Two Picasso Prints Stolen from Sao Paulo Museum

SAO PAULO, Brazil—Three armed robbers stole two Picasso prints from a Sao Paulo art museum yesterday, the New York Times reports via the Associated Press. The prints, The Painter and the Model (1963) and Minotaur, Drinker and Women (1933), were taken along with two oil paintings by well-known Brazilian artists Emiliano Di Cavalcanti and Lasar Segall from the Pinacoteca do Estado museum. The art is worth a combined 1 million Brazilian reals ($612,000).

Around noon, the three armed men paid the museum entrance fee and went straight to the second-floor gallery where the pieces were hanging. They overtook three unarmed guards and grabbed the works, with the robbery taking only ten minutes in the nearly empty museum. They left the artworks in their frames and carried them out in plastic bags.

In December, a work by Picasso and one by Brazilian artist Candido Portinari were stolen from the Sao Paulo Museum of Art by three men. The paintings were found on January 8, covered in plastic and leaning against a wall in a house on the outskirts of the city.