French court opens criminal probe into Picasso silverware

A court in France has opened a criminal investigation into silver plates and gold medallions linked to Pablo Picasso. The court of Aix-en-Provence acted after a complaint from the Picasso family, The Art Newspaper reported on 5 November 2026.

The complaint was filed on 10 March by Paloma Ruiz-Picasso, on behalf of nine heirs of the artist. It alleges fraud, counterfeiting, forgery and concealment. These are the family's allegations, and they have not been tested in court.

The pieces were made by Ateliers Hugo, a metalwork workshop in France. Francois Hugo, great-grandson of the writer Victor Hugo, founded it in 1933. In 1955 Picasso commissioned him to make plates and dishes in fine metal, using repousse, a technique of hammering metal from behind to raise a design. The designs were based on Picasso's ceramics from Vallauris, a town in southern France. Pierre Hugo took over the workshop in 1975, and his son Nicolas Hugo later succeeded him.

The family's complaint says moulds of Picasso's works were reused to make unauthorised silver and gold pieces. It points to duplicates, pieces bearing three times the same number, and unnumbered examples. The Picasso Administration, the body that manages the artist's estate, says it has identified at least 17 complete or almost complete suspicious collections. Together they amount to hundreds of pieces.

The case has a paper trail through the auction market. In May 2023 the Museum of Old and New Art, a private museum in Tasmania, Australia, told the Picasso Administration it had doubts about Picasso plates it had bought at Sotheby's in London. An earlier Sotheby's sale, on 13 October 2021, offered a set of 24 silver Picasso plates plus an unnumbered proof, with a certificate signed by Pierre Hugo. It sold for £1.4 million. The seller was Mark Maurice, a British dealer who ran Masterpiece, a gallery that has since closed.

According to legal files cited by The Art Newspaper, the Picasso Administration claims the same collector also sold another set of 24 silver plates and a set of 24 gold medallions. Those claims are part of the material the court will now look at.

Months before the court acted, the family took a public step. In April, after the complaint, it published a warning headed "Hugo silverware" in Gazette Drouot, a French trade publication for the art and auction world. The notice urged dealers, collectors and other buyers to be vigilant about silver plates and gold medallions of doubtful origin.

For anyone thinking of buying a Picasso piece, the warning points to one habit: checking provenance, the documented record of who owned a work and when. Buyers of these pieces have so far been told to look hard at numbering and paperwork. The investigation will decide whether any of the allegations hold.