Spanish police investigate the disappearance of a Picasso painting on its way to an exhibition Art theft

Police in Spain are investigating the disappearance of a small Picasso painting worth €600,000 (£520,000), which disappeared on its way from Madrid to an exhibition in the southern city of Granada.

gouache and pencil work, Naturaleza muerta with guitar (“Still Life with Guitar,” was scheduled to be shown in a new exhibition at the CajaGranada Foundation, which opened last week.

But the picture, painted in 1919 and measuring 12.7cm x 9.8cm, never made it into the Still Life: Eternity of Idleness exhibition.

The painting belongs to an art collector in the Spanish capital, and was expected to be part of a shipment of loan items that arrived by truck from Madrid on Friday, October 3.

The organization said that when the truck arrived at 10 a.m. that day, its contents were unloaded and examined. Although some of the carefully packed work was not properly numbered, making a “thorough inspection” impossible, the delivery was signed and the truck and crew set off on their way.

The following Monday, the pieces, which had been under video surveillance all weekend, were dismantled.

“Once the unpacking process was completed by CajaGranada Foundation employees, the works were moved to different parts of the exhibition room,” the foundation said in a statement. “Mid-morning that day, the curator and head of exhibitions at the foundation noticed that one of the works was missing. This piece is a small gouache painting by Pablo Picasso, called ‘Still Life with Guitar.’”

The foundation said it had informed the National Police of the painting’s disappearance, adding: “We have also made ourselves available to those investigating, and we have full confidence that the case will be resolved properly.”

Spanish media reports indicated that the truck may have stopped overnight near Granada, and that the two people on board may have taken turns guarding its precious cargo.

Picasso’s fame – and the huge sums generated by his works – have long made his art a target for thieves around the world.

In February 2007, two Picasso paintings worth a total of 50 million euros were stolen from the home of the artist’s granddaughter in Paris. Two years later, a Picasso sketchbook worth more than 8 million euros was stolen from a Paris museum dedicated to the artist.

Twelve Picasso paintings, worth around £9 million, were stolen from a villa on the French Riviera owned by another of Picasso’s granddaughters, Marina Picasso, in 1989.

Many other Picasso paintings have been stolen from galleries. In 1976, 118 works of art were stolen from a museum in the southern city of Avignon in one of the largest art thefts in France.

In 1997, a gunman entered an art gallery in central London and stole a Picasso painting Tate de femmeWith a value of more than 500 thousand pounds, before fleeing in a taxi. The work was later recovered.