Greek police recover stolen Picasso painting, then drop it
Greece on Tuesday said it had recovered a Picasso painting personally donated by the Spanish master to the Greek people, almost a decade after it was stolen alongside two other artworks in an audacious heist at the National Gallery.
But during a subsequent press conference, officers let the
artwork — created in 1939 — drop to the floor.
Footage from the event showed the painting slide off its
perch, with an official quickly picking it up from the floor and putting it
back, with no visible damage done by the fall.
“Head of a Woman,” gifted by Pablo Picasso to Greece in
1949, was recovered in Keratea, a rural area some 45 kilometers (28 miles)
southeast of Athens, officials told the news conference.
Police said a 49-year-old builder had confessed to stealing
the artworks in 2012 and had been arrested.
The man said he had initially hidden them in a home but had
recently stashed them in thick vegetation at a local gorge.
“Today is a special day, (a day of) great joy and emotion,”
Culture Minister Lina Mendoni told reporters.
Mendoni said the painting would have been “impossible” to
sell as it had a personal inscription by Picasso on the back — “For the Greek
people, a tribute by Picasso.”
The artist had given the cubist painting to the Greek state
in recognition of the country’s resistance to Nazi Germany during a painful
1941-44 occupation.
“This painting is of particular importance and sentimental
value to the Greek people, as it was personally dedicated by the great painter
to the Greek people for their fight against fascist and Nazi forces,” Mendoni
said.
Another painting stolen in the same heist in January 2012,
‘Stammer Windmill’ by Dutch painter Piet Mondrian, was also found.
According to police sources cited by news agency ANA, the
self-confessed thief had monitored security operations at Athens’ National
Gallery, Greece’s largest state art collection, for six months previously.
The heist lasted just seven minutes. It was originally
believed that two men broke in, cutting the paintings from their frames, but
police said the suspect likely had no accomplices.
Greek media reports said police had brought the builder in
for questioning following surveillance and he confessed, showing them where he
had hidden the paintings.
The man, who is represented by one of Greece’s leading
criminal lawyers, reportedly claimed he was an art lover and did not intend to
sell the paintings.
A sketch by 16th-century Italian artist Guglielmo Caccia,
better known as Moncalvo, was also stolen in the same robbery. But state
television reported it was damaged in the heist and discarded.
Security ‘non-existent’
A state report found that the National Gallery’s security
had not been upgraded for over a decade, with the then police minister calling
safeguards “non-existent.”
Several areas in the museum were out of range of security
cameras, while the alarms were faulty and prone to ringing gratuitously. In
addition, the gallery had a reduced security presence at the time owing to a
three-day staff strike.
On the night of the heist, the burglar had set off an alarm
by manipulating an unlocked door to send the sole guard elsewhere in the
building. The guard told police he ran after one thief, who dropped another
Mondrian oil painting.
The theft, at the height of the Greek debt crisis, was
followed a few months later by another high-profile robbery of nearly 80
archaeological artifacts from a museum in Olympia dedicated to the ancient
Olympic Games. The items were recovered several months later.
The National Gallery holds a prominent collection of
post-Byzantine Greek art, as well as a small collection of Renaissance works
and some El Greco paintings. It reopened in March after an extensive renovation
that cost over 59 million euros ($70 million) and doubled its capacity.
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