On January 27, 2019, Arkhip Kuindzhi's Ai-Petri. Crimea was stolen from a temporary exhibition at Moscow's Tretyakov Gallery. The French Wikipedia article on the painting gives the exact date and describes the theft as taking place in the exhibition hall, in view of visitors, when the thief removed the work from its frame and calmly carried it away. The English Kuindzhi article corroborates the broader episode: the painting was stolen from the Tretyakov Gallery in January 2019 and recovered the next day. The case drew attention because the painting belonged to the State Russian Museum and was on loan for a major Kuindzhi retrospective.
The episode became a widely reported reminder of security risks around high-profile state-museum loans.
Artists involved
