Thursday, August 27, 2009

Found (but maybe never lost)

Yesterday, Derek Fincham flagged a story that a Picasso painting "which was looted by an Iraqi soldier during the 1990 invasion of Kuwait has been recovered by Iraqi security forces." Today comes news that maybe it's not a Picasso after all: "The painting has a tag on the back with several misspellings that says it was sold by 'the louvre' to 'the museum of kuwait,' with the words Louvre and Kuwait in lower case. There are also several stamps bearing the name of the Louvre Museum in Paris. But an official with the Louvre Museum said it has never had a Picasso in its collection and does not sell its works because they are government property. ... The London-based Art Loss Registry said it has no record of any paintings missing from the Kuwait National Museum, and no record of this particular painting as missing at all."