The 1911 Louvre Heist: Picasso Accused of Stealing Mona Lisa

It’s been a month since thieves broke into the Louvre and absconded with a valuable stash of crown jewels. In many of the early news reports, reference was made to an earlier and equally spectacular heist at the famous museum. On a summer morning in 1911, an employee of the Louvre noticed that the Mona Lisa was missing. Indeed, one of the best-known portraits in the world had been stolen and would not be located for another two years. As with the recent escapade, the details of the theft make for a fascinating story. One of the most surprising aspects of the case is that Pablo Picasso was arrested as a suspect in the crime.

This is the first part of a two-part post about the 1911 heist. My research of the story led me on several tangents—such is the curse of a curious mind. I’ve tried to coalesce my findings into a compact version of the story, and I’ve included historical elements that I feel help set the stage for a better understanding of why people acted as they did. I hope you enjoy reading as much as I enjoyed chasing down the details.

How the Mona Lisa Came to France

The fact that the Mona Lisa was painted by the Italian artist and inventor Leonardo da Vinci at the beginning of the 16th century begs the question of how it came to reside in the Louvre. Given Europe’s many centuries of conquest and pillage, it’s reasonable to assume that at some point, the French army ran off with it and delivered it into the eager arms of the reigning monarch. In a rare instance of civilized exchange, however, France obtained the iconic portrait through legitimate means.

In 1515, King François I (not generally remembered for his benevolence) invited da Vinci to join his royal court, serving as First Painter, Engineer, and Architect. The 64-year-old master of the Renaissance accepted the offer and moved to France, where he lived out the rest of his life. It was a sweetheart deal. Da Vinci received a sizable pension, was housed in the sumptuous Château du Clos Lucé in the Loire Valley, and given the freedom to pursue whatever intellectual or artistic endeavors he chose.

Traveling to France, however, was difficult. Da Vinci made the journey through the Italian and French Alps on the back of a mule. He was accompanied by a handful of students and two servants who managed the transport of his possessions. Among the valuables were da Vinci’s notes, sketches, manuscripts, and three of his paintings—the Mona Lisa, the Virgin and the Child, and St. John the Baptist.

François took particular interest in La Joconde, the French name for the Mona Lisa. Differing accounts claim he either bought the painting from da Vinci or received it as a gift. Either way, he took possession of the painting with da Vinci’s approval and hung it in his favorite residence, the Château Fontainebleau, outside Paris.

Thereafter, all the rulers of France seem to have treasured the Mona Lisa, whose origins are uncertain. Various theories propose the model’s identity: the wife of an Italian merchant, da Vinci’s mother, or even a disguised self-portrait. In 1699, Louis XIV moved the painting from Fontainebleau to his newly completed quarters in the Palace of Versailles. In 1797, after the French Revolution, the Louvre Palace was turned into a museum, and La Joconde was added to its collection. It didn’t stay there long before Napoleon Bonaparte squirreled it away to his private apartments in the Palace of the Tuilleries. He later returned it to the Louvre, where it remained the property of the French people until that fatal day in 1911.

The Day the Mona Lisa Disappeared

On the morning of August 22, 1911, the local painter Louis Béroud arrived at the Louvre to begin work on a new piece. The museum had hired him to portray scenes of daily life in the grand institution’s galleries, and his upcoming canvas would feature the Mona Lisa. At the time, mounting paintings behind protective glass was a relatively new and controversial practice. But increased air pollution, larger crowds, and occasional acts of vandalism had convinced the museum’s administrators that protective glazing was needed for their most valuable works.

Today’s museums use special glass with anti-glare properties, but in 1911, protective glass was highly reflective and, as a result, justifiably unpopular. The Mona Lisa had recently undergone such treatment, and Béroud’s idea was to create a painting of a stylish female visitor adjusting her coiffure, aided by her reflection in Mona Lisa’s protective skin.

Béroud arrived early that day, eager to begin work. It was a Monday, a day when doors remained closed to the public, giving custodial staff time to perform various housekeeping duties before new waves of visitors arrived in the coming week. When Béroud reached the Salon Carré, a room dedicated to Renaissance masterpieces, he found only four empty pins fixed to the wall where the painting had hung.

Protecting France’s Cultural Legacy

After the French Revolution, with the dissolution of France’s Ancient Regime, there was widespread redistribution of both aristocratic and ecclesiastical possessions. Auction houses sprang up, and many important cultural sites were deconstructed and sold off. In 1841, the French government issued a directive stating that certain historic monuments could not be modified without the Minister of the Interior’s approval. The goal was to protect buildings and architectural structures from being restored or altered without authorization. While its objectives were clear, the directive lacked teeth. There was no system in place to ensure it was followed.

In the late 1800s, as American wealth skyrocketed, France experienced a new kind of cultural looting. Rather than warring invaders or disgruntled members of the proletariat running off with the country’s antiquities and objets d’art, the nouveau riche industrial magnates of the United States were engaged in a buying frenzy, snatching up everything from architectural elements to decorative pieces to the continent’s most significant works of art. Suddenly, French citizens were beginning to realize the importance and vulnerability of their homeland’s cultural treasures.

As a result, in 1887, France passed a landmark law that expanded both the scope and enforceability of protection. While the 1841 directive covered immovable monuments, the 1887 law extended protection to movable objects—paintings, sculptures, furniture, manuscripts, and decorative arts. France’s patrimoine, its cultural heritage, was now seen as intrinsically tied to national identity. It needed to be preserved and protected in place, not redistributed around the globe.

Art Theft and the Belle Époque’s Black Market

Despite such protections, the market for Europe’s antiquities and masterworks seemed negligibly hindered. Soon, a small industry of counterfeits sprang up. A trafficker might approach a clergy member or museum employee and express interest in purchasing a specific artwork or relic. The artifact’s custodian would explain that the state had to sanction the sale, and that such requests were customarily rejected. Thus, the trafficker would propose substituting the original copy with a fake. Who would know the difference? Who would notice? What harm could this cause? And thus, a deal would be struck.

In addition, security measures were often minimal, and outright theft was still the preferred modus operandi for some traffickers. Indeed, before the Mona Lisa disappeared from its walls, the Louvre had tried to keep secret that hundreds of its pieces had vanished over the years.

One such crook was a Belgian man named Géry Pieret, a charming impostor who befriended the famous French poet Guillaume Apollinaire and began working as his secretary. A great connoisseur of the Louvre’s collection, Pieret also worked as a museum guide. It was the perfect gig for a charlatan. The Louvre employed only 12 guards at the time, and these men also served as custodial staff. There were no alarms or security cameras. So, Pieret went about stealing small objects in plain sight, lifting them from display tables or pedestals that weren’t shielded by a glass case.

Searching for the Mona Lisa

When Béroud discovered the Mona Lisa’s absence, he may have been annoyed, but he wasn’t particularly worried. Neither was the museum guard he reported the problem to. They first suspected that the painting had been moved to the museum’s new photography studio, where important pieces from the collection were being photographed. This was usually a quick process, but when the portrait did not return, a second guard was sent to the studio to check on it. When the photographer was unaware of the painting’s whereabouts, concern began to set in.

A quick check in the restoration studio, followed by calls to the relevant administrators, soon had everyone believing that La Joconde was likely stolen. The director of the Louvre happened to be on vacation, and oddly enough, upon receiving a telegram alerting him to the crisis, he thought it was a practical joke. On several occasions, local journalists had pranked the institution, planting fake statues to see if anyone would notice, or spending the night in an Egyptian sarcophagus without being detected. Such high jinks made for titillating articles that were both entertaining and legitimate calls for better protection of France’s national treasures.

After a search of the premises by museum employees came up empty-handed, the police were called. The chief of police, Louis Lepine, soon arrived with a small legion of sixty officers. They immediately began going through the place with a fine-tooth comb. In short order, Mona Lisa’s ornate frame and protective glass were found in a narrow stairwell leading to the interior Cour du Sphinx.

After interviewing all staff members, the police pieced together the thief’s escape route. The museum was always locked during closing hours, but when the thief arrived early in the morning, wearing a white dress shirt, the guard on duty assumed he was there on official business and let him in. After removing the painting from its frame, the thief escaped through the same door while the guard was busy washing the entry hall’s floor.

[It’s worth noting that in the Louvre’s vast network of halls and galleries, the Salon Carré, which held the Mona Lisa, is adjacent to the Galerie Apollon, which housed the recently stolen crown jewels.]

Theories Behind the 1911 Louvre Heist

In the days that followed, theories abounded as to who might be behind the heist. There was talk of a mysterious American art collector who had ordered the operation so he could display the Mona Lisa in a secret room of his mansion. Another theory posited that a foreign swindler had hired a French counterfeiter to create multiple copies of the painting. He’d then planned the theft of the original in order to command higher prices for his fakes. Others felt certain that Germany, France’s long-proclaimed enemy, had carried out the robbery in order to humiliate the French police.

It didn’t take long for the news to reach the ears of the poet Apollinaire. By this time, Apollinaire must have known of Géry Pieret’s shadier dealings. Pieret had recently returned to France and had been staying with Apollinaire around the time of the Mona Lisa’s disappearance. Four years earlier, while Pieret was working for Apollinaire, the swindler had shown up one day with two Iberian statues and offered to sell them. Apollinaire wasn’t interested, but he correctly suspected that his friend Pablo Picasso would be. Thus, acting as an intermediary, Apollinaire unwittingly had helped Pieret offload what he now suspected were stolen statuettes.

He contacted Picasso and shared his concerns. If Pieret had stolen the Mona Lisa, Picasso’s statuettes might also be contraband, and the two of them could be implicated in a widening scandal. According to one account, Picasso considered throwing the sculptures into the Seine, thereby concealing his connection to Pieret. His admiration for the ancient works, however, prevented him from doing so. In the end, the two artists decided to pass the statuettes to a local newspaper, Le Petit Parisien, that could then return them to the Louvre.

As they say, the best laid plans often go awry, and the two men quickly found themselves behind bars. While they had nothing to do with the theft, they were worried. Both were foreigners. Apollinaire had emigrated from Poland, and Picasso, a self-proclaimed anarchist, had come from Spain. Vocal members of the extreme right were quick to condemn the two of them, going so far as to claim that the Catholic Apollinaire, whose work often explored Jewish themes, was the head of a Jewish crime mob.

The Aftershocks of Wrongful Arrest

Since the police lacked evidence that showed a connection between their only suspects and the missing Mona Lisa, the two friends were released in less than a week. Both, however, had been deeply affected. Still a suspect, Picasso worried that he’d be expatriated to Spain, putting an end to his artistic career. He’d been so scared in court that he’d broken down crying, denying that he even knew Apollinaire. For years, he carried profound shame for his conduct under questioning from the judge.

Apollinaire also felt humiliated. He wrote while in prison that he’d been forced to take off his clothes and was nude when he entered his cell. He’d been slandered, insulted, and imprisoned for nearly a week. The scandal also negatively impacted his relationship with Marie-Laurent Saint, his mistress and muse, who left him.

Over the next year, the police allegedly followed up on more than 2,000 leads, all of which led nowhere. The Louvre was mocked in the press, as were its measures to beef up security. Eventually, the uproar settled down. There were bigger stories and scandals to capture people’s attention, notably the sinking of the Titanic in the spring of 1912.

Then, in December 1913, the Mona Lisa was found.

To be continued…