BOXED AND GONE

Picasso Painting Vanishes On the Way to Exhibit

“Still Life with Guitar” is an oil-on-canvas painting valued at $700,000.

Spanish police are investigating a Pablo Picasso painting that vanished en route from Madrid to an exhibition in Granada, authorities said Tuesday. “Still Life with Guitar” is an oil-on-canvas painting valued at $700,000. The piece was among 50 works set to arrive on Oct. 3 for display at CajaGranada Cultural Center, according to Granada newspaper Ideal. All pieces for the exhibition were from private collections, the foundation said. The outlet said police will review surveillance footage along the route that the van traveled. The transportation workers had spent the night in a town, Deifontes, which was not agreed upon prior, CajaGranada sources told Ideal. And when the paintings arrived, they were poorly organized, per the outlet. The outlet said no arrests have been made. Picasso works have been stolen previously. One of the most notorious thefts was in 1976 when more than 100 of the Spanish artist’s paintings were stolen from a museum in France. All of the works were eventually recovered. Picasso, who was born in 1881 in Southern Spain and died in 1973, has over 20,000 pieces of art, according to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.