High profile art thefts

In the past 20 years, the world art market has seen the prices of expressionist, impressionist and other art works soar. Higher prices have prompted a raft of high profile art thefts, including yesterday's robbery of a version of Norwegian expressionist Edvard Munch's iconic masterpiece The Scream and Madonna from an Oslo museum. Some paintings were recovered while the status of others remains unknown. Here is a list of famous paintings stolen in recent years.

November 1985 - Paintings by French artists Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Berthe Morisot are stolen from the Marmottan Museum in Paris. Together they were valued at more than 37 million dollars.

December 1988 - Thieves escape with three works by Van Gogh worth around 100 million dollars from the Kroeller-Mueller Museum in the Netherlands. All the paintings are recovered.

March 1990 - Thieves disguised as police steal hundreds of millions of dollars worth of European masterpieces from Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in the United States.

April 1991 - In the world's biggest art robbery, 20 paintings, estimated to be worth $500 million, are stolen from the Vincent Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. They are found shortly after in an abandoned car not far from the museum.

November 1993 - Eight works by Picasso and French cubist Georges Braque are stolen from Stockholm's Modern Museum. The thieves escaped with art work valued at $60 million. Some of the paintings are recovered in the following months.

February 1994 - A version of Norwegian artist Edvard Munch's The Scream is stolen from Norway's National Gallery. It was retrieved several months later and remains in that gallery.

May 1998 - Two priceless paintings by Vincent Van Gogh and one by Paul Cezanne are stolen by masked gunmen from a Rome museum. They are found a few weeks later.

December 22, 2001 - Conversation and A Young Parisienne by French impressionist Pierre-August Renoir and a self portrait by Dutch master Rembrandt, valued at $30 million, are stolen from Stockholm's National Museum. Conversation is recovered the following April.

December 7, 2002 - Thieves disappeared with two Vincent Van Gogh oil paintings - Congregation Leaving the Reformed Church in Nuenen and View of the Sea at Scheveningen - from the Vincent Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. The works have not been recovered.