Six Stolen Picasso Prints Found Under Clothes in French Riviera Flat

French police have recovered six stolen Picasso prints worth just over $112,000 — found under a pile of clothes and toolboxes in an apartment near the restaurant they were taken from.

The works usually hang in L'Amandier, a restaurant in Mougins, the hilltop village where Picasso lived at the time of his death in 1973. Investigators say the prints turned up not far from the scene of the crime, which is either lazy or optimistic on the thieves' part.

The heist itself was almost brisk. At around 2 a.m. on October 1, two masked men wearing gloves entered the restaurant through a door and made off with the prints in under a minute. In the morning, owner Matthieu Autant discovered the works missing and alerted local authorities, who handed the case to officers in nearby Cannes.

Who took them, and why it didn't help?

The Belgian outlet La Libre put the prints' value at a little more than $112,000 — modest, as Picassos go. But the resale market is unforgiving to amateurs. Lieutenant colonel Guillaume Plaidy told Le Monde the works "were not easy works to sell," and that the suspects lacked the know-how to find a buyer for them. These men, Plaidy said, were "known more for drug and weapons offenses."

Speed still mattered. "We had to act quickly: Works like these carry a high risk of being resold and never returning to the art market," Plaidy added.

On November 3, 40 gendarmes searched two apartments and found the works. Police then arrested seven men, all aged between 18 and 30 — three burglars and four accomplices, per Le Monde.

Why did a small theft make headlines?

The crime was minor; the timing was not. Europe has seen heightened attention to art theft since the storied Louvre heist of 2025. Works have since been stolen from the Renoir Museum in Cagnes-sur-Mer, France, and from the Magnani Rocca Foundation near Parma, Italy.

In France, the fast recovery offered some relief. Leisa Paoli, head of the Female Artists Museum of Mougins, said: "We are delighted to be able to recover them; I thought they might have already left the country."

Autant, for his part, sounded relieved and slightly worn. "We may have to rethink the security arrangements," he told the channel France 2.

The prints should now return to L'Amandier's walls — presumably behind a better lock — while the case feeds a wider European debate about how small venues protect art that the market, and thieves, still price in six figures.