A glass painting in storage at Indiana’s Evansville Museum of Art was recently determined to have been made by Pablo Picasso, but was not identified as such when it was gifted to the institution in the 1960s. “Seated Woman with Red Hat” (“Femme assise au chapeau rouge”) c. 1954-1956 was created using a layered glass technique called gemmail (plural: gemmaux), pieces of colored glass overlapped and joined together with clear liquid enamel and fused with heat. Though it was signed by Picasso, it was mistakenly cataloged as being created by an artist named Gemmaux.
Raymond Loewy, an internationally known industrial designer, purchased “Seated Woman with Red Hat” in the late 1950s and gifted the piece to the Evansville Museum in 1963. It remained in storage for more than 50 years. Loewy’s connection to the Evansville Museum was through Siegfried R. Weng, the museum’s director at the time.
The museum has determined that the expense and added requirements to properly secure a piece of potentially significant value are too great.
Urban Art & Antiques 