Experts were called in to authenticate the work that a second-hand dealer allegedly found in his cellar in 1962.
Andrea Lo Rosso had doubts for years. This sixty-year-old Italian lived for a long time with this portrait of a lady hanging in his parents’ living room. He had begun to wonder if this painting that his mother « didn’t want to keep it » because she found it ugly was not reality a forgotten work by Pablo Picasso, reports The Guardian in an article spotted by The Parisianindicates La Voix du Nord.
His father, a second-hand dealer, never believed his son’s theory who tried to convince him, with his encyclopedia of art history under his arm, that the signatures of the great painter and the painting in the living room were strangely similar. He who did not even know who this Pablo Picasso was had found this painting by chance while emptying the cellar of a house in Capri in 1962.
After the death of his father, Andrea Lo Rosso continued to investigate this work and today he is sure: it is an original portrait of Dora Maar, a Franco-Croatian artist who was the mistress and muse by Pablo Picasso. The Guardian reports that an expert graphologist authenticated the signature as being that of the Spanish painter and valued the painting at no less than 6 million euros.
Another expert, Luca Marcante, president of the Arcadia Foundation, believes that it could be another version of the work “Bust of a Woman” by Dora Maar, painted in 1938 by Picasso, stolen in 1999 and found 20 years later. But only the Picasso Foundation in Malaga will be able to give the ultimate authentication to this painting. For the moment, she is unfortunately unreachable: the foundation receives hundreds of messages every day for the same request.
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