National Gallery - Alexandros Soutsos Museum

This guide to the National Gallery in Athens opens on a January night in 2012, when a construction worker who called himself Art Freak crawled through an unlocked balcony door after months of studying the museum's cameras and guard routines. It follows what he took, including a cubist Picasso the artist himself had given Greece in 1949 as thanks for resisting Nazi occupation, and traces the years the paintings spent missing before police finally caught up with him in 2021. He confessed at once, and told them exactly why he'd taken three works instead of the one he wanted.