French drug police made a stunning discovery during a routine narcotics raid in Paris, stumbling upon a stolen Picasso painting worth up to €15m (£13m).
Officers in the Brigade des Stupéfiants discovered the artwork on 15 June while carrying out a routine search of a house owned by the aunt of a suspected drug dealer in the southeastern suburb of Ormesson-sur-Marne.
The artwork has not been publicly named by France’s Alliance Police Nationale, who said it as worth “tens of millions” of Euros. French newspaper Le Parisien reported that it is one of a series of Picasso’s portraits of Marie-Thérèse Walter, his mistress, produced in 1937 – with a value between €12m and €15m.
A 37-year-old man who worked as a guard at a Paris firm that stores valuable art was arrested after the discovery.
He admitted to taking the Picasso from the depot and told police officers he was “seeking to demonstrate security flaws within the company”, Le Parisien said.
The man has now been charged with theft and involvement in drug dealing after police found 17kg of cannabis, €200,000 (£174,000) worth of designer clothing and €7,000 in cash (£6,000) during a search of several houses in the capital’s eastern suburbs.
The public prosecutor’s office of Creteil said the search was “carried out as part of an investigation into drug trafficking. It said the painting had been authenticated as an original Picasso.
A further three people were arrested and appeared in court for an initial hearing on Friday, with more charges expected as the investigation continues. A trial is expected to begin in August this year.
The portrait, the theft of which had not been publicly reported, was being held in private storage for a Singaporean woman who owned the piece, according to the police union.
Marie-Thérèse Walter, born in 1909, was a French model known as the artist’s “golden muse”, who first entered into a relationship with Picasso when she was 17 and he was 45, while married to Russian ballerina Olga Khokhlova.
Walter became pregnant with Picasso’s child in 1934, after which Khokhlova left the painter and took their son to the south of France.
Picasso afterwards started a relationship with surrealist photographer Dora Maar, and maintained a relationship with both Maar and Walter in the years following.
