Overblown budgets, scandal and intrigue: Picasso Museum reopens in Paris

When President François Hollande, the crème de la crème of the cultural world and the heirs of the Picasso fortune gathered last weekend to celebrate the reopening of the Picasso Museum in Paris on the 133rd anniversary of his birth, the relief was palpable.

The world’s greatest Picasso collection had closed in 2009 for renovations that were supposed to take two years. Delays, cost overruns and the management style of the museum’s former president Anne Baldassari were hot gossip in the art world. Baldassari clung to her job, with the support of Picasso’s son Claude, the patriarch of the family.

The scandal went public in May, when the newspaper Libération leaked an internal report critical of Baldassari. More than half the museum's 40 staff signed a petition denouncing her "authoritarianism, partiality and managerial methods, which have led the Picasso Museum into an impasse". The government sacked her.

“This museum has been sorely missed on the Parisian art scene,” says Stéphane Guégan, a curator at the Musée d’Orsay and the author of a new bibliography of Picasso. At least three-quarters of the books in Guégan’s biography are by US and British authors. “It’s time the French reclaimed Picasso,” Guégan says.

Nothing involving Picasso has ever been simple. When he died, in April 1973, Picasso left a fortune estimated at the equivalent of €660 million. He was survived by his second wife, Jacqueline, three former mistresses, four children and six grandchildren. It took more than six years for the family to divide the estate.

In lieu of inheritance tax the family gave France first choice of 5,000 artworks. The Picasso Museum opened in the 17th-century Hôtel Sâlé in the Marais district of Paris in 1985.

Laurent Le Bon, who was appointed to replace Baldassari, invited her to curate the first exhibition in the renovated museum. She eventually accepted, with spectacular results. The museum has doubled its exhibition space and increased the number of works on display from 200 to 450.

During a recent visit to the museum, Baldassari denies there have been delays in the renovation. She financed €31 million of the €53 million cost by sending parts of the collection around the world during the closure. Baldassari says she is totally dedicated to Picasso’s legacy, and is deeply wounded by her expulsion from “her” museum. “This has been my life’s work,” she says. “I believe I’ve completed it.”

Picasso split in three

Baldassari has divided the museum into three parts: the cellars represent Picasso’s ateliers; the ground, first and second floors are a chronological and thematic record of his art, from his first paintings in 1895, at the age of 14, to his last works in 1973, the year of his death; and on the top floor one can visit Picasso’s private collection, comprised of paintings by the men he called his masters – Cézanne, Degas, Matisse, Renoir, Rousseau, Miró and Modigliani. This section is almost a museum unto itself.

“I paint like others write their autobiography,” Picasso told Françoise Gilot, who lived with him for a decade and bore him two children. “I have the impression that time passes ever more quickly. I am like a river that keeps flowing, carrying trees uprooted by the current, dead dogs, rubbish . . . I carry all that and I continue . . . I have less and less time, and more and more to say.”

Baldassari filled a room with Picasso’s self-portraits. He was only 20, and in the midst of his blue period, when he painted himself as a confident, sombre figure with a wispy, reddish beard. If producing masterpieces at an early age is a criterion of genius, Picasso certainly fulfilled it.

In 1938, when the Nazis were burning “degenerate” art in Berlin and Joseph Goebbels, the propaganda minister, demanded that modern artists be sterilised, Picasso reacted by painting himself as van Gogh, whom he regarded as the genius of suffering, with a scarred face and wearing a straw hat. “It was a very strong affirmation,” Baldassari says. “He was saying loud and clear, ‘I am a modern artist.’ ”

Picasso donned van Gogh's straw hat again in a last self-portrait, painted in April 1972. He entitled it The Young Painter, but it's not clear if we are looking at a child, an old man or a cadaver. The eyes are hollow, the complexion blue-grey. In homage to Renoir, whom Picasso considered the genius of colour, Picasso strapped a paintbrush to his hand, the method Renoir used to paint despite severe arthritis.

Picasso’s women – Fernande Olivier, Olga Khokhlova, Marie-Thérèse Walter, Dora Maar, Françoise Gilot and Jacqueline Roque – appear often, in every style that marked Picasso’s oeuvre. The early paintings are visibly influenced by Lautrec and van Gogh, followed by the blue and rose periods, cubism, neoclassicism and the surrealist years, which are particularly well represented at the Hôtel Sâlé.

Marie-Thérèse Walter was 17 when Picasso approached her in the Galeries Lafayette department store, saying, “I would like to paint your portrait. I am Picasso.” He was 45 and married to the ballet dancer Olga Khokhlova.

In 1931 he encrypted Walter in a still-life, her eyes and body parts scattered through the painting. The following year he painted a recognisable portrait of her – his way of acknowledging the affair. In the same period, inspired by Ovid's Metamorphoses, he began disassembling and distorting his female sitters' features on canvas.

Picasso defies classification, says Laurent Le Bon, the new president of the Picasso Museum. He calls the exhibition curated by Baldassari “a new way of looking at his oeuvre, a sort of ocean”. Picasso “still surprises us,” Le Bon says. “The incredible power of his work is that it doesn’t age. It remains very contemporary.”

In his book Guégan has tried to nuance some of the myths surrounding Picasso. That of the artist who devours or destroys those closest to him is one of the most tenacious. The tragic legacy was fortified by Picasso’s turbulent life and of those around him. Walter and Roque took their own lives; his son Paulo ruined his life with alcohol; and his grandson Pablito died by suicide a few days after Roque refused to allow him to attend Picasso’s funeral.

Yet Guégan believes Picasso’s relationships have been misunderstood. “There is genuine tenderness when he writes to Marie-Thérèse Walter long after their relationship has ended, saying that he will love her always, that he remembers the day they met . . . Women are not only projections of his erotic fantasies. They are an important part of his life, thoughts and politics . . . There is as much tenderness and suffering in the oeuvre of Picasso as there is joy or predatory violence.”

Picasso's stature as an artiste engagé was guaranteed by his 1937 masterpiece Guernica. His political sensibilities are evident in many works at the Picasso Museum. He painted Cat Seizing a Bird as Madrid fell to Franco's forces in 1939. Massacre in Korea, from 1951, expressed his opposition to the war there.

In 1940 Picasso was refused French citizenship because he had associated with anarchists in his youth and was considered a Soviet sympathiser. Four years later he joined the communist party. As Baldassari points out, he was already one of the richest men in the world.

Mutual exploitation

Guégan sees Picasso’s adherence to the communist party as a case of mutual exploitation. The communists wanted to use his status as an artistic star. And, like Jean-Paul Sartre and millions of Frenchmen who survived Nazi occupation, Picasso wanted the appearance of having been a resistant.

Picasso was twice awarded the Lenin Prize. In 1965 the British art critic John Berger published The Success and Failure of Picasso. "He said clearly that Picasso didn't live up to communist party myths," Guégan says. "That he was a bourgeois who painted for bourgeois people and amassed a fortune while letting everyone believe the contrary."

Yet Berger’s denunciation was strangely liberating for Picasso. “When he finally drops the party line, his freedom returns,” Guégan says. “The works of his last years were the most torrid. There was a link between the spectre of impotence and this last burst of eroticism – he did in paint what he could no longer do in real life. But, also, the tunnel of Stalinism was over. Despite himself, Picasso had been constrained by the image the communists maintained for him.”