A three-day court hearing in France involving Pablo Picasso’s former electrician, who was found to have kept a cache of the artist’s work, ended yesterday with the prosecutor asking for a five-year suspended prison sentence for Pierre Le Guennec, 75, who worked for Picasso before the artist’s death in 1973, and his wife Danielle. “That’s it, we’ve been condemned?” a startled Guennec asked his lawyer, and the couple left the court in their hometown of Grasse, on the French Riviera, obviously distressed. The final verdict and sentence, however, is not due to be handed down by the judge until 20 March.
French media have called this the “€60 million trial”, an allusion to the estimated value of the hoard of art they kept in their garage for almost 40 years: 271 unsigned Picasso collages, drawings, sketches or lithographs, dating from the first third of the 20th century. The prosecutor and Picasso’s family claim the cardboard box was stolen from Picasso’s villa Notre-Dame de Vie, at Mougins, where the electrician installed an alarm system. The Le Guennecs say the collection was given to them as a gift.
The trial opened to much fanfare on Tuesday, 10 February. Dozens of photographers, cameramen and reporters pushed and shoved each other in the courtroom to snap picture of the Le Guennecs. Danielle, her nails painted bright pink, never removed her fur-collar coat.
Clearly tense, Pierre said the box came as un unexpected gift from the painter's wife, Jacqueline Picasso, with the artist’s consent. Both maintained they “completely forgot” about the box of “crumpled paper”, and never thought it had any value. “I didn’t have in mind that they were works of art,” Pierre said. Their lawyers insisted the were no evidence that proved the box was ever stolen. But members and associates of the Picasso family all testified that the artist would have never given away such a collection, which includes intimate portraits of his first wife Olga and Fernande, his long-term lover who lived with him while he painted Les Demoiselles d'Avignon at the Bateau Lavoir studio, in Montmartre.
Anne Baldessari, the former director of the Musée Picasso in Paris and an ally of Claude Picasso, his son, said that it was “improbable” that the artist would give away a collection of this size. “The Picasso that I know did not separate himself from his work,” she said, “it would be like ripping off his skin.” Even the son of the painter’s housemaid said in court that Picasso might “give a print or a drawing, but he would always sign and dedicate it”.