In 1962, 24-year-old junk dealer Luigi Lo Rosso was clearing out the cellar of a villa on the southern Italian island of Capri. As with anyone who is tasked with this sort of cleaning, Luigi had three basic categories of items; things to keep, things to throw away, and, most difficult of all, things he was unsure of. Luigi usually took only a few seconds to decide where to place each item. Then, Luigi found a rolled-up canvas. He quickly unrolled the painting and glanced at a distorted image of a woman. Luigi noticed a signature in the top left corner but did not recognize the artist’s name. As quickly as he had unrolled it, he rolled it back up. He placed it in the keep pile and kept sifting through the items in the cellar. Once finished with the task, Luigi returned to his home in Pompeii with the items he had deemed good enough to keep. He sold some of the items, usually “for next to nothing,” but not the distorted paining. He bought a cheap frame to hold the painting and mounted it to the wall. Luigi’s wife was less than impressed.
Two years later, Luigi and his wife had a son they named Andrea. As the boy grew up, he was always aware of the painting because his parents argued about it regularly. There were times when the family considered getting rid of the hideous painting. They considered throwing the painting away. “My mother didn’t want to keep it,” Andrea explained. “She kept saying it was horrible.” For some reason, the painting remained there on the wall of the Lo Rosso home. One day, Andrea’s aunt gave Andrea an encyclopedia of art history. Andrea immediately thought about the horrible painting on their wall. He flipped through the book and found a similar painting of a distorted lady. It appeared that the painting shown in the encyclopedia was of the same lady in the painting that had hung on their wall for decades. The paintings were not identical but had noticeable differences. The title of the painting in the book was “The Buste de Femme.” Andrea learned that the painting was a distorted image of the artist’s mistress, a French photographer and painter named Dora Maar. Andrea looked at the top left corner and realized that the signatures were almost identical. Andrea kept telling his father that the paintings were similar, and the signatures were similar, but Luigi remained unconvinced.
As the years turned into decades, Andrea remained curious about the painting. In 1999, the painting Andrea saw in the book, “the Buste de Femme,” was stolen from a luxury yacht belonging to Saudi billionaire Sheikh Abdul Mohsen Abdulmalik Al-Sheikh. Andrea thought about the painting that still hung on his family’s wall. Twenty years passed. Then, in March 2019, after a four-year search, Arthur Brand, known as the “Indiana Jones of the art world,” found and returned the stolen painting. Again, Andrea thought of the painting that his father had found all those years ago.
Andrea took the reins and sought the advice of the experts at the Arcadia Foundation, a company which specializes in attributions, restorations, and valuations of art works. Cinzia Altieri, a handwriting expert working at the Arcadia Foundation, confirmed the signature on the painting. After an intense investigation, Luca Marcante, president of the Arcadia Foundation, concluded that the painting that Luigi found amongst the junk in that cellar in 1962, which hung on Luigi’s wall in a cheap frame for more than six decades, is an original, authentic painting by Pablo Picasso. Its value has yet to be determined.
Sources:
1. Angela Giuffrida, “Painting found by junk dealer in cellar is original Picasso, experts claim,” The Guardian, October 1, 2024, accessed October 2, 2024, https://www.theguardian.com/
2. “Stolen Picasso portrait of Dora Maar found after 20 years,” BBC, March 26, 2019, Accessed October 2, 2024, https://www.bbc.com/news/