PARIS — Pablo Picasso gave them as a gift.

So said Danielle Le Guennec, 68, explaining how she and her husband came to possess a box full of 271 previously unknown sketches, paintings and collages by one of the 20th century’s most celebrated artists.

“It was very straightforward,” she said in a telephone interview on Monday, after the French newspaper Libération reported the find. Her husband, Pierre Le Guennec, 71, had worked as an electrician in three of Picasso’s homes on the French Riviera in the early 1970s. “My husband was getting ready to leave” one day, she recounted, and without much ado or any explanation, Picasso gave him “a box.”

Picasso, she added, “never explained anything.”

In September the couple boarded a Paris-bound train with a suitcase full of works, including several watercolors, dozens of lithographs, more than 200 sketches and 9 Cubist collages, in the hopes of having it authenticated by Claude Ruiz-Picasso, the artist’s son and the administrator of the Picasso estate.

Suspecting that the works were stolen, Mr. Ruiz-Picasso contacted a lawyer, who filed a lawsuit on Sept. 23 claiming that the works were “stolen goods”; investigators seized the art from the Guennecs’ home in the South of France two weeks later. The inquiry is continuing, and it is unclear what will become of the artworks.

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