Two paintings by Salvador Dali stolen last year found

Two works by Spanish artist Salvador Dali worth 300,000 euros stolen last year from a private home in Barcelona have been found in a warehouse and returned to their owners, police said on Friday.

The works are drawings “Els Pagesos” and “Les sardanes de la festa major”, made by Dali in 1922, commissioned by the artist to illustrate a book that was never published.

The works were removed last January from a home in Barcelona by three brothers, aged 50, 53 and 55, who were robbing luxury villas in the Catalan capital.

The theft was intended to take money, jewelry, and other valuable items without focusing on artwork, which ended in the defeat of the police investigation, which initially believed that Dalí’s drawings were stolen on the order of some collector or drug dealer. art, as the Catalan police explained this Friday.

A clue to the Dalí drawings, which authorities were looking for in the usual art trade schemes, came from a man who contacted the police to offer information about the whereabouts of the works in exchange for money.

This man was contacted by the brothers who stole the works and offered to buy the drawings. She was eventually detained by the police, and it was through her that the investigators began to follow the three brothers in order to get to Dali.

The perpetrators of the theft contacted several possible buyers of Dalí’s work and received an expression of interest from a person in Portugal, but the deal did not go through, according to police.

Still unable to figure out where the works are, three months later, police detained the three brothers because they were going to “continue stealing and that couldn’t be allowed to happen,” explained José González, head of the police’s history department. heritage unit of Catalonia, at a press conference.

During interrogation, the three detainees did not give any information about Dalí’s works, which were eventually found in a warehouse, accessed by the police through the access code that was in the message stored in the mobile phone seized from the criminal brothers.

The current owners of the two drawings are descendants of the Catalan lawyer, writer and politician Pere Coromines, a friend of Father Salvador Dali.

It was Father Coromines who ordered the work of the artist, who was then 19 years old.

The works were meant to illustrate a book that was never published, but two charcoal drawings were kept by the family and framed in the home of Montserrat Herrera, Pope Coromines’ granddaughter, until they were stolen last January.

After the discovery, seven experts from the Dalí Foundation confirmed the authenticity of the drawings of “a more naive Dalí who puts on a folk festival,” as explained by Dalí museums director Montse Ager.

Among the items found by the police in the same warehouse are also five “graphic works” by Joan Miro, the authenticity of which, however, has not yet been confirmed.

The investigation was completed last summer, but only this Friday the police announced the result at a press conference.