Thief walks out of US gallery with $20,000 etching

For an art heist, it was a simple affair. A man ducked into a San Francisco gallery and walked out less than a minute later holding one of its best pieces: a $20,000 (approximately Rs 14,00,00) Salvador Dali etching. "I was alone at the gallery and turned my back for a minute, and when I looked, it was gone," Rasjad Hopkins, an associate director of the gallery, said on Tuesday. "I never saw the person."
The artwork, a limited-edition hand-coloured 1960s surrealist etching titled "La Girafe en Feu," or "The Giraffe on Fire," had been sitting on an easel at the gallery, Dennis Rae Fine Art, when it was taken on Sunday. Normally, the Spanish artist's work would be tethered to the easel, Hopkins said, but on the day of the theft it was not. A security camera in the gallery was not turned on at the time.
But surveillance footage of the incident obtained by ABC7 News shows a man in a blue cap and a blue Nike shirt enter the gallery, with a second person in pink pants waiting outside. The man then appears to make his escape with the etching in his right hand.
The piece is one of seven original etchings from a suite of work influenced by Pablo Picasso known as "Tauromachie Surrealiste", which translates to "Surrealist bullfighting." "It could be quickly identified," said Joan Kropf, chief curator at the Dali Museum in Florida. The piece was insured and the gallery had obtained it from a French museum, Hopkins said. Galleries who recognise the work as stolen may report it to authorities. Pawn shops often ask for identification. The thief could try to start a bidding war on eBay, which could bring the wrong kind of attention. Or he could simply install it in his living room and admire it.