The stealing of Picasso’s Le pigeon aux Petits Pois

The day The Spiderman stole one of Picasso’s most iconic paintings

The Painting: Le pigeon aux Petits Pois

Last known location : Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris

Picasso once said, “Good artists borrow, great artists steal”. Ironically, it is his work that has been stolen the most, in the history of art crime.

Probably, the great artist failed to consider that this statement of his would become applicable to the disappearance of many of his own pieces of work throughout history.

As Picasso’s popularity and fame exploded, so did the value of his work translating into hundreds of millions of dollars in asset price. Valuation, that intrinsically attracted all kinds of con artists making a beeline to gather their own slice of Picasso through stealing, forgery and crime.

This trend continues even today.

Le pigeon aux Petits Pois was one of Picasso’s greatest pieces of work. But its popularity soared in pop culture, because of the mystery associated with its disappearance. Its infamy, derived from the nature of the burglary through which it was stolen and apparently destroyed.

This is the story of that crime.

So, let’s start by taking a short journey into the past. During the first and second decades of the 20th century, Pablo Picasso was highly prolific. It was during this time that he created Le pigeon aux Petits Pois (or The Pigeon with green peas). This oil on canvas painting was created during the first period of cubism, known as “Analytical Cubism”, a movement that started in 1907 in collaboration between Picasso and Georges Braque.

Using geometric shapes to convey the forms of people and objects, cubism offered viewers perspectives in motion from multiple angles. Subjects were depicted in a fractured way to create a multi-dimensional viewpoint on a two-dimensional canvas. Colour palettes were intentionally limited to express this effect, and over time these geometric shapes became more prominent, creating more abstraction in the process.

Till 2010, Le pigeon aux Petits Pois found pride of place in the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. But then, on May 20, 2010, tragedy befell. The painting got stolen from inside the museum with four other masterpieces never to be found again.

The Heist

The following is corroborated from investigations and CCTV footage.

The Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris is situated inside the Palais de Tokyo, which stands between Avenue Du President Wilson and Avenue de New York by the Seine.

On the night of May 20, 2010, at around 3 am, a solitary individual wearing a dark hoodie unscrewed a window pane of the Palais De Tokyo, which houses the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris. This saved the vibration sensors from going off. Once he had unscrewed the window pane, he came across a padlocked grille, which he had to shear using a pair of pliers.

On most nights, this would have triggered the infrared sensors, but on this night, the sensors stayed strangely silent. Guards stationed inside the museum had no warning that an infiltrator had entered their premises. So why did the sensors remain silent? Because very conveniently, they were out of operation during this time, awaiting spare parts for repair, which had yet to arrive.

Did the burglar know about it? Was it an inside job?

More on that later.

Once inside, the burglar moved with purpose and conviction. Carefully avoiding some of the more prominent CCTV cameras, he first removed the Nature Morte aux Chandeliers (Still Life with Candlesticks), a 1922 painting by renowned French painter Fernand Léger, from its frame.

Alarms stayed silent.

He then moved through other galleries and took out four other paintings. These were, Le Pigeon aux Petits Pois (The Pigeon with Peas) by Pablo Picasso, La Pastorale (Pastoral) by Henri Matisse, L’Olivier Près de l’Estaque (Olive Tree near Estaque) by Georges Braque; and La Femme à l’Éventail (Woman with a Fan) by Amedeo Modigliani.

Suffice to say that the burglar knew his art and his cubism.

He then climbed out of the window with an estimated €100 million of stolen art in rolled-up canvasses and vanished into the darkness of “Gay Paree”. It was not until early morning on May 20, 2010 — that a security guard on his rounds discovered the missing window and one the most significant art heists in the history of France.

Twelve years later, none of these paintings are yet to be recovered.

So who was this burglar, and what were the chain of events that led to this heist ?

After years of investigation, police and art crime investigators have been able to stitch a logical and corroborated narrative of what happened on the night of May 20, 2010.

The chain of events starts not with Picasso’s painting but somewhere quite far away.

It starts with an antiques dealer named Jean-Michel Corvez who was commisioned by an unnamed buyer in Saudi Arabia to acquire the Nature Morte aux Chandeliers (Still Life with Candlesticks” by Fernand Léger.

Jean-Michel Corvez — Photo @ Getty Images

Nature Morte aux Chandeliers — by Fernand Léger

To carry out this heist, Corvez recruited Vjéran Tomic, a French-born Serbian with 14 fine art burglary convictions, for a fee of EUR 40,000.

Born in Paris, Tomic grew up partly in Bosnia and Herzegovina, where he learned the tricks of his trade. By age 11, he was back in Paris and scaling walls near the Père Lachaise cemetery, leapfrogging his way from one tomb to another across the graveyard. He then joined the French army and further polished his climbing skills. Decidedly, a career serving the nation’s security was not of Mr Tomic’s calling. So he diversified, finally finding fame in climbing wealthy Paris high-rises for stealing expensive jewellery and works of art.

His climbing skills were so good, it even earned him the moniker of “The Spiderman” in art theft circles.

Commission in hand, Vjéran Tomic set out to recce the museum. In his testimony after his arrest, Tomic confirmed that during several scouting visits, he had sprayed the window mounts of the Palais de Tokyo with acid so they could be easily dismantled. Then, around 3 am on May 20, 2010, he disassembled the window, cut the padlock and the chain of the metal grid behind it and entered the museum.

His initial brief had been to just steal the “Nature Morte aux Chandeliers”, but as confessed in his testimony, Tomic was so surprised when the alarms did not go off, that he just decided to pick up a few more decorated pieces of work, before calling it a night.

And that’s how Picasso’s Le pigeon aux Petits Pois got stolen. It wasn’t in the plan, but for the artistic tastes of a charismatic con artist nicknamed “The Spiderman” who had been commissioned to steal a Léger.

Not a Picasso.

Vjéran Tomic — Photo @ The Telegraph

After the heist

That night Tomic passed off all the paintings to Corvez who was absolutely stunned by the haul. He had architected one of the greatest art heists of all time with one man using a couple of plungers and a plier.

But this is not where the story ends.

The media furore that erupted was unprecedented. French police, Interpol and global media were all over it. This, in turn, had a chain reaction because Corvez’s anonymous Saudi buyer feared too much exposure and walked out of the deal leaving Corvez with EUR100 million of some of the world’s most notable paintings and no buyer.

Crime investigators will confirm that without a predetermined buyer in today’s world, it is almost impossible to steal paintings by the likes of Picasso and Matisse and sell them in the open or grey market. Anyone trying would be caught within days.

So now, Corvez had an impossible task. He had to find a new buyer willing to pay in millions for his stash of stolen Picasso’s and Modigliani’s. Not an easy task. Corvez then made a second recruitment. A personal friend named Yonathan Birn, an expert clockmaker working in the luxury watch business.

Yonathan decidedly took the paintings, buying the Modigliani for EUR 80,000 and keeping the rest in his shop until a buyer was found. In his testimony to the court, Birn later recounted that he started panicking as investigators closed in and arrested Tomic, who had bragged about the heist to friends, only for them to tip the police and get him arrested.

After spending many agonising months over what to do with the paintings, which were stored behind a metal cabinet in his Paris workshop, Birn eventually decided to destroy them. In mid-May 2011, one year after they were stolen, he put all five paintings in the green recycling bin in his apartment building and let Paris municipal services decide the fate of five of the world’s best-known masterpieces.

This is where the investigation ends.

Based on future testimony, investigators arrested Tomic, Corvez and Birn but could not find any painting . These were assumed to be destroyed and dusted in some Paris landfill.

But, literally, no one believes in this ending.

Witnesses who were questioned about Birn say he was too smart to have destroyed them.

William Bourdon, a lawyer who represented the City of Paris, which owns the museum, told reporters there was an “immense probability” that the three men had managed to set up a “smoke screen” to deceive the authorities, with the “hope and the ambition to one day retrieve their share of the loot.”

However, this is a theory, at best unproven to date.

So until anyone finds Picasso’s “Le pigeon aux petits pois” it is assumed to have ended in trash approximately 100 years after it was painted.

Yonathan Birn, Photo @ AP/ Shutterstock

Unanswered Questions

How did all the museum alarm systems and sensors fail at the same time?

There is no clear answer to this. Museum authorities say they needed repairs, but the question remains how did Tomic know the dates when they would not be in service? Who was the insider who informed him?

There is no credible answer to date.

How did Yonathan Birn, who could afford to buy a Modigliani for EUR 80,000, suddenly decide to destroy all the paintings in trash after one year? Why not burn them if destroying was the critical motive? And why did he wait one year to do so?

Most people do not believe in Birn’s testimony. Not even his accomplices Tomic and Corvez. Honour among thieves be damned, Tomic even went on record to say he was sure Birn didn’t destroy the paintings and wanted him to confess their location. “These are my artworks,” he added.

How is it that no one in Paris Municipal services bothered to check five heavy oil canvasses, admittedly crumpled during the sorting of trash?

Whatever the truth is, maybe time will tell. Suffice to say there are many unanswered questions about the details of the theft and what happened even twelve years later.

From a justice perspective, Tomic was sentenced for eight years in prison while Corvez got seven and Birn got six.

All three are free today, and it would be fascinating if these paintings do turn up suddenly in a “miracle” of fate in the next few years

Sources: New York Times, Irish Times, Seattle Times, Artnet, The Art Newspaper, APNews, National Post, LaTimes