‘Lost’ Picasso masterpiece found under tree is a fake

A ROMANIAN novelist who thought she had been led to a painting by Pablo Picasso stolen in 2012 believes she was the victim of an elaborate hoax.

Mira Feticu made headlines around the world when she found a painting that appeared to be Picasso’s Tête

d’arlequin under a tree in eastern Romania and handed it in to the Dutch embassy on Saturday. But Frank Westerman, a Dutch journalist who helped Ms Feticu track down the picture, said yesterday they had been hoodwinked by a publicity-hungry Belgian theatre.

The Berlin theatre company in Antwerp, which is putting on a play about Geert Jan Jansen, the Dutch master forger, said in a tweet that it had “brought back” Tête d’arlequin in a new frame. “This was not intended as a publicity stunt but as an essential part of a theatre performance called True Copy,” the theatre said on its website. Separately, a former curator of the museum that owned the real Tête

d’arlequin, told Dutch television he was sure it was a forgery.

Romanian prosecutors, who said on Sunday they were trying to verify the work’s authenticity, could not be reached for comment.

The painting was among several masterpieces stolen from an exhibition in Rotterdam’s Kunsthal museum in 2012, and none of them have ever been recovered.

Ms Feticu, who used a fictionalised account of the robbery in Tascha, her 2015 novel, said she received an anonymous letter telling her where to find the painting earlier this month.

“There was an address where the work would be hidden and instructions on how I could find it,” she told NRC

Handelsblad, a Dutch newspaper. “I called the Rotterdam detective who I worked with on my book. When I hadn’t heard anything after a few days, I boarded the plane myself.

“When I arrived at the address, I immediately started searching in the bushes. When I turned a stone over, I felt something was lying underneath; it turned out to be a plastic wrapped package containing the drawing.”

Investigators believe the real painting and others stolen artworks have been burnt.