A man arrested last week after being spotted calmly walking out of a gallery with a $200,000 Picasso under his arm had an extensive collection of stolen works hidden in his studio apartment, police have said.

Mark Lugo, 30, was apprehended on July 6 after allegedly stealing Picasso's 1965 'Tete de Femme' from the Weinstein Gallery in San Francisco the previous day.

A subsequent raid on his one bedroom apartment in Hoboken, New Jersey, revealed a small museum's worth of art - 11 stolen pieces in total, worth more than $500,000.

The works were taken from seven galleries in Manhattan and included a piece by Cubist master Fernand Léger and another Picasso sketch, authorities said.

After Lugo's arrest in San Francisco, police in New York reviewed CCTV footage from The Carlyle Hotel on the Upper East Side, which had a Léger piece stolen on June 28.

Officers are said to have recognised Lugo from the tapes, connecting him to the robbery of Léger's $350,000 1917 piece 'Composition aux element mecaniques' and enabling them to execute a search warrant on his Hoboken property.

At the apartment on Tuesday, police said they found the 11 stolen pieces of art, some of which were hung on the walls.

'There were about six of them displayed on the wall of the apartment. His whole apartment was filled with wine books, upper-crust living, paintings,' a police source told the New York Post.