Word: museume
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Part of the charm of Zurich's E.G. Bührle museum is its quiet residential neighborhood, far from the Swiss city's more crime-infested areas. But the off-the-beaten-track location didn't stop three armed thieves from pulling off what Zurich police called the most "spectacular" theft in Swiss history on Sunday, looting four of the museum's most prized paintings with an estimated value of $160 million...
...brazen heist took place at 4:30 in the afternoon, while 15 visitors strolled around three floors of the vine-covered villa. The masked thieves, including one who witnesses said spoke German with a Slavic accent, ordered the museum staff at gunpoint to lie on the floor. They then stripped the wall of the downstairs salon of four paintings, considered to be among the museum's most expensive, says the museum's curator, Lukas Gloor. The heist took less than three minutes and nobody was hurt...
...Among the stolen artworks was Cezanne's The Boy in the Red Vest, one of the favorite paintings of the museum's late founder, Swiss industrialist Emil Georg Bührle. "He considered this work the signature painting of his collection," Gloor, told TIME last year...
...museum has offered a reward of $90,000 for information leading to the paintings' recovery, a figure that, Gloor says "is much higher than is customary, but it reflects the value of the paintings and our concern about getting them back safely and quickly...
...Switzerland's art community, meanwhile, is wondering whether such a theft could have been prevented in the first place, and if so, how. "The security in our museums is very high," says David Vuillaume, secretary general of the Swiss Museums Association, pointing out that the E.G. Bührle heist was the first armed robbery perpetrated while a museum was open to public. "The question is, how do we protect museums against armed thieves, while remaining open and welcoming to the public...