11 times famous art was stolen and recovered

• Arthur Brand is known as the "Indiana Jones of the art world" for recovering hundreds of stolen pieces of art.
• A New York resident stumbled upon a $1 million stolen painting in a pile of trash on the curb.
• Two of Edvard Munch's paintings were stolen in broad daylight and recovered two years later.

Stolen art worth millions is surprisingly hard to sell on the black market. Thieves who take famous works from museums or wealthy homes mostly do it for the bragging rights.

Some pieces of famous stolen art have taken years of painstaking investigation to track down. Other long-lost pieces of artwork have mysteriously turned up in garbage piles on city streets.

Here are 11 times that priceless pieces of art have been stolen and recovered.

Dutch art detective Arthur Brand has recovered so many pieces that he's known as the "Indiana Jones of the art world."

Most recently, The New York Times reported Tuesday that Brand recovered "Portrait of Dora Maar," a 1938 painting by Pablo Picasso, that was stolen off a yacht in 1999. Brand told the Times he received a tip from "two persons with good contacts in the underworld" who dropped it off at his house wrapped in garbage bags.

Brand recovered a 1,600-year-old mosaic from the Byzantine era that had been missing for over 40 years in 2018.

Stolen from the church of Panaya Kanakaria in 1974, Brand found the mosaic in Monaco at a British family's apartment. They had bought the piece without knowing it was stolen, according to CNN.

In 2015, he helped Berlin police track down bronze horse sculptures by Josef Thorak that were commissioned by Nazis.

The sculptures were made for the courtyard of Hitler's chancellery and had been missing for years. The New York Times reports that Brand invented a Texas millionaire interested in acquiring them and wore a camera disguised as a button to meet a middleman.

The sculptures were found to be in the possession of a businessman named Rainer Wolf, who released a statement saying that "The art objects were lawfully acquired more than 25 years ago from the Russian Army and the earlier producers."