5 Picassos went missing from the Los Angeles Times. What happened to them?
LOS ANGELES - The downtown complex that has housed the Los Angeles Times for decades is filled with notable spaces: the pristine test kitchen, the bustling newsroom and the historic Globe Lobby with its 10-foot-high murals, busts of past publishers and hulking linotype machine.
Then there's the community room, a drab, workaday gathering spot for employees and visitors that inspires few selfies. But for years, something remarkable resided in this otherwise unremarkable space, largely unseen.
It was art, five pieces framed as one, often hidden behind a lowered projection screen.
The artist was Pablo Picasso.
The five lithographs were abstract depictions of famous literary figures, including Shakespeare, done in vibrant brushstrokes.
They were among the last vestiges of a 110-piece art collection assembled in the late 1960s and early '70s by the newspaper's parent company, Times Mirror Co.
Dr. Franklin Murphy, the former UCLA chancellor who became Times Mirror's chief executive in 1968, built the collection with Otis Chandler, who served as Times publisher from 1960 to 1980 and whose family owned the newspaper and its parent.
Works by 20th-century artists Picasso, Rufino Tamayo, Helen Frankenthaler, Milton Avery, Richard Diebenkorn, Isamu Noguchi, Ellsworth Kelly, Saul Steinberg, Claes Oldenburg and many others were put on display in 1973 with the opening of the Times Mirror Building, which adjoined the existing newspaper headquarters.
