The Golden Toilet

At approximately 4:47 in the morning on Saturday 14 September 2019, two vehicles entered the grounds of Blenheim Palace, the Oxfordshire stately home where Winston Churchill was born. A small group of men forced an entry through a window. Five hours after the building had opened to the public for an unusual exhibition, they walked out with a hundred-kilogram artwork strapped between them, leaving the building's water mains streaming through the floor.

The artwork was a fully functional solid gold toilet, valued at £4.8 million. It would never be recovered.

The exhibition

The piece was titled America, by the Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan. It had been cast in 18-carat gold as a single working bathroom fixture and first installed at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 2016, where over a hundred thousand visitors used it during its display run. Cattelan had described the piece as a satire on excess — a working luxury toilet that any visitor, regardless of class or means, could sit on.

Blenheim Palace, the seat of the Dukes of Marlborough, agreed to install the piece as part of a curated exhibition opening on 12 September 2019. The installation was carried out by professional plumbers two days before opening. The toilet was connected to the building's live water supply. It functioned as designed. By the morning of Friday 13 September, members of the public had begun queuing.

By the morning of Saturday 14 September, the piece was gone.

The theft

Thames Valley Police's later reconstruction of the operation indicated a small team that had visited the palace as paying members of the public during the previous days, measuring access points and timing the route. They forced an entry through a window in the early hours, moved directly to the bathroom housing America, and used crowbars to lever the piece out of the wall. The water connection was live throughout. The piece weighed over a hundred kilograms — the team carried it out as a single load.

The water continued to run. From the disconnected supply pipes, through the floor of the bathroom, into the room below, through that ceiling and into the room beneath that. Damage to the historic floorboards and the painted ceilings of the palace was extensive and would take months to remediate. By the time staff arrived for the day shift and discovered the bathroom flooded and the piece missing, the vehicles had been gone for several hours.

Melted

The Crown Prosecution Service's case at trial was that the piece had not been stolen for resale as an artwork. The CPS argued that the team had no realistic ability to fence a uniquely identifiable £4.8 million art object — every gallery, every dealer, and every auction house in the world would have known the piece on sight. They had instead, the prosecution argued, intended only the gold.

A solid-gold toilet is, in functional terms, a hundred kilograms of pure gold. Gold of that purity can be melted in a high-temperature furnace within an hour and processed into ingots within a day. The melt value of America, at September 2019 spot prices, was approximately £4.5 million. The CPS argued the piece had been broken up and melted within forty-eight hours of the theft and the gold sold across multiple buyers in the unregulated end of the bullion market within a week. None of the gold has ever been traced.

The trial

The investigation was extensive and slow. Arrests followed in the months after the theft. The trial concluded at Oxford Crown Court in March 2024, almost five years later. James Sheen pleaded guilty to burglary and to conspiracy to transfer criminal property and was identified by the court as the operation's leader. Michael Jones was convicted of burglary. Fred Doe was convicted of conspiracy to transfer criminal property. A fourth defendant, Bora Guccuk, was acquitted. Custodial sentences followed. The court accepted the prosecution case that the artwork no longer existed.

The artwork that was about exactly this

What stays with anyone reading the case file is the literalness with which Cattelan's thesis was demonstrated. America was, on its own terms, a piece about how art and capital and excess can be reduced, on inspection, to pure gold weighed by the kilogram — about how a Renaissance altarpiece and a luxury commodity, looked at in a certain way, are different costumes worn by the same idea.

And then a small group of men, having understood none of this, arrived at five in the morning, pulled the artwork out of the wall, destroyed the artwork, and converted it back into pure gold. Which they sold by weight. The piece was, in the most precise sense possible, about exactly what they did to it. They proved its thesis. And in proving it, they ended it.

Cattelan, asked for comment at the time of the theft, replied with the kind of dryness that is characteristic of him. He said something close to: I always liked Robin Hood, and I admire thieves who have a sense of humour. He has not produced another version. America, the artwork, was unique. It is now, definitionally, gone.

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Listen to the full story on The Vault, Episode 6. Stream the episode here.