The $15 Million Picasso That Traveled the World as a $37 Christmas Gift

Picasso painted La Coiffeuse — French for The Hairdresser — in Paris in 1911, during the intense experimental period of his Cubist phase. Bequeathed to the French state, the small oil-on-canvas became part of the collection of the Musée National d'Art Moderne, housed at the Centre Georges Pompidou. It was last publicly exhibited in Munich, Germany, in 1998, after which it was returned to Paris and placed in storage.

Then it simply disappeared. The theft was so silent that the museum did not realize the painting was gone until November 2001, when staff went to retrieve it from storage in preparation for a loan — reportedly for an exhibition in India — and could not find it. The picture, then valued at around $2.5 million, was declared stolen and entered into Interpol's database of missing works of art. The exact moment of the theft was never pinned down; because the painting had been in storage since 1999, it could theoretically have vanished as much as two years before anyone noticed. For more than a decade, one of Picasso's Cubist works was a ghost.

Its reappearance was as mundane as its disappearance had been mysterious. On 17 December 2014, US customs agents conducting a targeted inspection in Newark, New Jersey, opened a FedEx parcel shipped from Belgium. The package had been sent by someone identified only as "Robert," with a Belgian address, and was bound for a climate-controlled warehouse in the New York area. The shipping label bore the words "Joyeux Noël" — Merry Christmas — and described the contents as an "art craft/toy" worth just €30, about $37. Inside, wrapped in ordinary parcel paper, was Picasso's missing La Coiffeuse.

What tipped off investigators, officials later explained, was the mismatch between the parcel's story and its destination: a package supposedly carrying a cheap $37 Christmas gift was headed for a climate-controlled fine-art storage facility, a peculiar destination that aroused suspicion. The painting was turned over to Homeland Security Investigations, the arm of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement that pursues international art trafficking.

In January 2015, two experts from the Paris museum traveled to New York and, comparing the canvas against historical records and photographs, authenticated it as the genuine long-lost Picasso. "A lost treasure has been found," declared Loretta Lynch, then US Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, who filed a civil forfeiture suit to wrest the painting from the black market and return it to its rightful owner. By now the work was valued at roughly $15 million.

On 13 August 2015 — some nine months after its interception — ICE Director Sarah Saldaña formally repatriated the painting to France in a ceremony at the French Embassy in Washington, DC. The following month, in September 2015, La Coiffeuse was unveiled once more at the Pompidou Center in Paris, attended by a senior French government minister and the US ambassador. The painting had suffered only minor damage and required some restoration after its long, strange journey.

The recovery was hailed as a rare art-crime success story and a model of Franco-American customs cooperation. Yet a central mystery endures: authorities never revealed who "Robert" was, how the Picasso was stolen from the Pompidou's archives in the first place, or where it had spent the missing years. No arrests were made, and the investigation into the theft remained open. The Pompidou, for its part, overhauled its security and collection-management systems in the aftermath.