The most consequential of these diversions involved two of the most prominent artistic figures in Paris.
Guillaume Apollinaire was a poet — one of the central figures in Parisian modernist literary culture, closely connected to the emerging avant-garde in both writing and visual art. He was not a thief. But his connection to a man who was a thief brought him into the investigation in ways that caused him lasting distress and gave the Mona Lisa case one of its most dramatic sideshows.
Honoré-Joseph Géry Pieret was a Belgian adventurer who had served, in earlier years, as Apollinaire’s secretary. In 1907, Pieret had stolen small Iberian sculptures from the Louvre’s collection. These objects were not strictly “stolen” in the way the word typically functions in museum theft cases: Pieret appears to have simply walked out with them. He subsequently sold two of them to Pablo Picasso, who had encountered them, found them useful as references for the geometric abstracted faces he was developing for his paintings, and purchased them without asking probing questions about their provenance.
Picasso later drew on those Iberian sculptural forms in the faces of the figures in *Les Demoiselles d’Avignon*, his landmark 1907 painting that would become central to the history of modern art. The stolen sculptures were, in this sense, a direct material input into one of the twentieth century’s most significant works.
Pieret had also not disposed of all his stolen objects. By 1911, with the Mona Lisa investigation generating headlines and reward offers, he found himself in an uncomfortable position: he was holding additional Louvre sculptures and knew that his prior connection to Apollinaire and to the missing paintings could place him in serious danger. He went to the newspaper *Le Paris* and offered it a statuette, which the paper then returned to the Louvre — an act that generated publicity and confirmed that the Louvre’s security problems predated the Mona Lisa theft by years.