‘France mocking my father,’ Picasso’s son says

Paris: France was accused of making a mockery of Picasso by the painter’s son yesterday, amid a bitter row with the government over the fate of the museum dedicated to 5,000 of his works in Paris.

Claude Picasso’s outburst came after it emerged that the re-opening of the state-owned museum, which has been shut for refurbishment since 2009, has been postponed because it has failed to recruit “enough museum guards” in time.

Extensive works on the museum, housed in the Hotel Sale, a 17th-century town mansion in the central Marais district, were completed this week, doubling its exhibition space. The museum was due to open next month, with the event hailed as one of the major happenings of the art world this year.

But the culture ministry now says it will not be ready until September at the earliest.

“This opening was supposed to be a great party. They are turning it into a fiasco”, said Claude Picasso, whose artist and author mother, Francois Gilot, was the prolific Spanish painter’s muse.

Claude, who speaks in the name of the Picasso family and represents it on the museum’s board, said he was furious with the culture minister, Aurlie Filippetti.

“I went to see [her] and she told me we couldn’t open in June as they didn’t have any guards yet, and she claimed this was due to the delay in the works,” he told Le Figaro. “But these were completed as planned on Tuesday. Who can believe they can’t find guards between now and June? The truth is that there is positively no desire to open the museum. I am being taken for a ride. I get the impression that France is making a mockery of my father and of me!”

Yesterday, the culture ministry hit back, saying: “Claude Picasso is getting carried away. The state is not making a mockery of Picasso when it spends ₤19 million (Dh96.7 million) [out of a total of 53] on a building and takes on 40 employees, who take time to train.”

It added: “Claude Picasso is wrong about there being no delays. The works were a month late. And the main building may be ready but other essential technical ones are not.”

A museum source, however, said: “We don’t even have 10 guards right now The ministry is dragging its feet.”

The row comes amid tensions between the museum’s highly-strung director, Anne Baldassari, whom Claude backs, and the culture ministry, which he claims wants to “destabilise” her.

Recent reports suggested an aide to Filippeti wants to replace the current museum head, amid complaints of “brutal management”.

Yesterday, the ministry said: “Three conditions need to be met to open the museum: the security of the collections, the security of the public and a positive atmosphere within the museum. None of these are met today.”

But Claude issued a thinly veiled threat to pull a number of works from the collection if relations soured further.