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Prosecutor tells trial electrician 'deprived world' of Picasso works

Prosecutors have called for a five year suspended sentence at the trial of a retired electrician and his wife, accused of stealing 271 works by the artist.

Pierre Le Guennec and his wife Danielle, 10 Feb 2015.
Pierre Le Guennec and his wife Danielle, 10 Feb 2015. Reuters/Eric Gaillard
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Retired electrician Pierre Le Guennec, now 75, says Picasso and his wife Jacqueline gave him the oil canvases, drawings and rare Cubist collages when he was doing work on the last property the couple lived in before the artist died in 1973.

But some of Picasso’s heirs, including his son Claude, suspect otherwise and have filed a complaint against the couple.

One of the main arguments put forward by their lawyer is that Picasso, fully aware of the value of his work, always signed it, whether he gave it away or sold it.

Gerard Sassier, the son of Picasso's long-time chambermaid who for years lived in close proximity to the artist, took the stand on Wednesday.

He said Picasso would often draw something and autograph it for people he liked.

"He did a portrait of my mother every year, he gave her lithographs and ceramics," he told the court.

But he insisted everything was always signed.

According to Sassier, after a theft attempt, Picasso once told his mother, who kept the keys to his studio: "In any case, nothing can be stolen as nothing is signed."

He said that gifting 180 individual works and a pad of 91 drawings that were not autographed was "unimaginable."

Le Guennec said Picasso's wife Jacqueline one day unexpectedly gave him a box with the 271 works of art inside.

He told the court on Tuesday that when he got home, he looked inside and found "drawings, sketches, crumpled paper," adding he and his wife Danielle did not look through everything, not really knowing they were valuable works of art.

"It's not as if I saw a painting, it's not the same," he said.

He put the present in his garage and discovered it again years later, in 2009.

But when he went to Paris the following year to get the works authenticated at the Picasso Administration, the artist's heirs filed their complaint.

Dominique Sassi, who worked in a ceramics studio where Picasso also came to work, told the court Wednesday that the artist would keep everything, "even his failed ceramics”.
And Christine Pinault, an authentication expert at the Picasso Administration, said that among the 271 works were eight very rare Cubist collages, as well as "intimate souvenirs" such as a portrait of his first wife Olga and of a girlfriend called Fernande.

"One can't imagine he could have given them to another person," she said.

The prosecutor declared on Thursday that in Picasso’s various houses there were “thousands of works, everywhere, the disappearance of a box would not necessarity be noticed.”

He noted that Le Guennec and his wife made no money at all from the Picasso works but say “this is a very unusual offence, which harms humanity, because for over 40 years the whole world was deprived of these works.”
 

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