By Katie Reid
ZURICH (Reuters) - Masked robbers brandishing handgunsstole four paintings by 19th Century masters worth $164 million(84 million pounds) from a Zurich museum in Switzerland'sbiggest art theft, police said on Monday.
Oil paintings by Cezanne, Degas, van Gogh and Monet werestolen in broad daylight on Sunday from the private BuehrleCollection in the second dramatic art theft in the area withindays.
"This is the biggest robbery in Switzerland in an artmuseum and one of the biggest art robberies in Europe," saidPeter Rueegger, head of investigations for the Zurich police.
Three men in dark clothing and masks, one of whom spokeGerman with a Slavic accent, forced their way into the museumand made off with the paintings in a white car, police said.
A reward of 100,000 Swiss francs was on offer forinformation leading to their arrest, police added.
Rueegger said the Zurich robbery could be compared to thetheft of Norwegian artist Edvard Munch's "The Scream" from theMunch Museum in Oslo nearly four years ago. That work wasrecovered in 2006.
The robbery in Switzerland's financial capital follows thetheft of two Picasso paintings -- Tete de Cheval, from 1962,and Verre et Pichet, from 1944 -- from a nearby cultural centrelast week.
They said it was possible a white vehicle had also played arole in this incident and that they would investigate whetherthe two thefts were connected.
The four paintings stolen were Cezanne's The Boy in the RedVest from 1890, Degas' Viscount Lepic and His Daughters from1871, Monet's Poppies Near Vetheuil from 1880 and Van Gogh'sBlossoming Chestnut Branches from 1890, police said.
"THE BOY IN THE RED VEST"
The Boy in the Red Vest was the museum's most valuablepainting, said Lukas Gloor, curator of the collection at themuseum.
"I am devastated. We had done everything we could toprotect the paintings to the best of our knowledge andcapability," Gloor said.
Police raised the value of the paintings to 180 millionSwiss francs (84 million pounds) after initially saying thepaintings were valued at 100 million francs.
The Sunday theft occurred at the impressionist collectionamassed by the late Swiss industrialist Emil Buehrle -- one ofthe most controversial business figures of his time for sellinganti-aircraft guns to Nazi Germany during World War Two.
The Buehrle Collection, positioned near Zurich's wealthyGold Coast chain of lakeside suburbs, boasts one of the mostimportant assemblies of French impressionism andpost-impressionism, according to its Web site www.buehrle.ch.
Buehrle collected the paintings, housed in a gated villa onthe outskirts of Zurich, between 1951 and his death in 1956,according to the Web site.
The stolen Picassos, which are valued in media reports ataround $4.5 million, were on loan from the Sprengel Museum inHannover.
Police told Reuters they had no concrete leads on thePicasso theft and that the investigation was ongoing.
(Reporting by Katie Reid and Andrew Hurst; Writing byThomas Atkins; Editing by Charles Dick)
