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By Root 1155 0

he showed the reporter what he had taken from the Louvre. The reporter described it as “a rather crude bust, an example of the somewhat rudimentary art of the Phoenicians.” 3 When a curator of the museum examined it, he confirmed from markings that it was from the Louvre’s collection (no one had even noticed it was missing) but said it was not a Phoenician but an Iberian sculpture, recently excavated from diggings at Cerro de los Santos near Osuna, Spain. Such details didn’t interest the Paris-Journal, which gleefully exhibited the object in its window and paid the young thief, who happened to be a writer, to tell its readers how he had obtained it:

It was in March, 1907 that I entered the Louvre for the first time — a young man with time to kill and no money to spend.… [Other newspapers had insisted that the Mona Lisa’s theft was the result of allowing the public into the museum free of charge. This letter seemed to confirm that, and the practice was soon stopped.]

It was about one o’clock. I found myself in the gallery of Asian antiquities. A single guard was sitting motionless. I was about to climb the stairs leading to the floor above when I noticed a half-open door on my left. I had only to push it, and found myself in a room filled with hieroglyphs and Egyptian statues… in any case the place impressed me profoundly because of the deep silence and the absence of any human being. I walked through several adjoining rooms, stopping now and again in a dim corner to caress an ample neck or a well-turned cheek.

It was at that moment that I suddenly realized how easy it would be to pick up and take away almost any object of moderate size.… I was just then in a small room, about two meters by two in the “Gallery of Phoenician Antiquities.”

Being absolutely alone, and hearing no sounds whatever, I took the time to examine about fifty heads that were there, and I chose one of a woman, with, as I recall, twisted, conical forms on each side. I put the statue under my arm, pulled up the collar of my overcoat with my left hand, and calmly walked out, asking my way of the guard, who was still completely motionless.

I sold the statue to a Parisian painter friend of mine. He gave me a little money — fifty francs, I think, which I lost the same night in a billiard parlor.

“What of it?” I said to myself. “All Phoenicia is there for the taking.” 4

The thief went on to describe how he stole and sold several other pieces before leaving the city. He had returned in May 1911 and resumed his career of looting objects from the Louvre. He noticed that the collection in the Phoenician room, his favorite hunting ground, was much diminished, and blamed that on “imitators of mine.” 5

Unfortunately, the thief wrote, what promised to be a steady source of income was now ruined because of “this hullabaloo in the paintings department [the Mona Lisa theft]. I regret this exceedingly, for there is a strange, an almost voluptuous charm about stealing works of art, and I shall probably have to wait several years before resuming my activities.” 6

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Naturally enough, the article caused a sensation. The Paris-Journal encouraged its readers to think that the unnamed thief might well be the culprit in the Mona Lisa case as well. France’s undersecretary of state of beaux-arts, Étienne Dujardin-Beaumetz, under pressure because he was ultimately the person responsible for the Louvre, filed a complaint with the public prosecutor against a “person or persons unknown,” in an attempt to get the newspaper to reveal the name of the person who stole the “Phoenician” heads.

But nowhere was the consternation greater than at 11, boulevard de Clichy, in Montmartre, the artists’ quarter on the Right Bank of the Seine. This was the residence and studio of Pablo Picasso and his mistress Fernande Olivier — and Picasso was the artist who had bought the “Phoenician” statuettes from the Louvre thief. The apartment was a comfortable one, very different from the “starving artist” garret of myth. Picasso had finished with that phase of his career