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,
Louvre Abu Dhabi has been noted that the museum will showcase work from multiple French museums, including the Louvre, the Centre Georges Pompidou, the Musée d'Orsay and Palace of Versailles. However, Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres, the French Culture Minister, stated at the announcement that the Paris Louvre "would not sell any of its 35,000-piece collection currently on display". In 2012, the Louvre Abu Dhabi started collecting photography, making its first acquisitions in the field, including works by Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey, Roger Fenton and George Wilson Bridges. The museum also acquired a sculpture of a Bactrian princess dating from the third millennium BC,