SUNDAY REVIEW / PICASSO'S BRUSH WITH LAW BEFORE HIS BRUSH WITH FAME

OF COURSE, HE DIDN'T STEAL THE MONA LISA? 

"Je ne sais Pas, mon ami."

Pablo Picasso was, in fact, arrested in 1911 during the investigation into the theft of the Mona Lisa — though he was entirely innocent of the crime. That is if you can accept as receiving stolen property as blameless. 

The painting disappeared from the Louvre on August 21, 1911. Its absence stunned Paris and electrified the international press. For two years the masterpiece was simply gone, and suspicion drifted through the city’s bohemian quarters as easily as cigarette smoke. Picasso’s involvement was accidental and indirect. 

A small-time Belgian thief named Honoré-Joseph Géry Pieret had stolen several Iberian sculptures from the Louvre prior to the Mona Lisa’s disappearance. Those sculptures found their way into the hands of Guillaume Apollinaire, the poet and close friend of Picasso. Some were eventually sold to Picasso, who admired their raw, archaic force and drew inspiration from them in shaping his early modernist work. When Pieret later bragged publicly about his Non-Mona Lisa Louvre thefts, the police traced the sculptures back to Apollinaire and then to Picasso. 

In September 1911, both men were arrested and interrogated. Picasso, still a young Spanish expatriate in Paris and not yet the titan he would become, reportedly broke down under questioning and even denied knowing Apollinaire, fearing deportation or worse. 

Authorities, however, found no evidence linking either man to the stolen Leonardo. They were released. The true thief turned out to be Vincenzo Peruggia, an Italian handyman who had previously worked at the Louvre. He concealed himself inside the museum overnight, removed the Mona Lisa from its frame, and simply walked out with it hidden beneath his coat. He kept it for more than two years before attempting to sell it in Florence, where he was arrested in 1913. 

Picasso’s brush with the scandal remains one of the more curious footnotes in art history — a moment when the future architect of modernism briefly stood in the shadow of the world’s most famous missing painting. 

Picasso, left, before denying he ever knew his friend, Apollinaire.

DOUBLE STOOL PIDGEONS.

Poet Apollinaire

 After finking on Picasso to the Paris cops and Picasso lying he ever heard of Apollinaire the friendship did not end. It was strained in 1911 during the Mona Lisa theft scandal, when Apollinaire was arrested and, under pressure, mentioned Picasso to police. Picasso was questioned in the presence of a judge. The episode embarrassed and frightened both men, but they continued their relationship afterward. The real separation came with World War I. Apollinaire enlisted in the French army in 1914. Picasso, as a Spanish citizen, did not serve. In 1916 Apollinaire suffered a severe head wound from shrapnel and never fully regained his health. Apollinaire died in November 1918 during the influenza pandemic, weakened by his war injury. Picasso attended the funeral. So the friendship did not end in a quarrel. It faded under the strain of war, injury, and changing lives, and finally ended with Apollinaire’s death. For more on Picasso and Apollinaire sobbing before a Paris judge click: https://inmediaciones.org/la-ultima-historia-feliz-el-robo-de-la-gioconda/ and... https://criminocorpus.org/en/exhibitions/les-prisons-de-guillaume-apollinaire/le-poete-incarcere-reconstruction/