanity runs through Mr. Ai's best work. "I've experienced dramatic changes in my living and working conditions over the past few years," he says in an interview with Hirshhorn curator Kerry Brougher reproduced in the exhibition catalog. But he resists being taken in by his own politics. "Maybe I'm just an undercover artist in the disguise of a dissident," he says. Believing in "freedom of speech, free expression, the value of life, and individual rights," he tempers his politics with empathy.

That's why his work on the "citizens' investigation" is so affecting and stands apart from the more ornamental aspects of this show. Alongside a wall-size spreadsheet listing all the child victims of the Sichuan quake, including their birthdays and schools, he presents a recording that reads off their names. In this stripped-down piece, we sense the full extent of the loss, a tragedy that is magnified for the victims' parents by China's one-child policy: "These people have cried a lifetime's worth of tears," says Mr. Ai. "In their hearts, they know that the precious lives they gave everything to protect are no longer." Beyond politics, the work strikes at the heart of death and remembrance. It also shows us how present this artist can be even in his absence—and just what is missing in so much else of this exhibition.

-By James Panero

 

JUST in time for Paris Fashion Week, the Musée d’Orsay opened “Impressionism and Fashion,” an expansive exhibition examining the depiction of contemporary dress in paintings and portraiture in the second half of the 19th century, when fashion here became both a booming industry and a leisure pursuit.

The show, a collaboration with the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Art Institute of Chicago, includes paintings and costumes and will travel stateside next year. But it is best seen here and now to spot unexpected parallels between the subject matter of the Impressionists, from roughly the 1860s to the 1880s, and that of the street-style photographers who document the exotically dressed creatures outside the fashion shows across the Seine in the Tuilleries.

It is the same as when Baudelaire described “the daily metamorphosis of exterior things,” only instead of the changing shape of bustle skirts, as the pouf derrière became wider in the 1870s and more decorative in the 1880s, the photographers document the exaggerated round shoulders of a Comme des Garçons coat in the 2010s. The thought occurs, while regarding a painting of a man holding an umbrella, standing just so in the bright daylight, that perhaps Claude Monet was The Sartorialist of 1868.

Visiting the exhibition with the Times photographer Bill Cunningham, we were fascinated by the clever staging of the show, with portraits arranged in galleries that are filled with gilded chairs, as if for a défilé. Place cards tied with tiny ribbons to each seat were inscribed with the names of guests. Charles Frederick Worth was seated between Mademoiselle Marie Duplessis and the Comtesse Clotilde Bonaparte.

The incorporation of fashion was thrilling, with a case of hats placed next to the millinery paintings of Degas, and a display of intimates laid out before “Rolla,” a painting by Henri Gervex that shows a naked woman asleep, observed by a man standing at a window.

As we entered the final gallery, designed to evoke Monet’s park settings with walls painted sky blue and the floor covered with a carpet of fake grass, Bill saw a group of children in schoolboy blazers sitting on the ground, and some tired tourists relaxing on a bench, and said, “Now that’s a picture.”

-By Eric Wilson

Panda Banquette by Fernando and Humberto Campana (2006).

LIKE everything else that Murray Moss does, the auction he curated for Phillips de Pury & Company, “Moss, the Auction: Dialogues Between Art and Design,” is highly subjective and personal. Mr. Moss has a fraternal twin (a sister, Fern Moss Kalai) and has always had an interest in genetics

Here are some lots from the auction, which pairs design objects (some from his private collection that he owns with Franklin Getchell) with art from various collectors.

The auction is on Oct. 16; the viewing starts on Saturday at the Phillips uptown location, 450 Park Avenue.

Pandamonium

Panda Banquette by Fernando and Humberto Campana (2006) and “Composition” by Henri Michaux (1959). “A variation of a Rorschach test?” Mr. Moss wonders in the catalog.

Lounge Act

Velvet Sofa by Mattia Bonetti (2002) and “Rosa Nackte (Red Nude)” by Luciano Castelli (1982). “Doesn’t the velvet-skinned sofa suggest the elongated, welcoming lap of the sleeping red Siren?” Mr. Moss muses. “Couldn’t each be a portrait of the other?”

By BOB MORRIS