This Tiny Picasso Painting Went Missing While Traveling to an Exhibition in Spain
A few days before “Still Life With Guitar” was supposed to go on display in Granada, staffers discovered the piece had vanished from a group of artworks that had recently arrived by truck
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A postcard-sized Pablo Picasso painting has gone missing in Spain. Titled Still Life With Guitar, the 1919 gouache artwork disappeared while being transported from Madrid to Granada for a temporary exhibition.
Still Life With Guitar was scheduled to be displayed in the CajaGranada Cultural Center’s exhibition, “Still Life: The Eternity of the Inert,” which opened on October 9. A week beforehand, a truck full of nearly 60 loaned artworks—supposedly including the Picasso piece—arrived at the center from Madrid. However, the paintings weren’t unboxed that day.
Nobody realized that Still Life With Guitar was missing until October 6, when organizers started unpacking the crates.
“As not all packages were properly numbered, it was not possible to carry out a thorough check without unpacking them,” says the foundation, per Reuters’ Romolo Tosiani.
The Picasso artwork depicts an abstract indoor scene of a guitar lying on a table. Measuring about five by four inches, it’s owned by a private collector and insured for a value of roughly $700,000.
Fun fact: How prolific was Picasso?
The Spanish artist created more than 20,000 paintings, sculptures, drawings, ceramics and other artworks during his lifetime.
The CajaGranada Foundation contacted Spain’s national police force, which is now looking into the case. According to the foundation, security footage shows that “no incident occurred” during the weekend before the artworks were unpacked.
“An investigation is currently underway, and the investigation is attempting to determine when and where the painting disappeared,” say the Granada police in a statement to CNN’s Amarachi Orie.
The Andalusian city of Granada is located more than 200 miles south of Madrid. According to El País’ Javier Arroyo, driving from Madrid to Granada takes about four hours by car. Police say the art transport vehicle stopped overnight in Deifontes, about 17 miles from its final destination, and that transporters took turns keeping watch over the truck. They finished their journey the next day.
Despite the missing painting, the exhibition opened on schedule. “Still Life: The Eternity of the Inert” features more than 50 still lifes from the 17th and 20th centuries—two eras that were pivotal for the genre, per the CajaGranada Cultural Center. Featured artists include Juan Gris and Fernando Botero.
Picasso’s Still Life With Guitar is only the latest of the Guernica painter’s works to go missing. In 1999, his Portrait of Dora Maar (1938) was stolen from a yacht, and it was recovered 20 years later. Picasso’s Head of a Woman (1939) was taken from the National Gallery in Athens in 2012 and recovered in 2021.
The Spanish artist’s paintings have sold for exorbitant prices in recent decades, regularly fetching millions at auction. To date, the most expensive Picasso painting ever sold is The Women of Algiers (Version ‘O’) (1955), which went for $179.4 million in 2015.
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