A painting thought to be a work by Picasso stolen from the Kunsthal Museum in Rotterdam in 2012 was revealed to be a fake, planted in Romania by two members of a Belgian theatre company as a publicity stunt. 

On the night of October 15 to 16, 2012, seven artworks temporarily on display at the Kunsthal Museum by Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Claude Monet, Paul Gauguin and Lucian Freud, with an estimated value of around €100mn, were stolen in a raid that lasted no more than three minutes.

The Romanian thieves were captured, sent to jail and ordered to pay €18mn by a Bucharest court in 2014. 

The paintings have been missing ever since, until Romanian-born Dutch writer Mira Feticu said on November 18 she had discovered the missing Picasso, Tete D’Arlequin, in Romania thanks to tips received by anonymous mail. 

Feticu claimed to have received a message with a precise description of the location in Romania where the missing Picasso painting was buried, Digi24 TV reported. She and a Dutch friend, Frank Westerman, followed the indications in the letter, found the painting under a tree and brought it to the Dutch Embassy that in turn handed the artwork to the Romanian authorities.

“DIICOT investigates the circumstances under which a Picasso-signed painting worth about €800,000 was found on Saturday evening in Tulcea county. The painting, which is part of a batch of seven works stolen in 2012 from a Dutch museum, is in the custody of the Romanian authorities and is about to be authenticated,” Romania’s anti-crime body DIICOT said on November 18. DIICOT then sent the painting to the Romanian Art Museum to be authenticated.

However, the painting later turned out to be a publicity stunt by the Belgian theatre makers, nos.nl reported. The duo informed Feticu and Westerman in an e-mail that the stunt was part of their performance True Copy, which premiered in Antwerp on November 15. They also made the news public via a tweet. 

Feticu had published a novel ("Tascha") based on the “theft of the century” in 2014.

The mastermind of the heist was the mother of the three thieves, Olga Dogaru, who claimed that she burned the paintings in her stove in a village in a bid to protect her sons when they could not sell them. After investigating the ash, experts confirmed at least three paintings were burned in the stove. Dogaru later retracted the statement but further investigations made no progress in the case.