Picasso Slashed

A huge, ragged hole was slashed in a Picasso masterpiece, “Woman Nude Before Garden,” in the Stedelijk Museum of Modern Art in Amsterdam, Netherlands, on Sunday. The 1956 oil on canvas was valued at up to $7.5 million. On Monday, Dutch police questioned the accused slasher, a 41-year-old man who had escaped from a psychiatric clinic in nearby Utrecht. Officials said the man, who tried to hijack a plane in 1978, also was a suspect in an incident in 1990 at another Amsterdam museum in which someone threw acid on a Rembrandt masterpiece. The Picasso, painted in cool hues of blue and green, depicts a naked woman reclining in a chair in front of an open window with a lush garden in the background. Picasso’s model was Jacqueline Roque, his newlywed wife at the time.