Database is state of the (stolen) art

LONDON — Your Degas has disappeared. Your Van Gogh has vanished. Your Pollock has taken a powder.

Who are you going to call?

Apart from the police, you might try Julian Radcliffe.

Radcliffe is the founder and chairman of the Art Loss Register, the world's largest private database of stolen art and a central clearinghouse of information about the shadowy underworld where purloined masterpieces may linger for decades, waiting to be sold or ransomed back to their owners.

The 15-year-old register contains records of more than 175,000 stolen objects, from paintings and sculptures to jewelry and rare antiques. Since its founding in 1991, the company has been involved in the recovery of more than $138 million in purloined art, according to Radcliffe. At any given time, the staff of about 30 employees is juggling roughly 150 active cases, with the result that the register is involved in about three recoveries of stolen artwork in a typical week.

"We just found a pair of cannons on eBay -- French 18th century," Radcliffe said. "EBay is just stuffed full of stolen goods."

Several high-profile cases have put the rarefied world of art thievery in the spotlight recently. Oslo's Munch Museum is displaying two paintings by Norwegian master Edvard Munch, including his iconic "The Scream," that were recovered in August. Masked gunmen stole the paintings from the museum in broad daylight two years ago.

And, in one of the most spectacular art heists in Russia's history, a curator at St. Petersburg's famous State Hermitage Museum was implicated in July in the theft of 221 artworks valued at $5 million.

Earlier this year, the Art Loss Register played a key role in a 28-year-old case involving seven paintings valued at more than $30 million that had been stolen from the Massachusetts home of collector Michael Bakwin. After seven years of complicated, high-wire negotiations with a lawyer who claimed to have been given the paintings by a client, Radcliffe secured the return of five of the paintings, including a Cezanne in 1999 and four other paintings in January.

The Art Loss Register is more than a passive repository of information. Radcliffe, whose background is in the insurance business, frequently finds himself flying around the globe to meet with lawyers or other middlemen with knowledge about the location of stolen works.