Six Stolen Picasso Prints Found Under Clothes in French Riviera Home
Six Picasso prints worth over €100,000, stolen from a Mougins restaurant on October 1, were found in perfect condition in a village house. Seven arrests follow.
Programme
- Six Picasso prints worth over €100,000 ($112,208) were recovered on November 3, one month after theft.
- Two masked intruders stole the works from L'Amandier restaurant in Mougins on the night of October 1.
- Seven suspects were arrested by the French National Gendarmerie.
- The prints were found in perfect condition hidden behind clothes and toolboxes in a village house.
- Picasso lived his last 12 years in Mougins at Notre-Dame-de-Vie.
Six Pablo Picasso prints worth over €100,000 ($112,208) have been recovered from under a pile of clothes in a house in Mougins, one month after masked thieves stole them from a restaurant on the French Riviera.
The French National Gendarmerie announced the recovery on Tuesday, November 3, and said it had arrested seven suspects in connection with the theft. Authorities have not yet released the titles, descriptions or images of the works.
How the theft unfolded
The crime dates to the night of October 1. Two masked intruders broke into L'Amandier, a restaurant in the village of Mougins, while a third accomplice waited outside as a getaway driver. The pair took six artworks displayed in the restaurant's Salon Picasso lounge and fled.
The prints remained missing for just over a month. According to Le Monde, investigators searching houses in the village found all six works in perfect condition, hidden behind clothes and toolboxes in one of the properties. The Gendarmerie's Cannes departmental company carried out the operation.
Why Mougins matters to Picasso
The choice of target was no accident of geography. Picasso first visited Mougins in 1936 and returned decades later to live the final 12 years of his life at Notre-Dame-de-Vie, a estate on the village's heights.
L'Amandier's Salon Picasso lounge honours the Spanish artist and his imprint on the place. Before his arrival, Mougins was a farming village; after it, the settlement grew into a tourism hotspot drawing visitors tied to the painter's legacy.
What does this change for art protection?
The case underlines the vulnerability of artworks held outside museums, in commercial venues such as restaurants where security rarely matches institutional standards. Yet it also shows how quickly rural gendarmerie units can close an art theft investigation: seven arrests and a full recovery within roughly five weeks.
For L'Amandier, the return of the prints restores a display built on Mougins's most famous resident. For investigators, the files now move to the courts, where the seven suspects will face charges linked to the October 1 burglary.
Source: hyperallergic.com
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Staff writer covering people, launches and day-to-day practice in arts in the broadest sense at Arts & Voices.
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