It vanished from storage in the Georges Pompidou Centre in Paris 14 years ago only to show up late last year in New York customs in a FedEx box innocently marked “handicrafts” and “toy”. But La Coiffeuse (The Hairdresser ) by Pablo Picasso has finally been returned to its rightful owners, the French government.
Measuring only 13 by 18 inches but valued at about $15m (£9.6m), the Cubist work was discovered by US Customs officials as it arrived at the Port of Newark last December. The sender was identified as “Robert” in Belgium. Recognising a Picasso when they saw one, they handed it over to federal officials. “A lost treasure has been found,” Loretta Lynch, then a chief prosecutor in New York and now US Attorney General, declared at the time.
Now the 1911 painting will make a return journey across the Atlantic after a handing over ceremony at the French Embassy in Washington DC.
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Bequeathed to the National Museums of France by one of its former directors, the work was last seen by the public in 1998 when it was part of an exhibit in Munich, Germany.
That the painting had gone missing at all was only discovered in 2001 when a new loan request was received and officials at the Pompidou Centre could not find it.
