Five works including paintings by modern masters Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso have been stolen from a Paris museum.

The canvases – worth a total of 100 million euros ($123m) – were discovered missing from the city-run Musee d’Art Moderne when it opened its doors.

Museum officials found a broken window and a sheared-off padlock, suggesting the heist took place overnight Wednesday.

Besides the Matisse and the Picasso, works by Georges Braque, Ferdinand Leger and Amedeo Modigliani were also stolen, the officials said.

In what seemed like an art thief’s fantasy, the alarm system had been broken since March in parts of the Paris Museum of Modern Art.

“The Picasso might be worth 40 to 50 million euros, the Braque 10 to 20,” said Didier Rykner, editor of the specialist magazine The Art Tribune.

“But in any case, we’re talking about a theoretical value, they don’t have a market value, because you couldn’t openly sell them. They’re too well known.”

Though there is often speculation that works have been “stolen to order” for dishonest collectors, experts in the field say that in reality this is very unusual.

Investigators think that international criminal gangs use art works effectively as a form of currency.

For criminals dealing in drugs or weapon, a rolled up painting is away of carrying very large amounts of “currency”, even if it is one tenth of the value at auction.

Source: AFP – BBC