No subject

PARIS -- In a stealthy overnight heist, burglars slipped into the Paris
apartment of Picasso's granddaughter and spirited away two portraits of
women the artist loved, slicing one of the paintings out of its frame.

The thieves were so quiet that the two people in the apartment of Diana
Widmaier-Picasso at the time didn't hear them make off with the art
treasures, police said. The burglars left few clues, and police said they
were not sure how the intruders gained entry.

The two paintings -- one of Pablo Picasso's daughter Maya, the other of his
second wife Jacqueline -- together are worth an estimated $66 million.

The paintings join 549 other missing or stolen works by the prolific Spanish
painter, sculptor, graphic artist and ceramist, considered by many the
leading artist of the 20th century. According to the Web site of the
Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Picasso produced more than 20,000
works of art during his long career.

Art experts say that if the burglars hope to sell the paintings, they are in
for a surprise.

Any work by Picasso is "very hard to fence because it's so well-known --
stealing a Picasso is like stealing a sign that says, 'I'm a thief,"' said
Jonathan Sazonoff, who runs a leading Web site on stolen art.

Katie Dugdale of the Art Loss Register, which maintains the world's largest
database on stolen, missing and looted art, said that although it's
difficult, famous artworks can be sold on the black market.

"Even though they can't get full value, there's still some value
unfortunately," she said, particularly if the artworks are used to fund
other illegal activities, like arms trading.

In high-profile cases like the theft of the Picassos in Paris, recovery is
likely because of intense media attention and ramped-up police efforts.

"Usually with things like this, they're recovered right away," Dugdale said,
noting that the paintings, already recognizable, will become nearly
universally so after their images appear in the media. For most works,
however, she said the average recovery time is seven years.

Investigators said today they were struggling to piece together what
happened.

Burglars entered the apartment in a chic corner of the Left Bank late Monday
or early Tuesday, police and the prosecutor's office said. Police said they
were examining a door lock to see if it was broken, and were unsure if the
alarm system had been turned on.

Once inside the apartment, the thieves cut the edges of one painting, "Maya
and the Doll," to take it out of its frame, a police official said, speaking
on condition of anonymity because the investigation is continuing.

The painting has sentimental value for Widmaier-Picasso: It shows her
mother, Maya, as a young girl in pigtails, eyes askew in an off-kilter
Cubist perspective. Another version of the painting hangs in the Picasso
Museum in Paris.

Maya was Picasso's daughter. Her mother was Marie-Therese Walter, whom
Picasso met when she was a fresh-faced, blonde teenager. Their affair did
not last. Four years after Picasso died in 1973, Walter committed suicide by
hanging.

Maya Picasso married Pierre Widmaier and had three children, Olivier,
Richard and Diana Widmaier-Picasso, an art historian and author of a book
called "Picasso: Art Can Only be Erotic."

The other missing painting is "Portrait of Jacqueline," and the burglars
took the frame with it, police said. The painting was one of many that
depict Picasso's second wife, Jacqueline Roque, whom he married in 1961 when
he was 79 years old and she was in her mid-30s.

After Picasso died of a heart attack, his heirs divided up the paintings
that he treasured over the years. While the two stolen portraits are worth
tens of millions of dollars, they are not as valuable as some other works --
Picasso's "Boy with a Pipe," for instance, sold at auction in 2004 for $78.7
million.

But the stolen paintings are important because the artist chose to keep
them, said Pepe Karmel, an associate professor at New York University and
the author of "Picasso and the Invention of Cubism."

"They were meaningful to him, so he didn't sell them," Karmel said.

It was unclear if the thieves also made off with drawings by Picasso. Police
and the Paris prosecutor's office mentioned only the two paintings, but the
director of the Picasso Museum in Paris, Anne Baldassari, said several
paintings and drawings were stolen. She did not give details.

The Art Loss Register now lists 549 missing Picasso pieces, including
paintings, lithographs, drawings and ceramics, said Beth Kocher, an art
historian with the register. In all, the group's database contains more than
170,000 pieces of stolen, missing or looted art.

The number of missing Picassos is so large because he was so prolific. He
created so much in so many different media, in fact, that it is difficult to
pinpoint an exact number of his artworks -- it depends on what counts as
art.

Auctioneers in Paris in 1998 sold matchbox covers that Picasso doodled on,
as well as other small treasures. One item on the auction block was a scrap
of paper with a bloodstain on it. Below the stain, Dora Maar, another of
Picasso's muses, wrote: "Blood of Picasso."