A stolen Pablo Picasso painting has been recovered by French police during a drug bust near Paris. The work, a portrait of Picasso's companion of the late 1920s and 1930s, Marie-Thérèse Walter, was found by the Brigade des Stupéfiants (drug squad) on 15 June when they raided a house owned by the aunt of a suspected drug dealer in the town of Champigny-sur-Marne, according to Le Parisien. Officers also reportedly seized 20kg of cannabis, €200,000 worth of luxury clothes and €7,000 in cash.
The theft of the painting appeared to be “opportunistic”, a police source tells The Art Newspaper “and, as it often happens in such cases, the gang had no idea what to do with it”.
Four men appeared in court on 19 June and one of them confessed to several thefts from a storage facility in Paris where he was working as a security guard.
The painting, worth around €12m, had been authenticated by the late Claude Picasso, one of Picasso’s sons, during the process of it being sold by a Parisian dealer to a woman in Singapore, according to a source close to the investigation.
This is not the first time a Picasso work has been stolen in the French capital. In 2010, the Cubist Le pigeon aux petits pois (Dove with Green Peas, 1911), was taken—along with works by Georges Braque, Henri Matisse, Amedeo Modigliani and Fernand Léger—during a spectacular heist at Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. In 2022, two Parisian gallerists were found guilty of selling Picasso works that had been stolen from the daughters of Jacqueline Picasso and the gallerist Aimé Maeght by a handyman.