AFP reports on the theft discovered this morning at the Paris Museum of Modern Art, a masked person was caught on a surveillance camera the night before:

Five paintings worth 500 million euros, including works by modern masters Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso, have been stolen from a Paris museum, officials said Thursday. The canvases were discovered missing just before the Musee d’Art Moderne was to open, a judicial source and others familiar with the investigation said.

A broken window and a sheared-off padlock suggested that the heist took place overnight Wednesday. Video surveillance cameras recorded one person entering the museum through a window. It was unclear if more thieves were involved. The museum was kept closed for the investigation.

Besides the Matisse and the Picasso, works by Georges Braque, Ferdinand Leger and Amedeo Modigliani were also plucked from the walls of the city-run museum, one of the most-visited in the French capital. Their estimated total value was put at 500 million euros (635 million dollars).

The stolen paintings included Picasso’s cubist “Dove with Green Peas,” which the Spanish artist created in 1912, and his French contemporary Matisse’s “Pastoral” from 1905. The others were Braque’s “Olive Tree near Estaque”, Modigliani’s “Woman with a Fan” and Leger’s “Still Life with Candlestick,” according to the website of Le Parisien newspaper.

Thieves Lift €500m in Art from Paris Museum (AFP)