New York, NY – (NYPOST)

There was nothing artful about this crime.

A Brooklyn couple was busted trying to sell a painting stolen off the wall of a Manhattan museum to an undercover cop, authorities said.

Denis Ryjenko, 35, and his girlfriend, Natella Croussouloudis, 42, were arrested Sept. 3 as they tried to unload a small masterpiece, “Himalayas,” by the prolific early 20th-century Russian artist Nicholas Roerich. One of them even told the “buyer” the painting was hot and warned him not to hang it on his gallery wall. The $125,000 painting had disappeared along with a second work by Roerich on June 24.

The second piece — titled “Talung Monastery” and worth $70,000 — was mysteriously returned by mail to the Nicholas Roerich Museum on West 107th Street on Aug. 14. But investigators caught wind that the couple had “Himalayas” when an informant told them the pair had been showing it off in their Midwood apartment, saying they were hoping to sell it for $40,000.

The informant told the couple he would help introduce them to a buyer, who was actually an undercover officer posing as an art collector. 

On Sept. 3, Ryjenko and Croussouloudis — carrying the painting in a blue paper shopping bag — traveled to a Lower East Side Starbucks to meet with the detective, police said. While Ryjenko waited outside, Croussouloudis met with the phony collector and asked for $20,000 for the painting. She even warned him that the work of art had been stolen and that he would be unable to freely display it in his gallery, police said. 

The cop then asked her to come with him to his gallery where he would give her the money. As she and Ryjenko walked with him up Allen Street, they were arrested. A law-enforcement source said the couple denied having stolen the painting.

But Ryjenko, who has a long criminal record, pleaded guilty in Manhattan Criminal Court yesterday to criminal possession of stolen property in return for four months in jail.

“I knew it was stolen,” he told Judge Anthony Ferrara. “I didn’t know if it was real or not.”

Croussouloudis, who is a German national, according to Correction Department records, waived her appearance and was held on $20,000 bail.

The landlord of the building where the two had been living said they owed $7,500 back rent and had recently had their power and gas shut off for failure to pay their bills.

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The Dirty Diaries website outlines the feminist perspective behind the one dozen films highlighting the ways in which they challenge gender norms and empower women. The online manifesto confronts gendered norms of beauty, heterosexism and misogyny and calls for women to engage in safer sex, embrace self-pleasure and celebrate sexual diversity.

Engberg and The Swedish Film Institute defend the public financing of feminist porn as a means of revealing and exploring sexuality through a female’s perspective. The filmmaker emphasizes that unlike mainstream pornography, her work is “not made to please a male audience and it’s not made to make money.”

Not surprisingly, taxpayer funding of the Dirty Diaries series has drawn harsh criticism from conservatives. The Local, a Swedish news source, suggests that feminism has gained an undeserved special status and the funding of feminist erotica represents a saddening disrespect for public monies.

Click here to view (NSFW) clips and stills from Dirty Diaries.

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Gunther von Hagens and his wife Angelina Whalley show corpses prepared using a technique invented by von Hagens called “plastination,” that removes water from specimens and preserves them with silicon rubber or epoxy resin.

“It’s not my intention to show certain sexual poses. My goal is really to show the anatomy and the function,” Body Worlds creative director Whalley told Reuters in an interview, adding the sex exhibition may open next year.

Body Worlds exhibitions, visited by 27 million people across the world, have been criticized for presenting entire corpses, stripped of skin to reveal the muscles and organs underneath, in lifelike and often theatrical positions.

Von Hagens has already triggered uproar with a new exhibit which shows just two copulating corpses.

German politicians called the current “Cycle of Life” show charting conception to old age “revolting” and “unacceptable” when it showed in Berlin earlier this year because it included copulating cadavers.

The way a plastinate is exhibited can vary from country to country to reflect local sensibilities. A vote of local employees decided that one of the copulating female cadavers should wear fewer clothes in Zurich than was the case in Berlin.

“Switzerland is the first country that already said from the outset that we could show whatever we wanted,” said von Hagens.

“Zurich is ready … but it’s maybe not so easy in every other town,” he said. “We have discussed whether it is proper to show homosexuality and in what way. This is a very delicate subject.”

Von Hagens and Whalley said they both intended to donate their bodies for plastination, but would not leave instructions about how to display them, dismissing this as vanity.

Plastintated Human Specimen

“I find it a great opportunity to give something to others by donating my body, namely self-awareness,” said Whalley.

Von Hagens said he and some other body donors even saw plastination as an alternative to burial or cremation, giving them more certainty about would happen to their bodies after death.

“Cremation for me is hell,” he said.

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