Officers had said that the painting was stolen during Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990, but a source at the museum in the emirate said they had never housed such a work. “The National Museum had no Picasso paintings before the Iraqi invasion,” the official said on condition of anonymity. A tag on the back of the painting, one riddled with misspellings, names the work “The nakede” (sic) and says it was “sold by the louvre to the musum” (sic) of Kuwait 1979, with the words Louvre and Kuwait in lower case.