Spanish police investigate as Picasso painting vanishes on way to exhibition | Art theft

Police in Spain are investigating the disappearance of a tiny Picasso painting, worth €600,000 (£520,000), which vanished en route from Madrid to an exhibition in the southern city of Granada.

The gouache and pencil work, Naturaleza muerta con guitarra (Still Life with Guitar), was due to go on show at a new exhibition at the CajaGranada foundation, which opened last week.

But the picture, which was painted in 1919 and measures 12.7cm x 9.8cm, never made it to the foundation’s Still Life: the Eternity of the Inert exhibition.

The painting belongs to a private collector in the Spanish capital and had been expected as part of a consignment of loaned exhibits that arrived by van from Madrid on Friday 3 October.

The foundation said that when the van arrived at 10am that day, its contents were unloaded and checked. Despite the fact that some of the carefully packaged works were not correctly numbered, making “an exhaustive check” impossible, the delivery was signed off and the van and its crew went on their way.

The following Monday, the pieces, which had been under video surveillance all weekend, were unpacked.

“Once the unpacking had been done, by the CajaGranada foundation’s own staff, the works were moved to different parts of the exhibition room,” the foundation said in a statement. “Mid-morning that day, the exhibition’s curator and the foundation’s head of exhibitions noticed that one work was missing. The piece is a small gouache by Pablo Picasso, called Still Life with Guitar.”

The foundation said it had reported the painting’s disappearance to the Policía Nacional, adding: “We have also put ourselves at the disposal of those investigating, and we have complete faith that the case will be properly resolved.”

Spanish media reports suggested the van may have stopped overnight near Granada, and that the two people aboard may have taken turns guarding its precious cargo.

Picasso’s fame – and the enormous sums his works command – have long made his art a target for thieves around the world.

In February 2007, two Picasso paintings worth a total of €50m were stolen from the Paris home of the artist’s granddaughter. Two years later, a Picasso sketchbook worth more than €8m was stolen from a Paris museum dedicated to the artist.

Twelve Picasso paintings, valued at around £9m, were stolen from the French Riviera villa of another of his grandchildren, Marina Picasso, in 1989.

Several other Picasso paintings have been stolen from galleries. In 1976, 118 works were stolen from a museum in the southern city of Avignon in one of France’s largest art thefts.

In 1997, a gunman walked into a central London art gallery and stole Picasso’s Tête de Femme, worth more than £500,000, before fleeing in a taxi. The work was later recovered.