Nightmare at the Picasso Museum

[Part 2]

In 1979, the Picasso family made a huge donation of Picasso's Picassos to the French state in lieu of inheritance tax. Crucially, public curators were given first choice of the inheritance - they could pick the very best of Picasso's personal collection to represent his entire career. After touring the world to universal acclaim, this mesmerising addition to the French patrimoine national was given a permanent home in the Hôtel Salé, a fine classical 17th-century building in one of the best-preserved parts of pre-modern Paris. The Picasso Museum opened in 1985, with a collection of 5,000 works by Picasso and an archive of some 200,000 items. Picasso did not merely inscribe his paintings and drawings with the year they were made; many of them were dated to the month and the day. The works he kept for himself tended to have a still greater documentary significance: they were often his first efforts in a new style, gutsy experiments with some new idea.

He did not only keep truckloads of his own work, he carefully oversaw its documentation. As early as 1932, when he still had four decades of creativity ahead, Picasso worked closely with the Greek critic Christian Zervos on the first volume of what was to become a 33-volume catalogue raisonné of his output and a model of this type of reference book. He also kept a vast private archive. Every Picasso researcher relies on the Picasso Museum. "It's such an astounding collection," the eminent art historian TJ Clark told me, "and all the time it provokes questions. Why did he hang on to these pictures in particular?" John Richardson called it "the greatest collection of Picassos in the world".

Crisis

This is, in effect, a museum curated by Picasso himself. He originally chose everything in it - including his personal collection of works by such artists as Degas, Cézanne and Henri Rousseau - and it contains, like a magical cabinet, the ceaseless energy of his life and art.

But in the past few years, the institution created to preserve and display Picasso's unrivalled collection of his own work has also been engulfed by crisis and scandal - touched by the tumult of yet another impassioned battle over the ownership of the great artist's legacy.

It has been closed since 2009, with work on a renovation running years overdue amid recriminations and allegations of mismanagement. In May of this year, another delay was announced, and the museum's president, Anne Baldassari, was sacked by the French government. It is finally due to reopen on 25 October, amid a frankly surreal atmosphere of accusation and dissent.

The turmoil at the museum comes at a suggestive and perilous moment for Picasso's wider legacy. Is the most revolutionary and exciting artist of the 20th century still a living force in the 21st? Crowds still pack travelling exhibitions of his work, which continues to command astronomical prices at auction. But while the playful spirit of his contemporary, Marcel Duchamp - who began his career in a particularly dim corner of Picasso's giant shadow - still inspires and shapes artistic creation, it is far harder to discern Picasso's direct influence among today's most celebrated contemporary artists. Do we still feel Picasso as a kick in the stomach, a shattering visionary, or has he slipped away from us into the safeness of history - to become an Old Master, deeply revered but as far away from the present as two of his own heroes, Velázquez and Poussin, are generally held to be?

In 1992, seven years after the museum opened, Anne Baldassari came to work in its archives. The 37-year old doctor of arts and social sciences had previously been at the National Museum of Modern Art in the Pompidou Centre, just a few streets away from the well-preserved streets of the Marais quarter where the Musée Picasso can be found.

She is, she told me, "a crazy researcher", and in the Picasso Museum's unrivalled, intimate collection of documents she soon made spectacular discoveries. For instance, among Picasso's hoards of news clippings and notes she found that he was a serious photographer.

"I discovered his negative plates," she recalled. "It's very interesting especially about cubism: experiments in double exposure that he did in 1909." In other words, the cubist revolution with its breaking up of the traditional picture into a hint of a bottle or a glimpse of a musical note amid labyrinths of painterly dapples and swerving angles may be connected to his interest in photographic effects. Baldassari's research on Picasso's camera culminated in an acclaimed exhibition in 1997, which permanently made photography part of the way his art is seen. Even more dramatically, she found a series of postcards in the museum archive that date from 1906 and carry photographs of African women by François-Edmond Fortier. 1906 is a year before Picasso painted Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, his scything pink and blue vision of jagged-limbed glaring prostitutes, two or perhaps three of whom wear what appear to be African masks. Do the "primitive" poses of Picasso's wild women mirror Fortier's photographs? Are these pictures the surprisingly simple - and colonial - source of the 20th century's first great artistic earthquake?

The striking research Baldassari produced made her one of the world's leading authorities on Picasso. Her services as a curator were widely sought after, her reputation truly international. "She loves her Picasso," the art critic and broadcaster Waldemar Januszczak, who has followed her career with admiration, told me. In 2002, she was one of the organisers of Matisse Picasso, a blockbuster staged jointly by Tate Modern, New York's Museum of Modern Art, the Pompidou and the Picasso Museum, which is widely regarded as one of the all-time great exhibitions of modern art. Baldassari's appointment as director of the Picasso Museum in 2005 was the logical next step. She had already raised its status as a museum - with her there, its exhibitions were seen as essential. Baldassari continued to curate important Picasso shows in and beyond the museum, including the immense Picasso and the Masters at the Grand Palais in 2009. Yet by this time her ambitious curatorial approach was attracting criticism as well as praise.

The respected art critic Richard Dorment called Picasso and the Masters "a complete and utter failure, an expensive turkey, the art world's answer to Heaven's Gate". He was not the only one to find it an overblown sprawl that failed to do justice to either Picasso or the masters.

Criticism

Baldassari was starting to attract personal criticism as well. Museums had trouble borrowing art, and scholars found it hard to research in the archives. "Anne Baldassari was a total menace," John Richardson said. "She was loathed by Picasso scholars. She was no help whatsoever - she was a positive hindrance. You couldn't see things in the library. Suddenly they weren't available." She would not loan works to other museums and "if she did loan things she came with them, which wasn't much fun."

Richardson even questions the quality of Baldassari's own research. He thinks her use of French colonial postcards to "explain" Les Demoiselles d'Avignon is nonsense, and has confused a generation of students. He claims there is solid evidence in the Picasso Museum itself that Picasso owned these photographs only from 1911, several years after he painted Les Demoiselles d'Avignon.

Tales of Baldassari's imperiousness circulate widely in the art world. One person told me that she once kept the director of a Russian museum, who had flown to Paris to discuss a loan of some works, waiting outside her office for a day before letting it be known she was too busy to meet. Another source claimed that a group of leading museum directors discussed writing a joint letter to the French culture ministry complaining about the leadership of the Picasso Museum. Whatever the truth of such rumours, they reveal that as Baldassari's prominence and power increased, so did her enemies.

She did, however, have one very powerful friend.

"All the little anecdotes of when I was a child are bullshit essentially," Claude Picasso told me, as we sat in bright September sunlight outside a neighbourhood restaurant in Paris - dismissing the notion that there was anything to be gleaned about Picasso, or his work, from the memories of his children.

They must certainly be complex memories. In one of the sweetest paintings in the museum, done in 1954, when he was about seven, Claude is drawing while his sister Paloma plays close by. Picasso painted several similarly endearing images of his youngest children. But when their mother, Françoise Gilot, left him, called him a "historical monument", and portrayed him in her book as a vain old fool, he punished the children in response.

Anne Baldassari was a total menace. She was loathed by Picasso scholars. She was no help whatsoever

John Richardson

For all that, Claude Picasso not only inherited his share of the Picasso fortune, but took the leading role in the management of Picasso's artistic estate. "Claude plays a very important part," as Baldassari told me. Like her, he has sometimes been a controversial guardian of the Picasso legacy. When he licensed the name Picasso to Citroën for the new Picasso car in 1998, the legendary photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson wrote to Claude and accused him of having betrayed the legacy of a great artist who was also a member of the Communist party. "It was a private letter," Cartier-Bresson told me at the time. "I sent it to Claude and I never got an answer." The car turned out to be a great success, and the Picasso Administration, which Claude founded in 1995, has been highly effective at monetising the inheritance: no artist's work costs more to reproduce in books or the media.