The Art Thief
By Emma Cleary
Buenos Aires
They told us to “immerse ourselves in local culture,” but I don’t think this is what NYU had in mind.
It started innocently—like most crimes do. I was a college junior, studying abroad in Buenos Aires. Supposed to be brushing up on my Spanish and writing a paper about Latin American modernism. Instead, I ended up sitting cross-legged in a cramped Palermo loft, staring at blueprints of the Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires (MALBA), while a man with a neck tattoo and a very charming smile poured me mate and explained how we were going to steal a Frida Kahlo.
To be clear: I didn’t mean to get involved in an art heist. I just wanted to impress Camila.
She was in my Latin American Cinema class—Argentine, confident, and allergic to small talk. We met during a screening of La Historia Oficial when we both reached for the same overpriced alfajor at intermission. I liked her immediately. She liked Frida Kahlo. Things escalated.
One night, while sipping fernet and Coke on her rooftop, she said, “You want to see something real?” I said yes.
That’s how I ended up in the loft with her cousin Julián, who was equal parts con artist, painter, and adrenaline junkie. He’d been kicked out of the Universidad de las Artes for “conceptual theft.” Whatever that means.
The plan was wild. Beautiful, even.
MALBA had just unveiled Autorretrato con Collar de Espinas, one of Frida’s lesser-known self-portraits, on loan from Mexico City. The security was tight, but nothing insane. Julián’s ex-girlfriend worked in exhibit maintenance and, allegedly, still loved him. Camila and I would pose as visiting art students doing a documentary on museum lighting. We’d distract the guards while Julián and his crew—three failed MFA students and a magician—slipped in through a service door disguised as caterers. I wish I were making this up.
My job? Narrate the fake documentary while filming Camila awkwardly pointing at bulbs. Every now and then I had to say things like “the diffusion of natural light across post-surrealist brushwork” with a straight face.
We rehearsed for a week. The crew even made a replica of the painting using old canvas, coffee grounds, and beet juice. I’ve never respected a forgery more.
The day of the heist, everything felt like a dream directed by Wes Anderson’s criminal cousin. We wore all black, carried around clipboards, and said “we have clearance from Belén” a lot. Camila was stunning in her seriousness. I kept forgetting my lines. At one point I nearly blew the whole thing because I got distracted by a Diego Rivera across the room and said, “Damn, that’s thick,” too loud. A guard glared at me. Camila whispered, “Focus.”
Then, right on cue, the power flickered. Just for a second. Just long enough.
In that instant, Julián’s crew swapped the real Frida with the fake. A clean switch. No alarms. No glass shattering. Just sleight of hand and too much confidence.
We walked out like nothing happened. I even waved to the guard on the way out and said, “¡Lindo día, no?”
That night, we all met back at the loft. The painting sat in the center of the room like a guilty jewel. Julián kissed it. The magician cried. Camila poured champagne and offered me a toast “to history.”
But when I asked what they were going to do with the painting, Julián just smiled and said, “We’re going to give it back.”
“What?”
“Well, not really,” he said. “We’re going to sneak it back into MALBA in a month. Just to prove we could.”
I left the next morning.
I never saw Camila again. Never found out if they pulled off the reverse heist. But a week later, an anonymous letter arrived at my host family's apartment. No return address. Just a photo of the Frida—real or fake, I couldn’t tell—with a handwritten message:
“To live in Argentina is to flirt with chaos. Thank you for dancing.”
–C.
I pinned it to my dorm wall next to my bus card and a fading photo of Palermo Soho at night.
And that was the story I almost put in my study abroad blog.
But instead, I just wrote about empanadas.
