Two Men Walked Into a Vienna Museum and Took a 1939 Van Cleef & Arpels Necklace

Two men walked into a Vienna museum on a Thursday afternoon and walked out with a diamond necklace. It happened on 27 August at about two o’clock, at the MAK, Vienna’s Museum of Applied Arts on the Stubenring, in a public gallery with visitors in it. National Jeweler’s report has the outline: the two smashed a glass display case, grabbed the necklace, and fled. The rest, from the Austrian coverage, is stranger than the outline.

They bought tickets and used a hammer

There was no tunnel and no rappelling through a skylight. They paid for admission like anyone else, wore no masks, and went at the case with a hammer. A visitor in the gallery told Die Presse she counted 41 blows before the glass gave, over several minutes, and heard no alarm the whole time. One of the two is thought to have been carrying a gun, which the police spokesperson described as presumably real. The museum’s director, Lilli Hollein, said the staff’s first job was getting visitors out of the room, and nobody was hurt.

Then they left on foot. The trail ends in the Stadtpark next door, a city park in the middle of the afternoon, and that is where it still ends. Nobody has been caught. The Vienna criminal police have published surveillance images of both men, unmasked, because they never bothered with masks.

The necklace was made for a princess’s wedding

The piece is Art Deco, platinum, 673 diamonds, a sunburst bib hung on a six-carat articulated centre stone. Queen Nazli of Egypt commissioned it from Van Cleef & Arpels, with a matching tiara, for her daughter Faiza’s wedding in 1939 to the man who would become the Shah of Iran. It wasn’t on loan from some private collector. Van Cleef & Arpels bought it back at Sotheby’s in New York in 2015 and had lent it to the MAK for its own exhibition, “Glanzstücke,” which was due to run through the end of September.

That 2015 sale is where the $4 million in the headlines comes from. The price was $4.3 million, which is what the house paid to reclaim its own work. Nobody has published a valuation of the loss, and the Austrian papers say only “several million euros.”

It isn’t just the Louvre this year

The obvious comparison is Paris. On 19 October last year, thieves took eight of the French crown jewels from the Galerie d’Apollon at the Louvre in under eight minutes, a haul the Paris prosecutor put at €88 million. Empress Eugénie’s crown was dropped in the escape and recovered damaged; the eight are still missing, and suspects have been charged.

But the trade press isn’t counting Vienna as the second one. There have been museum jewelry thefts this year in Paris again, in Sicily, in Parma, and, on the same Thursday as the MAK, in Villena, Spain. Vienna is the one with the famous necklace and the hammer, so it’s the one you heard about.

The exhibition was supposed to close on 27 September. The case is empty now, and two men who paid for their tickets are somewhere past the Stadtpark with a princess’s wedding necklace.