In September 1911, French police brought in a 29-year-old Spanish painter as a suspect in the theft of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre; he was released the same day, and his friend Guillaume Apollinaire spent five days in a Paris jail over the same case.

Pablo Picasso did not steal the Mona Lisa. For a few days in September 1911, the Paris police were not so sure.

The file against him was narrower than that headline suggests, and also true: he had bought stolen goods, years earlier, from a man who turned out to have stolen a great deal more than anyone realized.

How an art heist became his problem

In 1907, Picasso acquired two small stone heads, ancient Iberian sculptures, from Honoré-Joseph Géry Pieret, who worked as secretary to the poet Guillaume Apollinaire. Pieret had lifted them from an understaffed storeroom at the Louvre. Picasso liked them enough to keep them in his studio; he did not ask where they came from, and for four years nothing came of it.

Then, on August 21, 1911, the Mona Lisa vanished from its wall. The Louvre stayed closed for a week while police searched it floor by floor and found nothing, because the painting was no longer in the building: a Louvre employee named Vincenzo Peruggia had hidden it under his coat and walked out. He would keep it in a trunk in his Paris apartment for two years.

With the investigation going nowhere, Pieret saw an opening. He wrote to the newspaper Paris-Journal boasting that he had been stealing from the Louvre for years and offering to prove it, which put his old employer, and his old employer's friend, directly in the frame. Police arrested Apollinaire on September 7. He spent five days in La Santé prison (long enough to write a poem about the cell) before he was released for lack of evidence connecting him to the actual theft.

Picasso's turn before the magistrate came the same week. Terrified of being deported as a foreigner mixed up in a Louvre burglary, he denied under questioning that he even knew Apollinaire, a friend of several years. It did not matter: he was released the same day, the statuettes went back to the Louvre, and neither man had anything to do with the painting itself. Peruggia was caught in 1913, trying to sell it to a Florence art dealer.

Who was he before any of this?

He was born Pablo Ruiz y Picasso in Málaga, Spain, on October 25, 1881, the son of José Ruiz Blasco, who taught drawing at the local fine-arts school (and later in A Coruña and Barcelona, where his son studied under him). Family members recalled decades afterward that he could draw before he could talk, and that his first word was "piz," short for the Spanish lápiz, meaning pencil. It is a good story, told by people who loved him, remembered long after the fact; there is no way to verify it, and it says more about how the family wanted the beginning to sound than about an infant's vocabulary.

What is documented is the speed of his training. By his early teens he was working from plaster casts and live models under his father's own supervision, and family accounts hold that José eventually stopped painting altogether once he judged his son's work to have surpassed his.

Blue paintings after a death

Picasso moved between Barcelona and Paris around the turn of the century, broke and mostly unknown. On February 17, 1901, his close friend Carles Casagemas, undone by a failed love affair, shot himself at a café on the Boulevard de Clichy.

The paintings that followed for the next several years were almost all beggars, prostitutes, and the destitute, rendered in blues and grays: the Blue Period. Picasso was poor enough himself during these years that the mood in the paintings was not entirely borrowed.

What was actually new about Cubism?

By 1907 he had moved on to something else. That May or June, he visited the ethnographic collection at the Palais du Trocadéro and later described a "revelation" in front of African masks there; the same year, he had also been looking hard at Iberian sculpture like the pieces Pieret had handed him. Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, finished that July, carries both influences directly in its faces. (Picasso later denied to the writer André Malraux that African art had shaped the painting at all, a denial most art historians simply don't buy.)

Working alongside the painter Georges Braque over the next several years, partly building on Paul Cézanne's late paintings, he broke objects apart into overlapping geometric planes shown from more than one angle at once. Braque later said their canvases from this period grew so alike that the two of them sometimes had trouble telling their own paintings apart. That movement got the name Cubism, from a critic's dismissive remark about "little cubes," and it changed what a painting was allowed to look like.

A mural built from newspaper photographs

Picasso had been living in France for three decades when Spain's Republican government commissioned him, in January 1937, to produce a large work for its pavilion at that year's Paris International Exposition. He had no subject yet.

He got one on April 26, when German and Italian aircraft, flying at the request of the Nationalist general Francisco Franco, bombed the Basque market town of Guernica. Picasso read the accounts that ran in the Paris papers Ce Soir and L'Humanité two days later and started painting on May 1. He finished within about a month: a mural eleven feet tall and twenty-five feet wide, in black, white, and gray, with no explicit reference to Guernica beyond its title. It became the centerpiece of the Spanish Pavilion, then toured internationally for years afterward, raising money for Spanish war relief.

How much did he actually make?

Guinness World Records credits Picasso with roughly 147,800 works across paintings, prints, sculptures, ceramics, and book illustrations over a seventy-five-year career: the largest output ever attributed to a single artist. Treat the figure as an estimate rather than a count. No complete catalogue of everything Picasso made has ever been assembled, and much of the total is inferred from print runs and workshop records rather than counted piece by piece. The honest version of the claim is not "147,800," it's "more than anyone has managed to number."

What he's worth now

His 1955 painting Les Femmes d'Alger (Version O) sold at Christie's in 2015 for $179.4 million, still his auction record a decade on and among the highest prices ever paid for any painting. Retrospectives at the Musée Picasso in Paris and the Museo Picasso Málaga draw steady crowds every year, and his name sells everything from ceramics reissues to fashion collaborations. The two Iberian heads that nearly ended up at the bottom of the Seine are back in the Louvre's permanent collection, a few galleries away from the painting whose disappearance briefly cost their buyer a very bad week.

Museums have spent the past several years on a harder question than authenticity: how to hang work by a man who, by the accounts of women who lived with him, including the photographer Dora Maar and the painter Françoise Gilot, treated the people closest to him badly, without either scrubbing that record or pretending it has nothing to do with the paintings. That argument is playing out gallery by gallery right now, and nobody involved expects it to end soon.

Sources

• The Art Newspaper, "Missing Mona Lisa: the story behind the 1911 theft of Leonardo's masterpiece" (2024)
• HISTORY.com, "Why Pablo Picasso Was a Suspect in the 'Mona Lisa' Heist"
• TheCollector, "Did Guillaume Apollinaire Steal the Mona Lisa?"
• Museu Picasso Barcelona, "José Ruiz Blasco, the Father of a Genius"
• Guinness World Records, "Most Prolific Painter"
• ARTnews, "The Most Expensive Artworks by Pablo Picasso Ever Sold at Auction"