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Nightmare at the Picasso Museum

Part 3

Meeting Claude Picasso produces a shock of recognition: he is such an exact physical replica of his father that sitting beside him is like meeting the spectre of old Pablo. He shares those fiery eyes, that Mediterranean skin, the wise simian face and unimposing stature.

Our meeting had not been planned, but it was not a coincidence: Anne Baldassari had brought him along to lunch, in a dramatic display of her support from the leader of the Picasso clan.

In fact, more than one person I spoke to said that Claude Picasso's friendship - so strikingly paraded before me - was the only thing that protected her as she made one enemy after another.

Insiders don't want to criticise him out loud because he is so influential in the loftiest Picasso circles. "Claude Picasso was the only person who stood up for her," one person said. "Nobody else felt that way. Why does Claude back this woman who has done all these terrible things?"

But in 2010, Baldassari was promoted to become the Picasso Museum's president - a position in French national museums whose power is unrivalled in comparable institutions in Britain or the United States.

Answerable only to the French state, museum presidents do not have to negotiate with boards of trustees; some even have inner councils called cabinets.

They rule their museums exactly as their title implies. By this time, however, Baldassari had taken a decision that would leave the museum, and her, in very deep trouble.

When the Picasso Museum closed for renovation in 2009, Baldassari's plan was to vastly enlarge the display space inside the 17th-century Hôtel Salé, which had originally been converted into a museum in the 1980s and always had a pleasantly stuffed, intimate feeling to it.

She raised funds for the transformation by staging Picasso shows abroad - but a two-year project turned into a three-year one, then four years, then five.

Even though her supporters point to the €31m she raised through loan exhibits for the rebuilding, by this year, costs had risen to €52m. But the money was the least of the troubles.

The museum announced a series of opening dates, with one after another postponed. It came to be regarded as a national embarrassment that one of France's best-loved museums remained closed - and Baldassari began to bear most of the blame. By 2013, criticism of her management was no longer an art-world secret.

Early this year Vincent Noce, the art critic of the French paper Libération, published a leaked internal report that had severely criticised Baldassari. "She was interfering in everything, even in fields she knows nothing of," Noce said.

The report, he told me when we met in Paris, "said she had a real psychological problem".

As the conflict inside the Picasso Museum started to spill into the media, the French state took an acute interest in its problems. Aurélie Filippetti, France's minister for culture and communications, appointed a consultancy to investigate the situation; they reported that Baldassari refused to change her management style. "There was a social emergency" inside the museum, Filippetti told me. "She had very bad relations with other museums."

Finally, on 11 May, Noce revealed in a second Libération scoop that more than half of the museum's 40 staff members had signed an email demanding Baldassari's dismissal, accusing her of "authoritarianism, partiality and managerial methods which have led the Picasso Museum into an impasse".

The gossip traded by Baldassari's critics had become world news. "The mental and physical health of dozens of officials," the staff letter continued, "and the world reputation of a museum which is already seriously isolated, cannot continue to be under threat in order to keep one sole person in office, which is now unjustified."

Two days later, Filippetti summoned Baldassari to her office. "It was not a pleasure to have to ask her to resign," Filippetti told me. "She's a good curator but she was not a good president. Many people had quit and were not able to work with her any more.

The person in charge of the building workers had quit. She had pushed two second-in-commands to quit. Nobody was able to work with her on the building. The museum could not open with her as president. That became clear at the beginning of the year."

It seemed to Filippetti that as things stood the museum would never reopen. "In May there were wires everywhere," Noce said.

- The Guardian

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