Museum Finds A Genuine Lost Picasso… In Storage

People seem to find paintings and sketches by Pablo Picasso everywhere. Quick. Go look in your basement. Did you find a Picasso there? If you did, you’d have something in common with an Indiana museum that found a potentially priceless piece of Picasso’s art… in a storage room.

The story goes like this: the Evansville Museum of Arts, History & Science was rummaging through storage when museum officials took notice of a previously unnoticed work of glass art by Pablo Picasso. The Evansville Museum says the piece is titled “Seated Woman with Red Hat,” and was donated to the museum in 1963, meaning that it has been collecting dust in their basement for nearly 50 years.

So how did it get passed up for so long? According to Newser, museum officials say that the glass art piece was originally cataloged as art merely inspired by a design for a Picasso painting and was then mistakenly credited to an artist named Gemmaux.

According to the Associated Press, the label “Gemmaux” isn’t the name of an artist, but rather the plural form of “gemmail,” which is the type of glass used in the lost Picasso.

President Steven Krohn told the local paper that museum trustees have decided to have New York auction house Guernsey’s sell the piece due to the high costs of display, security, preservation, and insurance for the lost Picasso.

Krohn says that they don’t yet know how much the lost Picasso is worth, but we’re sure they’re hoping for a decent turnaround on it.