Brazilian police say they have recovered eight engravings by Henri Matisse that were stolen at gunpoint from a São Paulo public library in December, one of two batches of artwork taken in a heist that drew international attention to organized art theft in Brazil.
Investigators found the prints this week at a house in São Bernardo do Campo, a city in the greater São Paulo region, and arrested a man they say had been holding the works on behalf of the heist's alleged organizer. Officials put the recovered pieces' market value at roughly $200,000, though library and city officials have said the works' cultural significance is effectively incalculable.
The engravings, taken from Matisse's 1947 book "Jazz," were on display at the Mário de Andrade Library as part of an exhibition when two armed men entered, threatened a security guard and an elderly couple visiting the gallery, and made off with the prints in a canvas bag. Five works by the Brazilian modernist painter Cândido Portinari were stolen in the same robbery and remain missing.
Police have described the theft as the work of an organized ring rather than opportunistic thieves, with members assigned specific roles in planning the robbery and later moving stolen pieces through black-market channels. Authorities have named Laéssio Rodrigues de Oliveira Silva, a career art thief with a record dating to a 1998 theft of rare materials from Brazil's National Library Foundation, as the alleged architect of the heist; he was arrested in April on an unrelated charge and has remained in custody since. Two other suspects have separately been arrested as intermediaries, while at least one remains at large, according to police accounts of the investigation.
The Matisse prints are expected to be returned to the Mário de Andrade Library once they have cleared evidentiary processing, though authorities have not given a timeline. The search for the missing Portinari works, and for the remaining suspect, continues.