Dalí’s bronze cover stolen in France: 150 kilograms of bronze vanish from art centre in Issoire

On the night between Sunday 4 and Monday 5 October, the bronze cover of the unique book «L’Apocalypse de Saint-Jean» — sculpted by Salvador Dalí for the Auvergne art publisher Joseph Forêt, who had commissioned it in the late 1950s — was stolen from the contemporary art centre in Issoire, in the Puy-de-Dôme department, as Le Figaro reports. The owner of the work, collector Christian Karoutzos, discovered the theft on Monday at midday: one of the building’s large doors, on the outskirts of the town, had been broken. The piece weighs around 150 kilograms and is valued at «several million euros».

The book’s pages were saved — they were kept elsewhere, in a safe. Only the cover was on display, and it was due to stay in Issoire until the end of October. The Clermont-Ferrand prosecutor’s office describes the work as «a work of art of great value», «an extraordinary and unique piece», and the investigation has been entrusted to the research section. The cover is adorned with gold and precious stones, but Dalí also placed unusual elements on it — seashells and forks.

The book was conceived in 1959 by Forêt and produced over three years in a single copy, according to Wikipedia: 150 parchment leaves measuring 65×75 cm under the bronze cover, with a total weight of 210 kilograms — the heaviest book in the world. The text of the Apocalypse of Saint John is illustrated with three paintings each by seven painters from different tendencies of modern art — Dalí, Georges Mathieu, Bernard Buffet, Leonor Fini, Léonard Foujita, Pierre-Yves Trémois and Ossip Zadkine — while seven writers, among them Jean Cocteau, Jean Giono and Emil Cioran, wrote commentaries and meditations on the apostle’s text.

The bronze, as the collector explained this summer, «has never held anything inside»: it symbolises the book, whose leaves remained loose, and Forêt had even built «a machine to turn» the pages. The work, once presented as the most expensive and heaviest book in the world — once valued at 100 million old francs, according to caro-kann.fr — was exhibited around the world from 1961 for a decade, was bought in Switzerland and then in Japan, before collector Karoutzos brought it back to France.