A Pablo Picasso etching stolen from a downtown Milwaukee art gallery in February 2018 has finally been found, after a community member walked into Milwaukee Police District Four on North 76th Street on Wednesday and handed it over. An authenticator confirmed the following day that the print was indeed the missing piece, closing out an eight-year gap since it vanished without a trace.
The artwork, titled Torero, is a 1949 aquatint etching that was one of only 30 originally produced in that limited edition, each hand-signed by Picasso in green crayon in the lower right corner, according to FOX 6 Milwaukee. It disappeared on February 16, 2018, from DeLind Fine Art Appraisals LLC at 751-761 N. Jefferson Street in the East Town neighborhood, as reported by CBS 58. Milwaukee Police Department investigators are now working to locate the rightful owner of the piece, per an Urban Milwaukee press release from the department.
At the time of the theft, the etching was on consignment from its private owner, with gallery co-owners Bill DeLind and Michael Goforth attempting to sell the piece on the client's behalf. That original consignor is the very person police are now trying to track down, eight years later, before the artwork can be returned to its rightful home.
A Theft Nobody Saw Coming
DeLind said in 2018 that the thief likely slipped in through an unlocked front door unnoticed while staff members were upstairs, since the gallery had no internal security cameras at the time. Gallery owners had hoped surveillance footage from across the street might help identify a suspect, but the case went cold for years afterward.
After the print disappeared, the gallery registered it with international stolen-art databases in London and New York and offered a $5,000 reward for information leading to its return, the same report notes. Law enforcement and fine art appraisers estimated the etching's value between $35,000 and $50,000 both at the time of the theft and again upon its recovery this week, a figure that held steady across the eight-year investigation.
Recognized and Returned
The community member who turned the etching over to police recognized the piece before bringing it to District Four, though how that person came to possess it in the first place remains unclear. The Milwaukee Police Department expressed gratitude to that individual for coming forward and returning the artwork rather than attempting to sell or keep it.
Whether any suspect has ever been identified or charged in connection with the original 2018 burglary is still an open question, and the department's statement did not address it. For now, investigators are focused on confirming the print's authenticity, which they've done, and finding the owner it was taken from.
A City With a Strange Picasso History
This isn't Milwaukee's first brush with a vanishing Picasso. In 1969, a $40,000 Picasso painting bound for Milwaukee's Irving Gallery disappeared at Logan Airport in Boston during a snowstorm, only to be recovered by the FBI after a cargo worker had taken the crate home, unaware of what was inside, according to Urban Milwaukee.
Picasso's prints remain a deep and valuable corner of the art market more broadly. He produced roughly 2,400 print works over his career, and his prints have fetched record prices at auction, including £6 million for Le repas frugal at Christie's in 2022, per Christie's own research on the artist's printmaking output.
Cases like this one typically move through the FBI's National Stolen Art File, a public database created to help local police departments and international authorities track and recover stolen cultural property valued over $2,000. It's the kind of federal framework that gives local departments like Milwaukee's a fighting chance of eventually recovering pieces that slip through the cracks for years, even decades, before someone recognizes what they're really looking at.
