Early Tuesday morning, at around 2:45 a.m., a patron of the Dream Downtown hotel in Chelsea helped themselves to one of the items of an upstairs lobby exhibit by street artist Bradley Theodore. A fanciful portrait (pictured) of Diana Vreeland, who was the editor in chief of Vogue magazine from 1962 to 1971.
Roughly 16 hours later, the painting was returned to the hotel, via messenger. From the Page Six item:
“He [the thief] was ballin’ at PHD and jacked my painting at the end of the night! Those drinks ain’t cheap,” Theodore said.
The Daily News “Exclusive” beat the Post Tuesday night by nine time-stamp minutes, suggesting that both papers were simultaneously working on their reports. In the Daily News item, artist Theodore has more lively quote reaction, like this on:
“They’re not stealing from me, they’re stealing from the people of New York City that want to go and see my work and actually see the actual canvas pieces, as opposed to my street art.”
Did the thief sober up and realize the error of his drunken ways? Apparently, he paid for his bar tab with a credit card and was caught on camera, so we should soon be learning the rest of this story.
Check out more of Theodore’s work here.
