James Cameron's "counterfactual history of modern art"

What if Picasso's "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Demoiselles_d'Avignon actually had been on the Titanic (as happened in James Cameron's movie but not in real life) and was now at the bottom of the Atlantic instead of hanging in the Museum of Modern Art in New York? Remember that in OTL it was not exhibited to the public until 1916; it "stayed in Picasso's studio for many years. At first, only Picasso's intimate circle of artists, dealers, collectors and friends were aware of the work..." Perhaps at their urging he could repaint it from surviving sketches and black-and-white photographs (I doubt there was a color reproduction of it yet). But perhaps he wouldn't; he was after all famous for his frequent changes of style, and he might conclude that this represented a past stage of his work he did not want to revisit.

See https://www.theguardian.com/artanddes…/…/sep/04/arttheft.art which comments on Cameron's "counterfactual history of modern art" and argues that if the painting really had been lost "Surely it would obsess us even more than it does." Would it, though? I doubt it would be sufficiently well-known to do so...
 
While I'm not specifically familar with this picture in particular there's an interesting similarity with the Mona Lisa. While the painting La Gioconda by Leonardo da Vinci is one of the best known works-of-art in the world today, this fame is actually fairly recent. It really only began after the picture was stolen a century ago, under odd circumstances. Before this it wasn't considered to be anything outstanding.

The event that raised he Mona Lisa to mythic status occurred in 1911. On 11 August an Italian decorator named Vincenzo Peruggia, who'd previously worked in the Louvre, dressed as one of the workers and simply lifted the Mona Lisa off it's mounting pegs and smuggled it out under his arm, wrapped in a workman's smock. Paris was shocked and the newspapers played up the scandal. Exactly why Peruggia stole the painting isn't known; he didn't try and sell it for two years (and that effort, involving Florentine antique dealer Alfredo Geri, failed; Geri handed Peruggia over to the police). At his trial he claimed that the theft was an act of Italian nationalism, returning the painting to it's homeland. He was imprisoned for six months.
An interesting possibility was published by journalist Karl Decker in the Saturday Evening Post in 1932; he claimed that an Argentine con man calling himself the Marquis of Valfiero hired Peruggia to steal the portrait so that he could sell forged copies (the work of a forger named Yves Chaudron) to a number of secretive and gullible American millionaires. The picture would be returned, but Valfiero planned to assure each mark that the portrait in the Louvre was the forgery, and they had the original.
An interesting idea that would be borrowed, and given a science fictional twist, by a certain BBC television series in 1979...
 
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