An Italian family hopes to definitively prove that a painting thrown from a villa on the island of Capri more than 60 years ago is a Picasso, and they have collected scientific data to persuade the painter’s estate in Paris to make the final decision.
The rolled up canvas of a female figure had been discovered in a pile of rubbish which a second-hand dealer had been responsible for disposing of in the early 1960s. The painting remained hanging in the second-hand dealer’s living room and then in the family restaurant in Pompei, near from Naples, for years, until the son decided to investigate.
“My mother thought he was ugly,” the son, Andrea Lo Russo, said Thursday. Here we are more accustomed to maritime landscapes. »
His first intuition that the painting could be an important work came when he saw a Picasso in a school textbook, but neither his teacher nor his father were convinced. His curiosity persisted, and in his early twenties he and his brother traveled to the Picasso Museum in Paris with the painting.
“They looked at it and said, ‘That’s not possible,’” Mr. Lo Russo recalled. He then declined their invitation to leave the painting for further examination, not wanting to part with it.
Over the years, Mr. Lo Russo said his attempts to authenticate the painting exposed him to fraudsters who defrauded him. He himself was the subject of an investigation on suspicion of trafficking in counterfeit works of art — an investigation abandoned after he produced documents proving his attempts to verify the origin of the painting.
But after decades of attempts, Mr. Lo Russo believes that a recent battery of tests carried out by the Arcadia Foundation in Switzerland finally offers proof that it is indeed a Picasso.
According to Luca Marcante, a chemist by training, who founded Arcadia in 2000 to investigate the provenance of works of art, laboratory tests show that the pigments used correspond to Picasso’s color palette during the period in question. Then, a handwriting expert recently authenticated the signature, Mr. Marcante said.
The only entity that can authenticate the painting is the company Picasso Administration, in Paris. She has not responded to a series of requests over the years. Luca Marcante said he was preparing to share the most recent findings with her.
“You have to understand that they receive dozens of requests every day from individuals who believe they have found a Picasso,” he recalled.
Contacted by The Associated Press, the Picasso Administration declined to comment on the matter.
Mr. Marcante estimated the value of the painting at 6 million euros (nearly 9 million Canadian dollars), but said that if it were fully authenticated, it could rise to 10-12 million euros. After hanging for years in the Lo Rosso family home, the painting is now in a safe in Milan.
Mr. Marcante maintains that there is photographic evidence that Pablo Picasso visited the ruins of Pompeii in 1917, and says he probably also visited the nearby town of Capri, where he may have painted the canvas belonging to the Lo Russo in the early 1940s, then leaving her behind.