LOS ANGELES _ The downtown complex that has housed the Los Angeles Times for decades is filled with notable spaces: the pristine test kitchen, the bustling newsroom and the historic Globe Lobby with its 10-foot-high murals, busts of past publishers and hulking linotype machine.
Then there's the community room, a drab, workaday gathering spot for employees and visitors that inspires few selfies. But for years, something remarkable resided in this otherwise unremarkable space, largely unseen.
It was art, five pieces framed as one, often hidden behind a lowered projection screen.
The artist was Pablo Picasso.
The five lithographs were abstract depictions of famous literary figures, including Shakespeare, done in vibrant brushstrokes.
They were among the last vestiges of a 110-piece art collection assembled in the late 1960s and early '70s by the newspaper's parent company, Times Mirror Co.
Dr. Franklin Murphy, the former UCLA chancellor who became Times Mirror's chief executive in 1968, built the collection with Otis Chandler, who served as Times publisher from 1960 to 1980 and whose family owned the newspaper and its parent.
Works by 20th-century artists Picasso, Rufino Tamayo, Helen Frankenthaler, Milton Avery, Richard Diebenkorn, Isamu Noguchi, Ellsworth Kelly, Saul Steinberg, Claes Oldenburg and many others were put on display in 1973 with the opening of the Times Mirror Building, which adjoined the existing newspaper headquarters.
The artwork was a physical manifestation of the company's immense power and momentum in those halcyon days, said author Margaret Leslie Davis.
"It was this ethos that Los Angeles had arrived. (They) are not buying Old Masters _ this isn't for the socialites, this isn't for the ladies page. This is modern and bold, reflective of the new Los Angeles," said Davis, whose book about Murphy, "The Culture Broker," details the creation of the art collection. "This was really radical. It showed tremendous taste _ an informed sensibility of what was worth buying and presenting in terms of the Times Mirror image to the world."
Corporate dining rooms were named after artists _ Picasso, Tamayo and Steinberg _ whose works hung in them. The five Picasso lithographs were from a 29-piece set of his artwork that had been on display.
"The Picasso Room was exclusive _ you had to be an officer in the corporation, a high-up editor to go there," said Roger Smith, who joined the newspaper in 1977, later became national editor and left in 2013. "I don't think I got Picasso privileges until the 1990s. It was, 'Oh wow, I've kind of arrived.'"
By the late 1990s, when financial challenges grew and the Chandler family's patience with newspapers began to wane, the dismantling began. Chicago-based Tribune Co. bought Times Mirror in 2000, and by 2012 most of the collection had been sold off.
But it lived on as newsroom folklore. Veteran staffers told odd and possibly apocryphal tales about the art: that editors were given valuable pieces when they left the newspaper, that a former publisher had works depicting nude women taken down because they offended his sensibilities.
Reporters had cause to revisit this history earlier this year when then-incoming Times owner Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong announced plans to relocate the paper to El Segundo _ a move spurred by the 2016 sale of the downtown property to a Canadian developer.
Some staffers began to explore the historic property on nostalgia-laced, self-guided tours. And a visit was paid to the community room to see the Picasso lithographs, perhaps for a final time. They seemed to be the last connection to that vaunted bygone era.
But there was a problem: They were gone.
The artwork had disappeared at some point between 2014 and 2018, a period of great tumult at The Times, as a series of publishers and top editors were shuffled in and out by then-owner Tribune Publishing, which renamed itself Tronc.
The hunt for Picasso was on.
