A collector's son was stunned to discover that the “junk” painting in his father's attic was actually a Pablo Picasso painting worth more than $6 million.
Andrea Lo Rosso, 60, said: Guard His father said that Luigi found the painting in 1962 while cleaning a house in his hometown in Italy. “My father was from Capri and collected scrap to sell for next to nothing,” Andrea explained.
However, back home in Pompeii, Andrea's mother tried to persuade Luigi to throw away the painting because he found it particularly disgusting. Although Picasso's signature took up a significant portion of the upper left corner, the identity of the artist managed to elude the family for decades.
“He found the painting before I was born and had no idea who Picasso was,” Andrea explained. “He was not a very cultured person. “My mother didn't want to keep it, she kept saying it was terrible.”
The painting had hung in a cheap frame in Lo Rosso's living room for decades. Throughout her childhood, Andrea often compared the signature on the painting with Picasso's handwriting in the art encyclopedia her aunt had given her. “When I was reading Picasso's works in the encyclopedia, I would look at the painting and compare it with his signature. I kept telling my dad it was similar, but he didn't see it,” Andrea said. “As I grew older, I continued to wonder.”
After her parents passed away, Andrea applied to the scientific committee of the Arcadia Foundation, which deals with the evaluation, restoration and attribution of famous works of art. Experts, along with renowned art detective Maurizio Seracini, analyzed the painting for years before determining that the signature was legitimate.
“After all other examinations of the painting were made, [the] “It's a matter of examining the signature,” explained Arcadia Foundation fellow and graphologist Cinza Altieri. “I worked on it for months and compared it to some of his original works. There is no doubt that the signature is his own. “There was no evidence to suggest it was fake.”
The painting, valued at $6 million today, depicts a distorted image of Dora Maar, the French painter and photographer who was Picasso's mistress and muse. Experts believe that this painting was painted between 1930 and 1936. Picasso frequently visited the island of Capri during this period. The painting is also similar to Picasso's Buste de Femme, another Maar-inspired painting that was rediscovered in 2019 after being stolen in 1999.
Luca Marcante, president of the Arcadia Foundation, believes that the recently discovered painting and the Buste de Femme may be two versions of the same artwork. “Both could be original,” Marcante told local media Il Giorno. “Presumably these are two not exactly identical portraits of the same subject, painted by Picasso at two different times.
Marcante plans to acquire the recently discovered painting and submit it to the Picasso Foundation for evaluation. The Foundation is particularly meticulous in its evaluations as it receives hundreds of messages every day from people claiming to own an original work. “I wonder what they said,” Lo Rosso said. “We were just a normal family and the goal was always to uncover the truth. “We're not interested in making money from this.”