Pablo Picasso: Artist . . . and Thief?

A beautiful 400-year-old painting was missing, and the French police were baffled. They closed the borders, searched vehicles, and followed every lead, but the artwork they were searching for—the Mona Lisa, Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece—remained just out of their grasp. 

The revered painting disappeared from Paris’s Louvre Museum in August 1911. Until then, the artwork, known as La Joconde in French, hung from a simple hook on a wall. Only 150 guards oversaw more than 250,000 priceless works of art in the museum. It was an art thief’s dream. 

Media coverage of the theft quickly became an international sensation, and the world watched, aghast, as the investigation dragged on. Finally, eight days after the painting’s disappearance, the police got a surprising tip from a known art thief named Joseph Géry Pieret. 

Pieret hadn’t taken the Mona Lisa himself, but he thought he knew who might have it: a promising young painter named Pablo Picasso and his friend, the poet Guillaume Apollinaire. Pieret claimed that Picasso had purchased two Iberian statuettes that Pieret had himself stolen from the Louvre sometime before. 

The thief was telling the truth; in fact, Picasso and Apollinaire, alarmed by the media coverage of the Mona Lisa, had taken the statuettes to the river Seine to dispose of the evidence, but they couldn’t bring themselves to throw them in. Instead, Apollinaire handed over the contraband to the newspaper Paris-Journal, asking for immunity in exchange. 

The editor of the newspaper agreed, but the police had other plans. They detained Apollinaire and questioned Picasso, who denied having ever met his poet friend. Although the two men were not exactly innocent, they were cleared of any involvement in the disappearance of the Mona Lisa and were eventually released. 

Two years later, the Mona Lisa resurfaced in the possession of a museum worker named Vincenzo Peruggia, who served only seven months in prison for his crime—and Picasso’s role in the saga became a footnote in history, overshadowed by his own legendary contributions to the world of art.