art

Fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent died Sunday at the age of 71, a half century after he rocked the fashion world as the wunderkind successor to Christian Dior.

In a career that peaked in the 1960s and 1970s, Saint Laurent produced many striking collections and pieces, including his tentlike "trapeze" dresses for Dior, his 1966 Mondrian minidress, and his opulent Russian-inspired 1976 collection. But his most important contributions were the least individually memorable -- the innovations that became so much a part of fashion that we hardly notice them. To much controversy, he took turtlenecks and leather jackets out of beatnik subculture and made them high fashion. He turned pea coats and safari jackets from utilitarian apparel into recurring expressions of style. Above all, he made pants suits normal feminine attire, neither transgressive nor intrinsically casual. When in 1970 my elementary school finally decided to let female students and teachers wear pants, we could thank Yves Saint Laurent.

Thieves stole a Cezanne, a Degas, a van Gogh, and a Monet from a private museum in Zurich Monday. Together they are worth $163 million.

The universal first reaction is to puzzle over why anyone would want to own a painting so obviously hot that it could never sell.  Personally, I easily see why.  For a thief, driving a van with $100-million of French impressionism in the back would be far more thrilling and professionally satisfying than driving a similarly valuable load of, say, stolen bearer-bonds or gold ingots.  Money is money, everywhere.  But every Econoline van full of Cezannes is unique.

Suppose, though, that the thieves do not share my love of post-Impressionism and the Ford E-Series.  Why want the paintings?  Here's one intriguing possibility.  Criminals have, in past, tried to exchange stolen works of art for lenience in sentencing for other crimes.  "I'll help you find the Rubens, if you put me in jail for five years instead of ten for robbing that bank."  This perverse incentive probably isn't at work here, but it does show how a canvas with only sentimental value to the honest might have considerable value for those who live outside the law.