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Showing posts with label Diana Widmaier-Picasso. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Diana Widmaier-Picasso. Show all posts

May 3, 2014

Saturday, May 03, 2014 - , No comments

Bob Wittman, Diana Widmaier-Picasso, and art thefts in Paris

Majsan Boström, StarNews Correspondent (Wilmington, North Carolina) reported in "FBI agent, best selling author to discuss art cases" (April 23, 2014) that former FBI agent Bob Wittman lectured at the University of North Carolina Wilmington -- and that she joined Wittman and Diana Widmaier-Picasso for breakfast the following morning:
"We are going to talk about our books and compare notes about the theft and recovery of her grandfather's paintings," Wittman said.
Wittman explains his relationship to Widmaier-Picasso to Boström:
Wittman worked the case in which her Paris apartment was burglarized in 2007 and paintings worth $66 million were stolen while she was sleeping. "I was involved (posing0 as the wealthy U.S. buyer that the paintings were going to be sent to," Wittman said.
Three paintings by Pablo Picasso were stolen on February 27, 2007. Ms. Widmaier-Picasso spoke about the case to The New Yorker in June 2011. In other related articles, Wittman spoke about art thefts in Paris to ARTNews here and to The New York Times here.

June 14, 2011

Tuesday, June 14, 2011 - ,,,, No comments

Picasso's Granddaughter Diana Widmaier-Picasso Discusses 4 Year Old Theft with The New Yorker

Picasso's Maya à la Poupée on display at The Gagosian Gallery in New York (Photo from Gagosian website)

by Catherine Schofield Sezgin, ARCA Blog Editor-in-Chief

Picasso's Maya à la Poupée (Interpol)
Just finding information out about an art theft case can be like unraveling a mystery. Four years ago, thieves stole several paintings from the home of Picasso's granddaughter, Diana Widmaier-Picasso. Seven months later they returned but little was reported in the newspaper about the details of the theft. Ms. Widmaier-Picasso spoke to Eric Konigsberg (At the Galleries: Granddaughter) in The New Yorker's current issue (Summer Fiction, June 13 & 20, 2011) and described the people arrested for trying to sell one of the paintings six months later on the street in the 17th Arrondissement of Paris:
"That is how professional art thieves operate. The one in charge had two nicknames, and they're both interesting: the Locksmith and Goldfinger. It was like a Western."
Of the Brigade de Répression du Banditisme she said:
"They treated it like the kidnapping of a person in the family."
One of the paintings, "Maya à la Poupée", of her mother, the daughter of Picasso and his mistress Marie-Thérèse Walter, is currently on display at the Gagosian Gallery on West Twenty-first Street, in an exhibition, "Picasso and Marie-Thérèse" open until July 15.

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