It was a bit like watching a great tennis player who could win on clay one week and grass the next. In June, the thieves recruited a disgruntled security guard at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna and carried out an overnight theft of Caravaggio's David with the Head of Goliath. In July, they opted for a daring commando-style raid in Barcelona and relieved the Museu Picasso of Portrait of Senora Canals. Just one week later, the lovely Maisons a Fenouillet vanished so quietly from the walls of the Matisse Museum in Nice that bewildered French police wondered whether it had grown a pair of legs and walked out on its own. And then, on the last day of August, there was the textbook smash-and-grab job at the Courtauld Gallery in London that netted Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear by Vincent van Gogh. Total time of the operation was a stunning ninety-seven seconds—even more impressive given the fact that one of the thieves had paused on the way out a second-floor window to make an obscene gesture toward Modigliani's luscious Female Nude. By that evening, the surveillance video was required viewing on the Internet. It was, said the Courtauld's distraught director, a fitting end to a perfectly dreadful summer.

The thefts prompted a predictable round of finger-pointing over lax security at the world's museums. The Times reported that a recent internal review at the Courtauld had strongly recommended moving the Van Gogh to a more secure location. The findings had been rejected, however, because the gallery's director liked the painting exactly where it was. Not to be outdone, the Telegraph weighed in with an authoritative series on the financial woes affecting Britain's great museums. It pointed out that the National Gallery and the Tate didn't even bother to insure their collections, relying instead on security cameras and poorly paid guards to keep them safe. "We shouldn't be asking ourselves how it is great works of art disappear from museum walls," the renowned London art dealer Julian Isherwood told the newspaper. "Instead, we should be asking ourselves why it doesn't happen more often. Little by little, our cultural heritage is being plundered."