The Curious Case of the Le Guennec Picassos
How did Pierre Le Guennec—a 71-year-old French electrician—come to possess a cache of more than 250 previously unknown or presumed missing Pablo Picasso works, valued at more than $60 million? The artist’s biographer about their provenance.
It is my belief that this treasure trove belonged to a massive group of some 70 portfolios of works on paper which the artist had been obliged to remove from his Paris apartment on the Rue la Boétie and his studio on the Rue des Grands Augustins after the French government enacted regulations preventing people from having multiple residencies. Picasso had tried and failed to fight this injunction, but since he had apparently forsaken his Paris properties to reside in the Villa La Californie at Cannes, he was unsuccessful. To his rage, he was forced to relinquish them and have their contents stored or sent down to Cannes.
Douglas Cooper, the celebrated British Picasso collector, and I happened to be visiting Picasso when this vast shipment arrived. He asked us to help him go through some of the portfolios. The next two days were spent sitting on the floor of the principal studio rediscovering these treasures. He hadn’t looked at most of the material for 20 or 30 years, Picasso said, and the contents were as much a surprise to him as they were to us. The artist’s excitement was infectious and his comments fascinating.
The contents, which had never been photographed or catalogued, were exceedingly varied—and anything but systematically organized. Virtually everything was on paper, so you never knew what was going to emerge. Nor were the contents confined to the artist’s work. One portfolio had nothing in it but blank sheets of rare paper, which Picasso collected: 17th- and 18th-century sheets, French, Italian, Japanese. Another portfolio might contain little of consequence—exhibition catalogues, pamphlets, mementos from his Russian Ballet years. It was the luck of the draw.
Picasso was especially excited to re-discover a group of portrait drawings (circa 1900) of fellow members of Els Quatre Gats, a Barcelona group that was sacred to his memory. These portraits have reappeared in Le Guennec’s cache. Picasso would never, in my opinion, have given away these works—so relevant to his early development—not even to his wife.
As soon as I heard about Le Guennec’s Picassos, I realized they had to have been part of this horde that had arrived in Cannes more than 50 years ago. How such a large chunk of the artist’s private collection ended up in the possession of Le Guennec is another matter. Picasso was exceedingly generous with his work, but he never gave away anything from earlier periods, always from whatever he was working on at the time and available in the studio. Also, when he gave someone a drawing or a print, he always signed and also inscribed it. Of the 271 works said to be in Le Guennec’s cache, reportedly only one of them bears the artist’s signature, and none of them is inscribed.
The Le Guennec affair puts me in mind of the large collection of works, mostly on paper and mostly executed at the end of the artist’s life, belonging to the heir of his driver, Maurice Bresnu, which appeared on the market in the 1990s. Bresnu (nicknamed “Nounours”) and his wife endeared themselves to the Picassos. At first mistakenly thought to have been fakes and, later, to have been stolen—only a fraction had been inscribed—they were ultimately O.K.’d by the Picasso administration and put up for sale at Christie’s (November 19, 1998). It will be interesting to see how the Picasso administration, not to mention the French judiciary, reacts in this new, far graver case.
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