HIBAPRESS – Agencies
The Spanish police have recovered a painting by the international artist Pablo Picasso, which was lost at the beginning of October while being transported from the capital, Madrid, to the city of Granada to participate in a temporary exhibition.
It turned out that the painting, which is titled "Still Life with Guitar," did not leave the building from which it was scheduled to be shipped. The painting dates back to 1919 and is a small work drawn with gouache and pencil, and its value is estimated at about 600,000 euros. It was part of a shipment that included dozens of artworks sent by the Caja Granada Foundation to organize its new exhibition entitled "Still Life: Eternity of Stillness." The story began on October 3, when the truck carrying the paintings arrived in Granada, and the organizers discovered after unloading the boxes that the number of paintings was only 57 instead of 58. The foundation informed the police about the disappearance of the painting after reviewing surveillance recordings. After three weeks of searching, the painting was found in Madrid with a neighbor who had found the package in front of the shipping building and thought it was a forgotten package, so she kept it in a safe place until she learned from the news about the disappearance of a Picasso painting, and later contacted the police and returned it. In a post on the X platform, the Spanish police explained that preliminary investigations indicate that the painting was not loaded onto the truck in the first place. She pointed out that the Historical Heritage Unit continued the investigation in cooperation with experts who took on the task of examining materials and evidence. For its part, the Caja Granada Foundation said that some works were carefully wrapped but not numbered correctly, which complicated the verification process during shipping. Despite the incident, the foundation expressed its keenness to display the painting on its scheduled date within the exhibition after its official recovery. Picasso is one of the artists whose works have been targeted for theft around the world, as several of his paintings were stolen in various incidents during the past decades, including the theft of two paintings from his granddaughter's house in Paris in 2007 worth 50 million euros, and another from a museum dedicated to him in the French capital two years later.
