In August 1986, Picasso’s Weeping Woman was stolen from the National Gallery of Victoria, which had recently acquired it for $1.6 million – the most expensive artwork bought by an Australian gallery at the time. Watching the news with her parents in Brisbane, 13-year-old Ursula Sullivan was transfixed by the cubist painting beaming from the TV. “Until then, the only art I’d encountered was a painting my mum had bought from a door-to-door salesman and hung in our living room,” she recalls.
“It was like one of those slow-motion movie moments, with me going, ‘Woah, what is that? What is going on?’ I was hooked.”
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