Though nothing is official yet, it appears that a painting said to be by Pablo Picasso, seized by the police in Iraq after the owner tried to sell it for $450,000, is not authentic. Police claimed that The Naked Woman was stolen from the Kuwait National Museum during Iraq's 1990 invasion of the country.
But some of the painting's characteristics appear to discredit that claim, including a tag in the back with several misspellings, and a note saying the painting was sold to the Kuwait museum from the Louvre — suspicious on two levels, as the Louvre does not sell work and both museums' names were oddly lowercased. Museums in France are searching their archives for a record of the work, but nothing has turned up yet.
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