Sao Paulo - Two engravings by Spanish artist Pablo Picasso and two paintings by Brazilians Lasar Segall and Di Cavalcanti were stolen Thursday from the Pinacoteca de Sao Paulo. The Sao Paulo state culture ministry said the works - insured for a total of 568,400 dollars - were taken from the second floor of the museum in central Sao Paulo by three armed men.
The attackers threatened museum personnel - though reportedly no one was injured - and took Picasso's The Painter And His Model (1963) and Minotaur, Drinker And Women (1933), Segall's Casal (Couple, 1919) and Di Cavalcanti's Mulheres na janela (Women At The Window, 1926).
The attackers got away, but security cameras images from all museum halls were yet to be studied.
The four works belong to the Jose and Paulina Nemirovsky Foundation and were shown at the Estacion Pinacoteca, which regularly hosts temporary exhibitions at the museum.
The 8,000-square-metre Pinacoteca occupies the premises once held by the political police of the military dictatorship that ruled Brazil 1964-1985.
Estacion Pinacoteca was closed shortly after the attack - which happened around midday (1500 GMT) - and was not set to re-open before Friday.
The robbery was being handled by the Departament of Investigations on Organized Crime (Deic).
The Deic was recently successful in recovering Picasso's Portrait Of Suzanne Bloch and Candido Portinari's The Coffee Grower, valued at some 55 million dollars and taken from the Sao Paulo Museum of Modern Art (MASP) in December 2007.
