By Meredith Rutland, McClatchy Newspapers –
MIAMI — When brazen thieves stole Henri Matisse’s painting “Odalisque in Red Pants,” replacing the 1925 masterpiece with a forgery, they left a Venezuelan museum with a major mystery.
This week, almost a decade after the work disappeared, FBI agents recovered it and arrested two people at the Miami Beach Loews Hotel when they tried to sell the $3 million work of art to undercover agents.
Pedro Antonio Marcuello Guzman, 46, of Miami, and Maria Martha Elisa Ornelas Lazo, 50, of Mexico City were arrested Tuesday, accused of possessing and transporting the stolen art and trying to sell it for $740,000.
“This is the stuff of movies and novels,” said Rebecca Nagy, director of the Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art in Gainesville. “Just the name is massive. (Matisse is) an artist comparable to Picasso or Monet or Rembrandt.”
Marcuelo and Ornelas made their first court appearance Wednesday in a Miami-Dade courtroom, and a detention hearing is scheduled for Friday. If convicted, they face a maximum sentence of 10 years.
In 1981, the Caracas Contemporary Art Museum paid more than $400,000 for the Matisse painting of a bare-chested woman lounging in red pants.
Matisse is known for his vibrant use of color. Odalisques — oriental-themed paintings of partially clothed women reclining, standing or sitting, usually on beds — were a popular theme for the French artist in the 1920s.
In 1997, the painting was lent to a Spanish exhibition, according to The Associated Press. After that, it remained in Caracas until it was stolen.
In 2002, the museum staff’s realized that what they thought was a multimillion-dollar painting hanging on a wall was actually a fake. Law enforcement agents around the globe had been searching for the original ever since.
At the time, Caracas museum director Rita Salvestrini said she suspected it was an inside job.
“You can’t just make the switch freely inside the museum,” she said. “There had to be inside complicity.”
The forgery hanging in the gallery had extra shadows and a missing green stripe.
The theft, coupled with public vandalism of prized Venezuelan art and the government replacing longtime art directors with politicians’ friends, sparked an uproar in the artistic community against the country’s president, Hugo Chavez. Art lovers accused him of neglecting the country’s artistic patrimony, according to Rutgers University assistant professor Tatiana Flores, who specializes in 20th century Latin American and contemporary art
“The theft of the Matisse was one of many events that made people feel outraged at the state of art under Chavez,” she said. “The impact was really quite stunning.”
The artistic landscape started to shift as art lovers boycotted museums led by Chavez’s sympathizers in favor of newly created galleries, some of which remain popular today, Flores said.
The FBI offered few details of the painting’s investigation and recovery.
The Matisse was thought to have been taken by a Venezuelan woman who lived in Miami Beach, according to an Associated Press report after the theft. She is thought to have taken the piece to Fortress Art Storage in Miami, then smuggled it to Spain.
The woman was not named.
In the Wednesday announcement by U.S. Attorney Wifredo A. Ferrer, officials said Ornelas flew into Miami International Airport from Mexico City on Monday carrying a red tube with the painting rolled up inside.
The two later met up with who they thought were buyers, but who actually were undercover agents, at the Loews, according to WPLG-ABC 10. After the sale was arranged, agents arrested Ornelas and Marcuello, according to the FBI.
