“Le pigeon aux petits pois” by Pablo Picasso: Stolen on May 20, 2010

Picasso: Le pigeon aux petits loi. Stolen, 2010. by Travis Simpkins

“Le pigeon aux petits pois” by Pablo Picasso: Stolen on May 20, 2010

by Travis Simpkins

The Painting:

     Painted in rich tones of ochre and brown, Le pigeon aux petits pois or The Pigeon with Green Peas exudes a palpable warmth. The 26x21 oil on canvas was conceived in 1911, while Picasso was in the creative throes of his Cubist period. Bold strokes and sharp lines deconstruct the subject, presumably of a pigeon making plans to swipe some peas outside of a Parisian café. In cubism, subjects are visually analyzed, taken apart and reassembled in abstract form. The theoretical essence of Cubism is that instead of being relegated to a single focused viewpoint, a subject can be seen from all sides simultaneously, placing it in a greater context. Picasso utilized this innovative style from about 1908-1912.

The Theft:

     On May 20, 2010, a lone thief pulled off one of the biggest art thefts in history. Five works, valued at upwards of €100m, were stolen from the Musée d'Art Moderne in Paris. The filched paintings were well-known works by top-tier artists: Picasso, Modigliani, Matisse, Leger and Braque.

Lax security and careless blunders were largely to blame for the success of the heist. It was discovered that the paintings were gone around 7:00 a.m. The three guards on duty that night were dumbfounded, telling investigators that they “saw nothing.” A closer look at the museum's security system and the events of that shift painted an unsettling picture. Inspection of the security alarms revealed that the motion detectors that covered the area in which the theft took place had been non-functional for nearly two months, since March 30. The alarms points were malfunctioning, causing false alarms, and the management decided to disable them to alleviate their frustration. Spare parts to make repairs had been ordered, but had not arrived yet.

     On the night of May 20, all of the exterior CCTV cameras were focused towards the roof of the building, leaving the guards blind to street level activity. At about 4:00 a.m., the thief sheared a padlock and smashed through a first floor window to gain entry to the Musée d'Art Moderne. Once inside, the masked “burly” thief passed by an array of interior CCTV cameras, which nicely recorded his nonchalant movements as he perpetrated the crime. The thief spent about 15 minutes removing the five canvases from their frames, and he placed them all together in a large single bundle before exiting from the same window. French investigators theorize that the guards were sleeping, or otherwise distracted, in order to have missed the entire crime playing out on their monitors. The Brigade de Répression du Banditisme believes that the thief acted alone.

     In 2011, a suspect told police that he had thrown the five paintings in the garbage and that they were destroyed by a trash compactor. However, this claim is unsubstantiated.

      The five masterpieces are unsellable and have not been recovered.

French Police investigate the 2010 Paris Museum of Modern Art Heist

The 5 Stolen Masterpieces. Paris Museum of Modern Art

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LCS News: Stolen Cavalier. Picasso. Travis Simpkins

Read the full feature at LCS HERE:

Stolen Cavalier: Picasso's Mother and Child- Stolen, Recovered and Lost Again

"The Lost Painting" by Jonathan Harr (2005)

     An astounding read, entertaining and well-written, offering great insights into research and conservation...

The Taking of Christ. by Caravaggio

     "An Italian village on a hilltop near the Adriatic coast, a decaying palazzo facing the sea, and in the basement, cobwebbed and dusty, lit by a single bulb, an archive unknown to scholars. Here, a young graduate student from Rome, Francesca Cappelletti, makes a discovery that inspires a search for a work of art of incalculable value, a painting lost for almost two centuries.
     The artist was Caravaggio, a master of the Italian Baroque. He was a genius, a revolutionary painter, and a man beset by personal demons. Four hundred years ago, he drank and brawled in the taverns and streets of Rome, moving from one rooming house to another, constantly in and out of jail, all the while painting works of transcendent emotional and visual power. He rose from obscurity to fame and wealth, but success didn’t alter his violent temperament. His rage finally led him to commit murder, forcing him to flee Rome a hunted man. He died young, alone, and under strange circumstances.
     Caravaggio scholars estimate that between sixty and eighty of his works are in existence today. Many others–no one knows the precise number–have been lost to time. Somewhere, surely, a masterpiece lies forgotten in a storeroom, or in a small parish church, or hanging above a fireplace, mistaken for a mere copy.
     Prizewinning author Jonathan Harr embarks on an spellbinding journey to discover the long-lost painting known as The Taking of Christ–its mysterious fate and the circumstances of its disappearance have captivated Caravaggio devotees for years. After Francesca Cappelletti stumbles across a clue in that dusty archive, she tracks the painting across a continent and hundreds of years of history. But it is not until she meets Sergio Benedetti, an art restorer working in Ireland, that she finally manages to assemble all the pieces of the puzzle.
     Told with consummate skill by the writer of the bestselling, award-winning A Civil Action, The Lost Painting is a remarkable synthesis of history and detective story. The fascinating details of Caravaggio’s strange, turbulent career and the astonishing beauty of his work come to life in these pages. Harr’s account is not unlike a Caravaggio painting: vivid, deftly wrought, and enthralling."

-amazon.com


". . . Jonathan Harr has gone to the trouble of writing what will probably be a bestseller . . . rich and wonderful. . .in truth, the book reads better than a thriller because, unlike a lot of best-selling nonfiction authors who write in a more or less novelistic vein (Harr's previous book, A Civil Action, was made into a John Travolta movie), Harr doesn't plump up hi tale. He almost never foreshadows, doesn't implausibly reconstruct entire conversations and rarely throws in litanies of clearly conjectured or imagined details just for color's sake. . .if you're a sucker for Rome, and for dusk. . .[you'll] enjoy Harr's more clearly reported details about life in the city, as when--one of my favorite moments in the whole book--Francesca and another young colleague try to calm their nerves before a crucial meeting with a forbidding professor by eating gelato. And who wouldn't in Italy? The pleasures of travelogue here are incidental but not inconsiderable." --The New York Times Book Review

Francesca Cappelletti