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'Stolen' Picasso painting found under tree is fake
A Romanian novelist who thought she had discovered a painting by Pablo Picasso stolen in 2012 believes she was the victim of an elaborate hoax.
Mira Feticu made headlines around the world when she found a painting that appeared to be Picasso's Tete d'Arlequin wrapped in plastic under a tree in Eastern Romania and handed it in to the Dutch Embassy on Saturday.
But Frank Westerman, a Dutch journalist who helped Ms Feticu track down the picture, said on Monday that the pair had been hoodwinked by a publicity-hungry Belgian theatre.
"The supposed lost Picasso was put there by two Belgian theater makers," he wrote on Facebook. "The Flemish theater makers who lured writer Mira Feticu and I to a fake Picasso in Romania have to realize that they have managed to place a hoax in the New York Times with their project / joke / publicity stunt. And the NYT is already under heavy pressure from Trump as the flagship of the so-called 'fake news media'," he added.
The BERLIN theatre company in Antwerp, Belgium, which is putting on a play about the Dutch master forger Geert Jan Jansen, said in a tweet that it had "brought back" Tête d'Arlequin in a new frame.
"This was not intended as a publicity stunt but as an essential part of a theatre performance called True Copy," the Theatre said on its Website.
Separately, a former curator of the museum that owned the real "Tête d’Arlequin", or Harlequin's Head, told Dutch television that photos he had seen of the painting Ms Feticu and Mr Westerman found appeared to be of a forgery.
Romanian prosecutors, who said Sunday they were trying to verify the work's authenticity, could not immediately be reached for comment.
The painting was among several masterpieces worth millions of pounds lifted from an exhibition in Rotterdam's Kunsthal museum in one of the world's most audacious art heists.
Ms Feticu, a Dutch-Romanian writer who used a fictionalized account of the robbery in her 2015 novel Tascha, said she received an anonymous letter to her work address telling her where to find the painting earlier this month.
"The letter was written in Romanian. There was an address where the work would be hidden, and instructions on how I could find it," she told the Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad. "Immediately after reading, I called the Rotterdam detective who I worked with on my book. When I hadn't heard anything after a few days, I boarded the plane myself. It felt like I was Don Quixote, because the chances of finding it are one percent, yet you want to try it. "
"When I arrived at the address, I immediately started searching in the bushes. When I turned a stone over, I felt something was lying underneath; it turned out to be a plastic wrapped package containing the drawing."
She and Mr Westermen immediately handed it in to the Dutch embassy in Bucharest and later accompanied Romanian police back to the site to help with the investigation.
Other paintings taken during the 2012 robbery were Matisse's "La Liseuse en Blanc et Jaune", Monet's "Waterloo Bridge, London" and "Charing Cross Bridge, London", Gauguin's "Femme devant une fenêtre ouverte", Meijer De Haan's "Autoportrait" and Lucian Freud's "Woman with Eyes Closed".
Although the Romanian ringleader was arrested and confessed in 2013, none of the paintings have ever been recovered. Investigators believe they may have been burnt by the suspect's mother in a bid to destroy evidence.