Weak finders fee? 0.5 %

[Kip Powick]

ZURICH, Switzerland – Paintings by Cezanne, Degas, van Gogh and Monet worth $163.2 MILLION have been stolen from a Zurich museum by a gang of armed roobers, Swiss police said Monday.

The robbery of the four paintings occurred Sunday at the E.G. Buehrle Collection, one of Europe's finest private museums for Impressionist and post-Impressionist art, police said.

Three masked men who entered the building with pistols were still at large.

A police statement said the three robbers, wearing ski masks and dark clothing, entered the museum a half-hour before closing time Sunday.

While one of the men used a pistol to force museum personnel to the floor, the other two went into the exhibition hall and collected the four masterpieces.

The men were about five feet, nine inches tall and one of them spoke German with a Slavic accent, the police said. They loaded the paintings into a white vehicle parked in front of the museum.

Police, asking for witnesses to come forward, said it was possible that the paintings were partly sticking out of the trunk as the robbers made their getaway.

A reward of $91,000 was offered for information leading to the recovery of the paintings – Claude Monet's "Poppy field at Vetheuil"; Edgar Degas' "Ludovic Lepic and his daughter"; Vincent van Gogh's "Blooming chestnut branches"; and Paul Cezanne's "Boy in the red waistcoat."

The FBI estimates the market for stolen art at $6 billion annually, and Interpol has about 30,000 pieces of stolen art in its database.

While only a fraction of pieces are ever found, the theft of iconic objects, especially by force, is rarer because of the intense police work that follows and because the works are so difficult to sell.

Sunday's theft came days after Swiss police reported that two Pablo Picasso paintings were stolen from an exhibition near Zurich. The two oil paintings, "Tete de cheval" (``Head of horse") and ``Verre et pichet" (``Glass and pitcher"), were on loan from the Sprengel Museum in Hannover, Germany.

In 1994, seven Picasso paintings worth an estimated $44 million were stolen from a gallery in Zurich. They were recovered in 2000, and a Swiss man and two Italians were jailed for the theft.

In the late 1980s, three armed men robbed a Zurich art gallery, making off with 21 Renaissance paintings worth hundreds of millions of dollars.