It should have been a stomach-dropping second. The exhibition group on the CajaGranada Cultural Middle started unboxing dozens of artworks—rigorously packed, freshly arrived from Madrid—solely to find that Pablo Picasso’s Still Life with Guitar was… gone.
The four-by-five-inch portray, no greater than a postcard, belongs to a non-public collector. It was set to be a part of the middle’s new present, Still Life: The Eternity of the Inert, which opened on October 9. The piece is insured for round $700,000, however its worth goes far past the value tag.
The vanishing act of the lacking Picasso
The work, painted by Picasso in 1919, was supposedly loaded onto a truck in Madrid alongside about 60 different borrowed items certain for Granada. The journey ought to have been easy—a four-hour drive south. However someplace between the capital and the shadow of the Alhambra Palace, the Picasso disappeared.
When the truck lastly reached Granada, it wasn’t unloaded instantly. It sat untouched till October 6, when organizers started unpacking the crates and realized one was lacking.
“As not all packages had been correctly numbered, it was not attainable to hold out a radical test with out unpacking them,” the muse stated, in response to Reuters’ Romolo Tosiani.
Including to the thriller, the truck didn’t journey straight by means of. The drivers stopped in a single day within the small city of Deifontes, about 17 miles from their ultimate vacation spot. Police say the transporters took turns watching the automobile and seen nothing suspicious.
Now investigators are retracing the truck’s route, attempting to find out when and the place the portray vanished. Granada police confirmed the continuing investigation in an announcement to CNN’s Amarachi Orie.
The present goes on
Even with out the Picasso, the exhibition opened as deliberate. Admission is free, and the galleries nonetheless characteristic a placing lineup of nonetheless lifes from the seventeenth to twentieth centuries, together with works by Juan van der Hamen, Juan Gris, Fernando Botero, and Antonio López.
Nonetheless life, many guitars
Juan Gris, an in depth up to date of Picasso, painted his personal Nonetheless Life with a Guitar in 1913 whereas residing within the French city of Céret within the Pyrenees. Picasso admired Gris’s work and visited him there.
Even British musician Kevin Ayers paid tribute to the theme, naming his 14th studio album Still Life with Guitar.
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