Wanted posters are going up in Berlin picturing the artist Francis Bacon.
The reason? Well, the posters reproduce in black and white Lucian Freud's portrait of Bacon, which was stolen from the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin back in May 1988.
The valuable picture is still missing and the British Council are launching a huge campaign with a cash reward in the hope that someone will turn Bacon in.
Freud is especially keen for the work to be returned so that it could be included in a major retrospective of his work.
"Would the person who holds the painting kindly consider allowing me to show it in my exhibition at the Tate next June?" he says.
Freud was born in Berlin in December 1922, the son of the architect Ernst Freud, the youngest son of the psycho-analyst Sigmund Freud.
Immediately before the family left Berlin in l933, following Hitler's rise to power, they lived in an apartment in Matth盲ikirchplatz in the Tiergarten district, close to the site now occupied by the Neue Nationalgalerie, designed by Mies van der Rohe and opened in 1968.
Sigmund Freud emigrated to London from Vienna in l938. Lucian Freud became a naturalised British subject in l939.
Bacon and Freud became friends in the l940s, and Bacon painted a portrait of Freud in l951 - his first portrait of an identified person - using a snapshot of Franz Kafka as his point of departure.
Freud's portrait of Bacon was painted soon after, and bought for the nation in l952 by the Tate Gallery.
Anyone with information about the whereabouts of the painting should ring: 00 49 30 31 10 99 40.
