End of a blue period for Paris’s embattled Picasso museum

Paris’s Picasso museum reopens its doors on Saturday amid the fallout from a fraught $71-million renovation. Just over five years after it closed for what was intended to be a two-year refurbishment, the museum – housed in a 17th-century baroque mansion in Paris’s historic Marais quarter – has been extensively modernized and is more than twice its previous size. Costs, however, stand at $27 million over budget due to an increase in the scope of the works, a rift has opened up between Picasso’s son Claude and the French government and the museum’s director of nearly a decade, Anne Baldassari, no longer has her job.

Everything has changed and nothing has changed. You still have the basic structure of the building… but at the same time everything has been redone.

Laurent Le Bon, new director of the Picasso museum

The gallery, which first opened in 1985, boasts one of the world’s most extensive collections of Picasso’s work with around 5,000 paintings, drawings, sculptures, ceramics, photographs and documents. Most of the exhibits were left to the French state on his death in 1973. The museum director’s dismissal prompted Claude Picasso, who supported her, to accuse the French government of dragging its feet over the reopening and disrespecting Picasso’s memory.

Picasso Arts