‘Amateurish’ thieves damage Warhol prints in botched heist at Dutch gallery

A screen print depicting Queen Elizabeth II similar to a Warhol work stolen from a gallery on Friday (Peter Dejong/AP)

Thieves blew open the door of an art gallery in the Netherlands and stole two works from a series of screen prints by American pop artist Andy Warhol, but left two more badly damaged in the street as they fled the scene of the botched heist, the gallery owner said on Friday.

Mark Peet Visser said the thieves attempted to steal all four works from a 1985 Warhol series called Reigning Queens, which features portraits of the then-queens of the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Denmark and what was then known as Swaziland but is now Eswatini.