French police found a painting by Pablo Picasso that had been stolen while raiding a home in connection with a drug trafficking investigation, according to the report.
Officers from the Brigade des Stupéfiants, which is France’s anti-narcotics unit, conducted the search on June 15 in Champigny-sur-Marne, a suburb southeast of Paris. They were looking for evidence linked to a suspected drug network but instead turned up cannabis resin, thousands of euros in cash, luxury clothing — and the missing artwork.
Officials have not named the specific piece but confirmed that it is authentic. They said that it belongs to a series of portraits of Marie Thérèse Walter, the artist’s partner and frequent muse.
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The work was stolen from a Paris storage facility.
The theft had not been made public before the raid.
The report says the artwork belongs to a woman from Singapore and could be worth in value between €12 million and €15 million, or roughly $14 million to $17 million.
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Police initially arrested six people. One of them was a 37-year-old security guard who worked for the company that runs the storage site. He admitted taking the artwork, saying he wanted to expose weaknesses in the company’s security, according to the report.
Two suspects have since been released. Four others appeared in court on the 19th of June. Officials said that additional charges could follow, and a trial is expected to start in the month of August.
The artist met Walter in Paris in 1927, when she was only 17 and he was 45 and still married to Russian ballet dancer Olga Khokhlova. Their relationship stayed secret for years, but Walter became one of the artist’s most important inspirations. Many of the artist’s best-known portraits from the late 1920s and ’30s feature her likeness. In 2018, another portrait of Walter, titled Woman in Beret and Checkered Dress (1937), sold for nearly £50 million at Sotheby’s in London.
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Works by Picasso have been stolen before. In 2021, Greek authorities recovered Head of a Woman (1939), which had been taken from the National Gallery in Athens in 2012. The next year, two Paris art dealers received suspended sentences for selling stolen artworks that were worth over $15 million. In 2024, Belgian police recovered Tête (1970), which had been stolen from a home in Tel Aviv ten years earlier.
Authorities have not yet released any images of the newly recovered artwork or indicated where it will be returned.
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