Picasso painting goes missing en route to exhibition
By Amarachi Orie, CNN
(CNN) — Spanish police are investigating the disappearance of a painting by Pablo Picasso after it apparently vanished on the way to an exhibition.
The 1919 gouache work “Still Life with Guitar,” which measures just 12.7 centimeters by 9.8 centimeters (5 inches x 3.9 inches), was supposed go on display from October 9, as part of a temporary exhibition at CajaGranada Cultural Center in the southern Spanish city of Granada.
The work is owned by a private collector and was insured for an estimated 600,000 euros ($700,000), the CajaGranada Foundation, which owns the cultural center, confirmed to Reuters Friday.
The Friday before the exhibition was due to open, a van belonging to a transportation company arrived at the cultural center as scheduled to deliver works from Madrid, CajaGranada Foundation said in a press statement Thursday.
All the works were moved in a single, continuous movement from the van to a freight elevator that took all the transportation company employees at once from floor -1 to floor 1, the center said.
The items were then transferred from the elevator to the exhibition hall under video surveillance, according to the statement.
After verifying the origins of the different packages, the exhibition manager agreed with the transportation company that the delivery would be signed for, ahead of the unpackaging of the pieces the following Monday.
The packages remained under video surveillance at all time over the weekend, and the unpacking began at 8:30 a.m. on Monday, according to the center.
The recordings have been checked and no incidents occurred over the weekend, it said.
By mid-morning, the CajaGranada Foundation staff had finished unpacking the works and had positioned them in the room.
This is when the exhibition curator and head of exhibitions realized Picasso’s “Still Life with Guitar,” known by its Spanish title as “Naturaleza muerta con guitarra,” was missing.
The foundation then reported the missing work to the police, according to the statement.
The video recordings from the weekend were checked and no incidents had occurred, it said.
“An investigation is currently underway, and the investigation is attempting to determine when and where the painting disappeared,” Granada police said in a statement to CNN on Friday.
The police said the missing work has been added to the international database of stolen artworks but noted that there is no international police cooperation currently being carried out from Granada.
Thieves have often targeted Picasso’s paintings, which have fetched up to $179 million at auction.
In 2019, a Dutch art detective recovered Picasso’s 1938 masterpiece “Portrait of Dora Maar,” worth $28 million, 20 years after it was stolen from the yacht of a Saudi sheikh off the south coast of France.
In 2021, Greek police recovered Picasso’s “Head of a Woman” and Piet Mondrian’s “Landscape with a Mill” almost a decade after they were taken in a daring heist at the National Art Gallery in Athens.
And last year, Belgian police found Picasso’s stolen painting “Tête” in a basement in the city of Antwerp.
The-CNN-Wire
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Oscar Holland contributed to this report.
