In 2021, award-winning journalist Marc Fennell released the documentary series Framed, which uncovered the theft of Picasso’s The Weeping Woman from the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) in 1986 – the most expensive painting in Australia at the time. Now Fennell is back with another, even more bizarre, story that takes us to a Spanish Monastery in regional WA four decades ago, where 26 European masterpieces were slashed out of their frames.
The Mission focuses on the little-known art heist, which occurred in the mid-1980s at New Norcia Monastery in the WA Wheatbelt. With the artworks thought to be valued in the millions of dollars and from different periods, the big question was: what were these “European masterpieces” doing in a bush monastery in the first place?
