Stolen Dalí Drawing Is Mysteriously Returned

A $150,000 drawing by the Surrealist artist Salvador Dalí that was stolen from a Manhattan gallery last week was sent back to New York from Europe by Express Mail, the United States Postal Inspection Service said Friday. Postal inspectors intercepted it at Kennedy International Airport before it was sorted for delivery, said Donna Harris, a spokeswoman for the inspection service. The 11-by-14-inch drawing, “Cartel de Don Juan Tenorio,” was taken from the month-old gallery Venus Over Manhattan on June 19 by a thief in a checkered shirt who strolled in with a shopping bag and strolled out with the Dalí. He apparently simply lifted it off the wall of the gallery, at 980 Madison Avenue, near East 77th Street. It had been hanging alongside more than a dozen other works in the gallery’s first exhibition, “A Rebours.” Also in the exhibition were a portrait of the American Indian activist Russell Means by Andy Warhol and a painting called “I Left My Heart at Wounded Knee” by Llyn Folkes, both from the 1970s, and older works like “Des Esseintes” by the French painter Odilon Redon (1888) and “Fairy Mab” by the Swiss-born British artist Henry Fuseli (1793). The police released surveillance images last week showing the thief in the checkered shirt. “There was a security guard standing right there,” the gallery’s owner, Adam Lindemann, said at the time, “so how you don’t see a young, sweaty guy with a shopping bag I don’t understand.” He also wondered, “What do you do with a stolen drawing by Dalí?” Ms. Harris said Friday that the answer to that question apparently turned out to be, not much. Typically, she said, art thieves cannot sell stolen paintings “because they’re hot.” She said there had been no arrests in the case. She said the gallery received an e-mail earlier in the week that said the drawing, “Cartel de Don Juan Tenorio,” had been sent back. The e-mail included an Express Mail tracking number. She said the gallery had told the police, and detectives had contacted the inspection service, which retrieved the package at the airport. The return of the drawing was reported online by The New York Post on Friday afternoon. A woman who answered the telephone at Venus Over Manhattan said the gallery would not comment. Mr. Lindemann, an art collector and writer who said last week that the gallery was cooperating with the police, did not return calls to his home telephone on Friday night.