Category Archives: Pablo Picasso

Huge crime network forging Banksy, Warhol and Picasso uncovered in Italy

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Art police and Pisa prosecutor say 38 people being investigated, with about 2,100 fake artworks seized

Italian police have dismantled a Europe-wide forgery network suspected of producing sophisticated replicas of works by some of the world’s most famous artists, including Banksy, Pablo Picasso, Andy Warhol and Gustav Klimt.

Thirty-eight people had been placed under investigation in Italy, Spain, France and Belgium on suspicion of conspiracy to handle stolen goods, forgery and illegal sale of artworks, Italy’s art police and Pisa’s prosecutor’s office said in a joint statement on Monday.

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Picasso the printmaker takes centre stage at British Museum

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Big exhibition will reflect life and loves of artist, from his first professional print in 1904 to 1960s masterpieces

The British Museum is putting on a big exhibition of the print works of Pablo Picasso, one of the finest graphic artists of the 20th century, it will announce on Monday.

About 100 prints will reflect the life and loves of the artist with an extraordinary vision, best known for masterpieces include Guernica, one of the most powerful anti-war paintings.

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Channel 4 buys painting by Hitler – and may let Jimmy Carr destroy it

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Ian Katz says new show, Art Trouble, celebrates the channel’s tradition of ‘iconoclasm and irreverence’

Channel 4 has bought a painting by Adolf Hitler and will allow a studio audience to decide whether Jimmy Carr should burn it with a flamethrower.

As part of its latest season of programmes, the TV channel has bought artworks by a range of “problematic” artists, including Pablo Picasso, as well as convicted paedophile Rolf Harris and sexual abuser Eric Gill.

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Tehran museum unveils western art masterpieces hidden for decades

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‘Deviant’ works by artists including Picasso and Warhol return to display at exhibition in Iranian capital

Some of the world’s most prized works of contemporary western art have been unveiled for the first time in decades in Tehran.

The Iranian president, Ebrahim Raisi, a hardline cleric, rails against the influence of the west. Authorities have condemned “deviant” artists for “attacking Iran’s revolutionary culture”. And the Islamic Republic has plunged further into confrontation with the US and Europe as it rapidly accelerates its nuclear programme and diplomatic efforts stall.

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National Museum of Slovenia cancels art exhibition over alleged fakes

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Show claiming to feature works by Van Gogh, Matisse and Picasso abruptly cancelled as police launch investigation

An exhibition in Slovenia claiming to feature works by Picasso, Van Gogh and Matisse was abruptly cancelled this week over fears some works were forged, prompting a police probe on Friday.

The National Museum of Slovenia planned to officially open the show on Wednesday this week, entitled “Travels” and featuring 160 paintings owned by the little-known Boljkovac family.

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‘The rich have got much richer’: why art sale prices are going through the roof

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Auction houses are recording a boom in sales after a return to pre-pandemic levels of supplies of works

As a straight return on investment, it’s hard to beat “Untitled”, a 1982 work by Jean-Michel Basquiat, the African American street artist who became a global cultural icon, featuring a horned African mask on an abstract background across a canvas almost 5m wide.

In 2004, the painting sold for $4.5m. Back on the market 12 years later, it fetched $57.3m, then a record for a Basquiat. This week, it went under the hammer in New York for $85m (£68m), including fees, to a buyer from Asia.

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How Dalí’s ‘lips’ sofa began life … on the back of an envelope

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Newly opened archive of art patron’s papers reveals a previously unseen sketch for the surrealist work

One of the world’s best-known pieces of furniture, Salvador Dalí’s Mae West lips sofa, started life as a sketch on the back of an envelope, research in the archive of a Sussex country house has revealed.

The sketch was unearthed at West Dean near Chichester, the former home of Dalí’s patron Edward James, and experts say it reveals the extent to which James was involved in the creation of the 1930s sofa. Alongside the lobster telephone, also the result of a collaboration between Dalí and James, it is one of the emblems of the surrealist movement.

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Picasso pieces worth about $100m to be auctioned in Las Vegas

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Sotheby’s to sell 11 works in Bellagio hotel and casino, in one of most valuable Picasso auctions yet

Las Vegas: the city of sin, where you can gamble away your savings, get married on a whim, dine on an octuple bypass burger at the Heart Attack Grill – and soon, it has been announced, take part in one of the most valuable Picasso auctions ever staged.

Sotheby’s has announced it is to sell 11 Picasso works owned by MGM Resorts, which have a combined value of about $100m (£72m).

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Basque country hails ‘forgotten’ retelling of Picasso’s Guernica

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Agustín Ibarrola’s 1977 version was painted as part of campaign to get the original returned from New York

The grief-snapped mother is still there, cradling her dead child 84 years on, as is the fallen soldier with his stigmata and the horse with its silent screams.

However, the Guernica now on its way to a museum in the Basque country is not Pablo Picasso’s monochrome howl of anti-fascist fury but a retelling of the work intended to help bring the original to the market town whose agonies beneath waves of German and Italian bombers inspired its creation – and to denounce the subsequent horrors of the Franco dictatorship.

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Greek police recover stolen Picasso after nine years, drop it in front of media – video

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A Picasso painting stolen nine years ago from Greece's National Gallery and recovered by police has had yet another mishap after the valuable artwork slipped and fell from its display. Police were exhibiting the recovered painting - along with a Mondrian piece from 1905 - when it slipped from its display. It was hastily returned to its position by an official not wearing gloves. The paintings were stolen in 2012 and recovered after they were found hidden in bushland

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Greek police recover two stolen paintings by Picasso and Mondrian

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Works by 20th-century masters found nearly a decade after audacious heist at Athens gallery

A Picasso gifted to the Greek people by the artist in honour of their resistance to Nazi rule has been found in a gorge after a builder admitted to stealing the masterpiece and two other artworks in an audacious heist from the National Gallery in Athens nearly a decade ago.

For nine years, Head of a Woman had lain hidden in the home of the self-described art lover alongside Stammer Windmill, a work by the Dutch painter Piet Mondrian, also stolen during the overnight raid on 9 January 2012.

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My father, Picasso: secret daughter tells of posing in pink bootees

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A book of family memories paints the artist as doting dad, rather than the callous, ageing womaniser depicted by others

Pablo Picasso was still married to the former ballerina Olga Khokhlova when he became captivated by a 17-year-old girl outside the Galeries Lafayette in Paris in 1927.

He was 28 years her senior, but Marie-Thérèse Walter soon became his muse for voluptuous portraits and gave birth to his daughter before he moved on to the next of his many relationships, with Dora Maar, the surrealist photographer and painter.

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Italian woman wins €1m Picasso in Christmas raffle

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€100 ticket scoops ‘incredible’ 1921 still life oil painting by Spanish master

An Italian accountant whose son bought her a raffle ticket as a Christmas present won a Pablo Picasso oil painting valued at €1m ($1.1m) in a charity draw on Wednesday.

Claudia Borgogno summed up her amazement in one word: incredible. “I have never won anything before,” said the 58-year-old told from Ventimiglia, in north-western Italy.

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UK art dealer jailed in US for defrauding clients of up to $30m

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Timothy Sammons used works by Picasso and Chagall as collateral for personal loans

A prominent British art dealer who defrauded his clients out of millions by using a scheme that involved masterpieces by artists including Pablo Picasso and Marc Chagall has been sentenced for up to 12 years in prison.

Timothy Sammons – a former Sotheby’s specialist who had offices in New York and London and who brokered multimillion-pound deals for the likes of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation – used art that did not belong to him as collateral to obtain personal loans between 2010 and 2015.

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Fantastique beasts: cult art from the Lalannes’ private collection to go on sale

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Surreal works from the home of François-Xavier Lalanne and his wife Claude expected to fetch up to £20m

For years, a giant brass and Sèvres porcelain grasshopper that could, if needed, double as a wine-cooler sat outside the royal apartments at Windsor Castle; a gift from French president Georges Pompidou to the Duke of Edinburgh during a state visit to France in 1972.

Across the Channel, an hour from Paris, the home of its late creator François-Xavier Lalanne and his artist wife Claude is full of such wonderful and whimsical creatures: a huge rhinoceros that transforms into a desk; a bronze cabbage on chicken legs; a herd of sheep that can be sat on, tables of enormous ginkgo leaves.

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Art detective Arthur Brand: how I found a stolen Picasso

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The man dubbed ‘Indiana Jones of the art world’ says the paintings can ‘become a burden’

The ring at the door of the modest east Amsterdam apartment came late in the day on Thursday 14 March. On the doorstep stood two men “with contacts in the underworld”, Arthur Brand recalls, and with them a large, rectangular package.

Eagerly, Brand removed the covering and examined the contents: Buste de femme (Dora Maar), a portrait by Pablo Picasso of his mistress. Unsigned because it was never sold by the painter, it bore in its bottom-left corner the date he completed it, 26 April 1938, and was worth an estimated €25m (£21.5m).

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