A silver plate crafted by Pablo Picasso and valued at US$85,000 was stolen in Miami just as one of the world’s premier art festivals kicked off, police said Friday.
Police are investigating the theft, which apparently occurred overnight, a police source told AFP. The 1956 work, Visage aux mains, one in a series of 20 silver plates by the famous Spanish artist, disappeared from one of the many exhibition halls set up around Miami in parallel to the annual Art Basel festival.
“I’ve been doing art shows all my life,” David Smith, owner of the Amsterdam-based Leslie Smith Gallery, which owned the Picasso work, told the Miami Herald. “I’ve never, ever had anything stolen.”
Photo: EPA
The 16.5-inch (40-centimeter) plate, featuring a rudimentary face and hands, had been installed at the Art Miami display on Monday.
According to Smith, in Miami for the art fair, a security guard saw the plate during regular rounds on Thursday night, but when the collector arrived Friday morning, it was gone.
The exhibition hall is guarded 24 hours a day, but there aren’t security cameras everywhere.
The plate was the only item to disappear from the gallery, which is exhibiting a number of even more valuable items, including a Picasso ceramic valued at US$365,000, Smith said.
But the plate’s small size makes it easy to hide, he suggested, adding that the theft had been reported to an international registry of stolen art aimed at blocking black-market sales.
Tens of thousands of collectors, museum curators, art lovers and tourists come to Miami each year for Art Basel, the US installation of a festival created in Switzerland in 1970. Parallel exhibits, aimed at taking advantage of the influx of art-minded visitors, also spread over the city.
May 6 to May 12 Those who follow the Chinese-language news may have noticed the usage of the term zhuge (豬哥, literally ‘pig brother,’ a male pig raised for breeding purposes) in reports concerning the ongoing #Metoo scandal in the entertainment industry. The term’s modern connotations can range from womanizer or lecher to sexual predator, but it once referred to an important rural trade. Until the 1970s, it was a common sight to see a breeder herding a single “zhuge” down a rustic path with a bamboo whip, often traveling large distances over rugged terrain to service local families. Not only
Ahead of incoming president William Lai’s (賴清德) inauguration on May 20 there appear to be signs that he is signaling to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and that the Chinese side is also signaling to the Taiwan side. This raises a lot of questions, including what is the CCP up to, who are they signaling to, what are they signaling, how with the various actors in Taiwan respond and where this could ultimately go. In the last column, published on May 2, we examined the curious case of Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) heavyweight Tseng Wen-tsan (鄭文燦) — currently vice premier
The last time Mrs Hsieh came to Cihu Park in Taoyuan was almost 50 years ago, on a school trip to the grave of Taiwan’s recently deceased dictator. Busloads of children were brought in to pay their respects to Chiang Kai-shek (蔣中正), known as Generalissimo, who had died at 87, after decades ruling Taiwan under brutal martial law. “There were a lot of buses, and there was a long queue,” Hsieh recalled. “It was a school rule. We had to bow, and then we went home.” Chiang’s body is still there, under guard in a mausoleum at the end of a path
Last week the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) released a set of very strange numbers on Taiwan’s wealth distribution. Duly quoted in the Taipei Times, the report said that “The Gini coefficient for Taiwanese households… was 0.606 at the end of 2021, lower than Australia’s 0.611, the UK’s 0.620, Japan’s 0.678, France’s 0.676 and Germany’s 0.727, the agency said in a report.” The Gini coefficient is a measure of relative inequality, usually of wealth or income, though it can be used to evaluate other forms of inequality. However, for most nations it is a number from .25 to .50