The recently acquired "Girl Looking Out the Window" is the museum's first work by Edvard Munch.
Police officers carried out the original frames left behind by the burglar to search for fingerprints, passing them through the broken shards of a museum window.
"Outside the museum window was an empty space with a sign, 'You are standing on the grounds of the former torture chamber of the Gestapo,' " Mr. Nachama said.
Mr. Franceschelli said that the foundation worried that the artwork might be damaged if the roof leaked or a tree branch broke through a window or a museum visitor fell into it.
Then, on January 9th, someone tossed a vodka bottle through the rightmost window of the museum's living room, where objects like Nabokov's game of Scrabble are on display.
In nearby Sansepolcro, meanwhile, the authorities commonly leave a window of the museum open so that passersby can glimpse the master's "Resurrection of Christ" on an opposite wall.
His talent for self-promotion, which had blossomed at MOMA, helped him place a few of these objects in downtown group shows, and in 1980 Marcia Tucker, the director of the New Museum of Contemporary Art, did a small installation in the window of the museum's building, on Fifth Avenue.
One will cover the central window along the museum's south side 's south side so as to not distract from "Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue," a larger version of a piece that made its debut at Pace Wildenstein in Chelsea last year.
Others are keen-eyed chance takes on the street: two men loading a plaster Pieta onto a litter for a religious parade; a close-up of the sleek back of a fat man's neck, hairless all the way up to his too-small porkpie lid; a companionable Renoirish couple seated outside the window of a museum reflecting in spirit the painting hung directly inside.
The court heard Rist used a brick to smash a window at the museum to get in.
