On March 20, burglars bypassed the alarm system at San Francisco’s Michael Rosenthal Gallery and made off with four paintings by Bay Area artist Terry Hoff. The theft was reported to local authorities, and the next day, Rosenthal got a call: A man had apparently purchased the four paintings out a van for a total of $1,000.

“They all need to be repaired, but they're repairable,” Rosenthal said of the returned paintings in a report published in the San Francisco Chronicle. “The police had stacked them face-to-face. I guess they thought that was the best way.”

Before the paintings were found, the motive for the crime puzzled investigators. At $12,000, Hoff’s paintings are not exceptionally valuable. His abstract surrealism is distinctive and hard to pass off as work by a higher-priced painter. And while the thieves made off with four large-scale paintings, they left behind several other works by the artist that would have been easier to carry, without showing any signs that they left in a rush.

Now that the paintings have been recovered, it still unclear what Hoff’s show will look like. “There are enough pieces here to go on with the show even if we replace the stolen ones,” Rosenthal said. “I’m waiting for Terry to come down and decide what to do. I'd encourage him to hang the stolen paintings again with a little explanation of the story. They're the world's most famous paintings right now.”