Welcome to Criminalia, a production of Shondaland Audio in partnership with iHeartRadio.

Art Heists can often look and sound like something out of a Hollywood script.

Like one time, two thieves lifted two Van Gogh paintings from the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam,

and they entered the premises through the roof. Mission Impossible-style-ish.

Another time, two men wearing fake moustaches stole an estimated 500 million dollars in artwork

from the Gardner Museum. Welcome to a new season of Criminalia, where we're telling the stories

of, and looking at the motivations for, Art Heists throughout history. In this episode,

we're talking about five men who were brazen enough to buy tickets to a museum and pull off

an art heist in broad daylight while visitors continue to roam the galleries. I'm Maria Tramerky.

And I'm Holly Fry. Located where the Chateau de la Mouette was originally built,

the building that houses the museum, Marmoton Monet, or Marmoton, was once a mansion

belonging to Francois Christophe Edmond Kellerman, Duke of Valmy, until it was sold to the Marmoton

family in 1882. Today, the Marmoton is an art museum dedicated to French painter Claude Monet.

And Monet was a French painter and the father of the impressionist painting style,

seen as a key precursor to modernism. Not only did Monet's painting lend the movement its name,

his paintings defined the movement. Impressionism uses small, visible brushstrokes that give

just the bare impression of form, along with unblended color and an emphasis on accurate

depictions of natural light as the artist perceives it. Early impressionist artists wanted to show

their work without the approval of the French art academy, and there was a growing disinterest

among the painters in garnering recognition from any of the government-organized salons in Paris.

These were exhibitions showcasing art selected by jurors and chosen from the art academies in

the city, and it was kind of the only way to get your art seen at the time. Emperor Napoleon III

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