Picasso's Weeping Woman, taken from Melbourne

On the weekend of 2 and 3 August 1986, someone took a Picasso off the wall of the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne. The painting hung in the European gallery on the second floor. The thieves cut it free with a special security screwdriver and left the frame behind. In its place they hung a typed card in the gallery’s own style, dated 2 August. The Age reports that it said the work had been moved for restoration. It was signed ACT, which staff took to mean the Australian Capital Territory.

The painting was Weeping Woman, an oil on canvas of 55.2 by 46.2 centimetres. Picasso made it in Paris and dated it 18 October 1937. It is one of several Weeping Woman pictures he painted after Guernica. Press reports say the gallery bought it in 1985 for 1.6 million Australian dollars, the most an Australian public institution had paid for an artwork. The Guardian and Dixon put the real cost closer to 2 million dollars, because the Australian dollar fell. The New York Times gave 1.2 million US dollars. The gallery’s own credit line says 1986. ABC and The Art Newspaper report that the painting was not insured. Thomas Dixon, the gallery’s chief conservator then, writes that the building had no CCTV, only hourly patrols with torches.

A staff member saw the card on Sunday and was not suspicious. On Monday 4 August, The Age received a typed letter and told the gallery. The director, Patrick McCaughey, first took it for a hoax, then confirmed the loss that afternoon. The letter came from a group that called itself the Australian Cultural Terrorists. It was addressed to Race Mathews, who was both the state’s arts minister and its police minister. It demanded a 10 per cent rise in arts funding over three years and a new annual painting prize, the Picasso Ransom, worth 25,000 dollars. The deadline was seven days, after which the painting would be destroyed. Mathews answered that “Budgeting by blackmail is just not on”.

More letters followed. Accounts differ on how many. The New York Times reported four ransom notes by 6 August. ABC describes three before the painting was found, and then a final one. The deadline passed on 9 August and no harm came to the painting. The reward also depends on the source. The Age reported 30,000 dollars on 20 August 1986. ABC, The Art Newspaper and Dixon say 50,000.

At about 8 pm on Tuesday 19 August 1986, a man telephoned The Age and said he spoke for the group. He quoted a number from the second letter that had not been made public. He said the painting was in locker 227 at Spencer Street railway station. Staff opened the locker at about 9 pm. The painting lay in brown paper on its stretcher, unrolled and undamaged, with a note that police called threatening.

Nobody has ever been charged. ABC reports that police thought three or more people were involved, from the art world or its fringe, and that two women were seen near the locker with a parcel. Police closed the file in 1989, citing a lack of solid evidence. The Sydney Morning Herald wrote in 2016 that Victoria Police still counted it as a cold case, and the Guardian called it unsolved in December 2021. The painting soon hung again at the gallery. The Art Newspaper reported it in the NGV exhibition Picasso Century in June 2022, and the gallery lists it on Level 2 at NGV International.