Guillaume Apollinaire returned one of the stolen statues to the French newspaper the "Paris-Journal". Apollinaire implicated his friend Picasso, who was also brought in for questioning in the theft of the "Mona Lisa", but he was also exonerated. The theft of the "Mona Lisa" was perpetrated by Vincenzo Peruggia, an Italian house painter who acted alone and was only caught two years later when he tried to sell the painting in Florence. Apollinaire wrote the preface for the first Cubist exposition outside of Paris; "VIII Salon des Indépendants", Brussels, 1911. In an open-handed preface to the catalogue of the Brussels Indépendants show,
The Fifer The Fifer The Fifer or Young Flautist is a painting by French painter Édouard Manet, made in 1866. It is usually kept in the Musée d'Orsay, Paris, and is now on loan to the Louvre Abu Dhabi museum in Abu Dhabi, UAE. On a trip to Spain in 1865, Édouard Manet visited the Prado, where the art of Diego Velázquez was a revelation. Upon his return to Paris in 1866, he began work on a new painting, depicting an anonymous regimental fifer of the Spanish army. In this picture, Manet presents the uniformed boy, in a manner that imitates and