The bizarre case of a lost trove of paintings by Pablo Picasso began in September of 2010 when the artist’s former electrician, Pierre Le Guennec, waltzed into the Picasso estate in Paris with 271 pieces of artwork. He had come from his home in Southern France with his wife Danielle to have the pieces authenticated by Picasso’s son, Claude Ruiz-Picasso.
The pieces were authenticated but then confiscated when it was suspected that Le Guennec had taken them.
Le Guennec and his wife insist they were gifts from the artist.
Ms. Le Guennec told The New York Times in 2010 that as her husband was getting ready to leave Picasso’s home one day, he handed his handyman/electrician “a box.” She also said the artist “never explained anything.”
Mr. Ruiz-Picasso said he became suspicious because his father only gave away art he recently made and he always signed them – the pieces Le Guennec had were unsigned.
Three days later, the Picasso estate filed a report against the couple and the investigation led the police to seize 271 works of art from Le Guennec’s garage, including a piece from the artist’s Blue Period, six oils on canvas, nine Cubist collages, 28 lithographs, and sketchbooks dating between 1900 and 1932.
The estimated worth of the collection? Between $74 million and $98 million – and the Le Guennecs claims it had all been stored in a garage for 40 years.
The couple went to the Paris office in 2010 because Mr. Le Guennec had received a cancer diagnosis and wanted to ensure the pieces would be part of the estate he would hand down to his two children. Instead, he sparked a 10-year investigation and set off lengthy court battles over who owned the artwork and whether or not they had been stolen.
The case went all the way to France’s top appeals court and was only just settled in November 2019.
The couple first went on trial in 2015 and many in Picasso’s circle insisted he would have never given away these works. Le Guennec also changed his testimony during the trial and said it was Picasso’s last wife who gifted him the cache of art in 1971.
The estate also called into question whether they were stored in the garage for that long since they had been very well preserved.
In 2015, the couple was convicted of possession of stolen goods and each received two-year suspended jail terms – they wouldn’t face jail time as long as they followed guidelines.
During the couple’s appeal, they changed their story. They claimed Picasso’s widow, Jacqueline, asked him to hide part of the collection from his son Claude after the artist’s death in 1973. He said there were once a dozen garbage bags full of Picassos in the garage but all but one had been returned to his widow over time. That’s the one she told him to keep for himself.
But the appeals court didn’t buy the claim and they upheld the guilty verdict.
However, the Le Guennecs got one more chance when they appealed to the Court of Cassation, France’s highest court, which ordered a retrial.
Then, finally, in November of 2019, the Court of Cassation found the Le Guennecs guilty for a third time – and they were out of appeals. The court upheld their two-year suspended sentence but the couple continues to insist they are innocent.
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