The son of a collector was stunned to discover that a “junk” painting in his father’s attic was actually a Pablo Picasso painting worth more than $6 million.
Andrea Lo Rosso, 60, told The Guardian that his father, Luigi, found the painting in 1962 while he was cleaning out a house in his hometown in Italy. “My father was from Capri and would collect junk to sell for next to nothing,” Andrea explained.
But when he returned home to Pompeii, Andrea’s mother tried to convince Luigi to throw the painting away because she found it especially hideous. Despite Picasso’s signature taking up a significant portion of the top left-hand corner, the identity of the artist managed to elude the family for decades.
“He found the painting before I was even born and he didn’t have a clue who Picasso was,” Andrea explained. “He wasn’t a very cultured person. My mother didn’t want to keep it, she kept saying it was horrible.”
For decades, the painting hung in a cheap frame in the Lo Rosso’s living room. Throughout his childhood, Andrea frequently juxtaposed the signature on the painting to Picasso’s handwriting in an art encyclopedia gifted to him by his aunt. “While reading about Picasso’s works in the encyclopedia, I would look up at the painting and compare it to his signature. I kept telling my father it was similar, but he didn’t see it,” Andrea said. “As I grew up, I kept wondering.”
After his mother and father passed, Andrea turned to the Arcadia Foundation’s scientific committee, which deals in the valuations, restorations, and attributions of famous works of art. Along with the well-known art detective Maurizio Seracini, experts spent years analyzing the painting before determining the signature was legitimate.
“After all the other examinations of the painting were done, I was given [the] job of studying the signature,” Cinza Altieri, a graphologist and member of the Arcadia Foundation, explained. “I worked on it for months, comparing it with some of his original works. There is no doubt that the signature is his. There was no evidence suggesting that it was false.”
The painting, which today is valued at $6 million, depicts a distorted image of Dora Maar, a French painter and photographer who was Picasso’s mistress and muse. Experts believe it was painted sometime between 1930 and 1936. Picasso frequently visited the island of Capri during that period. The painting also bears a resemblance to Picasso’s Buste de Femme, another painting inspired by Maar which was rediscovered in 2019 after being stolen in 1999.
Luca Marcante, the Arcadia Foundation’s president, believes that the recently discovered painting and Buste de Femme might be two versions of the same artwork. “They could both be an original,” Marcante told local outlet Il Giorno. “They are probably two portraits, not exactly the same, of the same subject painted by Picasso at two different times.
Marcante plans to take the recently discovered painting and present it to the Picasso Foundation for appraisal. The foundation is particularly thorough in its evaluations, as it receives hundreds of messages every day from people claiming to have an original piece. “I am curious to know what they say,” Lo Rosso said. “We were just a normal family, and the aim has always been to establish the truth. We’re not interested in making money out of it.”
