French police have recovered a stolen Pablo Picasso painting during a drug trafficking raid in the southeastern suburbs of Paris.
The painting, which has been authenticated though not publicly named, belongs to a series of portraits Picasso made of Marie-Thérèse Walter, the artist’s model and lover between in the 1920s and 1930s. Alliance Police Nationale, a French police union, told the newspaper Le Parisien that the work was worth “tens of millions of euros” and belonged to a woman from Singapore. In 2018, another portrait of Walter from the period, the brightly-colored Woman in Beret and Checkered Dress (1937), sold at Sotheby’s London for £49.8 million ($83 million with inflation).
Pablo Picasso’s Woman in Beret and Checkered Dress, ahead of 2018 auction. Photo:Ian Gavan/Getty Images.
Officers from the Brigade des Stupéfiants, the French equivalent of the Drug Enforcement Administration, discovered the Picasso on June 15 at a property connected with a suspected drug dealer in the town of Champigny-sur-Marne. Along with the painting, police seized nearly 40 pounds of cannabis, €7,000 ($8,000) in cash, and €200,000 ($229,000) worth of luxury clothing.
Six people were arrested following the raid, including a 37-year-old man who worked as a security guard at a Paris firm specializing in storing art and other valuables. According to French media reports, the man admitted to taking the Picasso from the Paris depot, but claimed he did so to expose weaknesses in the company’s security. Two of the initial suspects were released and the remaining four appeared at a court hearing on June 19 with the trial expected for August.
Picasso met Walter in 1927 while still married to his first wife, the Russian ballet dancer Olga Khokhlova. As legend has it, the then 45-year-old spotted Walter outside the Galeries Lafayette, a high-end Paris department store, and said he wanted wanted to paint the 17-year-old’s portrait. For years, the relationship remained a secret, but in 1935 Walter gave birth to their daughter Maya and Picasso separated from Khokhlova that year.
Maya Ruiz-Picasso standing in front of two paintings of her mother. Photo: Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images.
For decades, Picasso paintings have been a recurrent target for criminals and in recent years a number of works have been recovered. In 2024, Belgian police found Tête (1970) in an Antwerp basement that had been stolen from a home in Tel Aviv a decade earlier. In 2022, two Paris gallerists were given suspended sentences and fined for selling stolen Picasso works worth north of $15 million.