When Everyone Thought Picasso Stole the Mona Lisa

If you’ve ever visited the Louvre in Paris and seen the Mona Lisa, you may well have been underwhelmed. Not because the painting itself isn’t beautiful, but because viewing it these days allows about as much chance for personal connection as you’d have with a fragment of uranium. It’s housed in a jail that looks designed more for Magneto than a piece of art, and unfortunately, there’s a good reason for it. Security was understandably ramped up from previous levels, which were roughly “zero,” after it was stolen in 1911.

Funnily enough, the Mona Lisa wasn’t nearly as world-famous as it is now before the theft, and its fame is at least somewhat thanks to the theft. Once it was gone, though, it became world news, and there was global pressure to solve the case and return her freaky little smile to its official seat. 

Possible suspects were received with a sigh of relief that at least they had someone to point to, and one finger landed on another famous artist: Pablo Picasso. Now, the title of this article has probably hinted at the result, that Picasso wasn’t the thief they were looking for. It wasn’t an unfounded accusation, however, because it turned out he was, in fact, a thief who was holding hot items from the Louvre at that very moment.

The Mona Lisa’s disappearance prompted a famehound and high-class kleptomaniac named Joseph Gery Pieret to confess to the Paris-Journal that he'd been stealing culturally significant bits and bobs from the Louvre from years. As for the Mona Lisa, he had no information, and denied the theft, but did reveal a nameless compatriot in Paris had bought stolen pieces from him before. Another slipup led police to connect him to the poet Apollinaire, who was himself connected to Picasso, who wasn’t exactly known for being the kind of artist who sips tea, paints and sleeps soundly.

Picasso hadn’t stolen the painting, of course. He did, however, have two stolen statues stamped “PROPERTY OF THE LOUVRE” sitting in his apartment, which wouldn’t paint him in a particularly flattering light. He considered throwing them into the river, but instead coughed them up to the Paris-Journal and would eventually be put on trial along with Apollinaire, an especially risky turn of events since Picasso could face deportation as a result. 

In the end, the case turned out to be as anticlimactic as a modern visit to the Mona Lisa, since both Apollinaire and Picasso were such a mess in court that the judge ended up throwing out the entire case.

Which was just as well, since the Mona Lisa had never passed through his possession, and was instead the stolen property of an Italian handyman who’d simply walked out of the Louvre with it. He was arrested and convicted, though he claimed he was just returning her to her homeland. 

Maybe he should have tried crying in court, like Picasso did.