Greek police claimed to have recovered two paintings by 20th-century masters Pablo Picasso and Piet Mondrian, nearly a decade after their theft from the National Gallery in Athens.
The paintings had been unframed during a well-organized night theft at the National Art Gallery on January 9, 2012. The thieves had also taken a religious pen and ink drawing by 16th-century Italian painter Guglielmo Caccia. Initially they had also stolen a fourth work, also by Mondrian, but they had then abandoned it while they fled.
The stolen Picasso was the “Head of a Woman”, a cubist female bust that the Spanish painter had donated to Greece in 1949 with a dedication “in homage to the Greek people” for its resistance to the German Nazi occupation forces during World War II. . Mondrian’s work, on the other hand, was a representative oil painting from 1905 of a windmill along the river.
The Reuters news agency, citing an anonymous police officer, reported that a Greek man was arrested after the works of art were found on the outskirts of Athens.