Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. Image courtesy of Wikipedia.

Pablo Picasso’s 1911 painting La Coiffeuse (The Hairdresser) which has been missing for over a decade, has surfaced in the United States. The Cubist canvas was discovered by federal Customs and Border Protection officials in a FedEx shipment heading from Belgium to a climate-controlled warehouse in Long Island City, New York, in December 2014. The package’s shipping label described the contents as an “art craft” holiday present worth $37.

The painting, which is owned by the French government, is part of the Musee National d’Art Moderne’s collection. It was last exhibited in Munich in 1998, and returned to Paris, where it was placed in storage at the Centre Georges Pompidou. Though the exact dates of the theft have not been determined, it is believe that La Coiffeuse was stolen directly from the Pompidou’s storeroom. Museum officials did not realize the work was missing until it received a loan request in 2001, three years after the Munich exhibition. The painting, then valued at $2.5 million, was declared stolen. French museum officials traveled to New York in January 2015 to examine the Picasso painting alongside historical records and photographs, ultimately confirming that the canvas was in fact the missing masterpiece.

La Coiffeuse was created at the height of the development Cubism, which flourished from 1907 to 1914. Established  by Picasso and Georges Braque, Cubism departed from the traditional interpretations of art, challenged conventional perceptions of space, time, and perspective, and paved the way for complete abstraction -- a concept that dominated the art world for much of the 20th century. La Coiffeuse boasts many of the movements defining characteristics -- forms reduced to basic geometric parts, a two-dimension picture plane, and a monochromatic palette, which was typical of the movement’s earlier “Analytic” works.

According to Loretta Lynch, the attorney for the eastern district of New York, where the painting was seized, “A lost treasure has been found. Because of the blatant smuggling in this case, this painting is now subject to forfeiture to the United States. Forfeiture of the painting will extract it from the grasp of the black market in stolen art so that it can be returned to its rightful owner."