Nine years after it was stolen from the Athens art gallery, a painting by Pablo Picasso has resurfaced: The cubist “woman's head”, created in 1934 or 1939, was found in a warehouse around fifty kilometers from the Greek capital and was found by the police ensured. The painting “Mill” from 1905 by Piet Mondrian, which was stolen from the Pinakothek during the same theft, was also confiscated. This means that one of the most spectacular art thefts in recent years has come to a happy end for the museum, even though Mondrian's painting is said to have been slightly damaged. The fact, however, has not yet been resolved: the media in Greece report that a 49-year-old man is urgently suspected by the authorities of being the mastermind behind the art theft.
Image of national importance
During the break-in, at least one perpetrator entered the museum through a window in the early morning hours of January 9, 2012, had taken the works of Picasso and Mondrian and fled, disturbed by guards, before he could steal a third painting.
What the thief planned to do with Picasso, estimated at a value of 16.5 million euros, puzzled the police and experts, as the 56 by 40 centimeter oil painting was a gift from the artist to the Greek state that he had given him appropriated as recognition for the resistance against the National Socialists. The investigators assumed that the work was virtually unsaleable on the black market and it is highly likely that it had not yet left the country. So they resumed the search for him that spring.