From The Atavist Magazine:
At first the letter read to Mira Feticu like a suicide note.
“I am tired of being the guard,” it said. “The story is over. It only
brings trouble.”
Consisting of a few short sentences typed on
cream-colored paper, the letter wasn’t signed. “It was so dark,” Feticu
said later. “I thought, What story? Somebody needs something.” The
letter described a remote forest in Romania, Feticu’s native country,
and included instructions. “Follow the path. After 450 meters you will
find an old tree,” it directed. Nearby was another tree, marked with red
paint. “Harlequin lies buried under the rock.”
The letter wasn’t a suicide note—it was a treasure map. The harlequin was Pablo Picasso’s Tête d’Arlequin
(Harlequin Head). Completed in 1971, two years before the artist’s
death, it’s a drawing in ink, colored pencil, and pastel on thick brown
paper. The work was part of a private collection that hung in
Rotterdam’s Kunsthal museum, a pavilion designed by Rem Koolhaas, until
the early morning hours of October 16, 2012, when thieves broke in
through a back door and made off with the Picasso and six other works,
by Henri Matisse, Claude Monet, Paul Gauguin, Lucian Freud, and Jacob
Meyer de Haan. Experts estimated that the missing items were worth as
much as $115 million. Four Romanian men were apprehended, tried, and
convicted, but the art was never recovered. The mother of one of the men
claimed to have burned it in her kitchen to protect her son; she later
retracted her statement, but a forensic analysis of the ash in her stove
found traces of what appeared to be nails from art frames used before
the end of the 19th century. Some experts believe that at least three
paintings went up in flames.
The mysterious letter sent to Feticu
in November 2018 suggested that the harlequin drawing had survived. “Can
you imagine?” she asked me a few months after she received it in the
mail. “The chance to find a Picasso.”
Feticu is an author and poet who lives in the Netherlands. She has a
round, youthful face and straight dark hair that she sometimes dyes
blond. In 2015, she published a novel called Tascha, based
on the story of a girlfriend of one of the Rotterdam thieves, who
brought his lover to the Dutch city to become a sex worker. Presumably
because of the book, Feticu was the recipient of the letter indicating
that whoever had the Picasso drawing wanted to give it up. The note was
an invitation: Come get it.
Feticu told me that she contacted the
Dutch police, speaking briefly with a detective who had investigated the
heist in 2012; he said that he would call her back. When he didn’t,
Feticu confided in Frank Westerman, a fellow writer and friend. They
decided to go to Romania together.
Five days later, Feticu and
Westerman were tromping through a snowy forest in eastern Romania, near
the village of Carcaliu, where the thieves were originally from.
Following the letter’s instructions, the writers walked until they
located a stripe of red paint on a tree. After clearing away snow,
leaves, and a thin layer of dirt at the foot of the trunk, Feticu and
Westerman found a rock. Underneath, wrapped in plastic, was the treasure
they’d hoped would be there. The black ink, the pastel shading, the
elongated, contorted face with a bulbous nose, close-set eyes, and deep
wrinkles that hardly look like laugh lines—it was the missing harlequin.
Feticu
burst into tears. “I was more than excited,” she told me. Holding the
Picasso in her hands, she considered how the tragedy of the Rotterdam
heist, and the humiliation she felt it cast on Romanians, might be
transformed into a story of redemption.
Feticu and Westerman
returned to their car, photographed the drawing, and sent the images to
news programs in the Netherlands. They then drove to the Dutch embassy
in Bucharest, where the Picasso was whisked to Romania’s national art
museum. Rather than greeting them as redeemers, the police interrogated
Feticu and Westerman for several hours, to make sure the writers weren’t
complicit in the heist. “I was a little bit scared, because the
Romanian police are not so kind,” Feticu said.
The pair were
cleared, and news of their discovery headlined the evening news in
Romania. The story quickly spread around the world, picked up by outlets
like The Guardian, the Associated Press, and Le Figaro. A
sensational crime, an anonymous tip, and a prized work of art buried in
the earth made for a remarkable tale. Reporters and art lovers alike
were hopeful that authentication efforts would prove that a masterpiece
had indeed been found.
Within 24 hours, however, the optimism had evaporated.....
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