$66 million in Picasso paintings stolen in Paris

The painting has sentimental value for Widmaier-Picasso: It shows her mother, Maya, as a young girl in pigtails, eyes askew in the classic off-kilter Cubist perspective. Another version of the painting hangs in the Picasso Museum in Paris.

Maya was Picasso’s daughter. Her mother was Marie-Therese Walter, whom Picasso met when she was a fresh-faced, blonde teenager. Their affair did not last. Four years after Picasso died in 1973, Walter committed suicide by hanging.

Maya Picasso married Pierre Widmaier and had three children, Olivier, Richard and Diana Widmaier-Picasso, an art historian and author of a book called “Picasso: Art Can Only be Erotic.”

‘Jacqueline’ is missing
The other missing painting is “Portrait of Jacqueline,” and the burglars took the frame with it, police said. The painting was one of many that depict Picasso’s second wife, Jacqueline Roque, whom he married in 1961 when he was 79 years old and she was in her mid-30s.

After Picasso died of a heart attack, his heirs divided up the paintings that he treasured over the years. While the two stolen portraits are worth tens of millions of dollars, they are not as valuable as some other works — Picasso’s “Boy with a Pipe,” for instance, sold at auction in 2004 for $78.7 million.

But the stolen paintings are important because the artist chose to keep them, said Pepe Karmel, an associate professor at New York University and the author of “Picasso and the Invention of Cubism.”

“They were meaningful to him, so he didn’t sell them,” Karmel said.

Did they take the drawings?
It was unclear if the thieves also made off with drawings by Picasso. Police and the Paris prosecutor’s office mentioned only the two paintings, but the director of the Picasso Museum in Paris, Anne Baldassari, said several paintings and drawings were stolen. She did not give details.

The Art Loss Register now lists 549 missing Picasso pieces, including paintings, lithographs, drawings and ceramics, said Beth Kocher, an art historian with the register. In all, the group’s database contains more than 170,000 pieces of stolen, missing or looted art.

The number of missing Picassos is so large because he was so prolific. He created so much in so many different media, in fact, that it is difficult to pinpoint an exact number of his artworks — it depends on what counts as art.

Auctioneers in Paris in 1998 sold matchbox covers that Picasso doodled on, as well as other small treasures. One item on the auction block was a scrap of paper with a bloodstain on it. Below the stain, Dora Maar, another of Picasso’s muses, wrote: “Blood of Picasso.”

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