A museum in Tasmania hit the headlines when it hung works by Picasso in a women’s toilet following a discrimination complaint – but they weren’t Picassos at all.
ADVERTISEMENTHobart’s Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) is no stranger to controversy.
In April 2023, the museum was found to have discriminated against a man who was refused entry to the museum’s women-only ‘Ladies Lounge’ space, despite having paid for museum admission.
The row took an unexpected turn last month, when ‘Ladies Lounge’ creator and MONA curator Kirsha Kaechele announced the museum had found an innovative workaround to restrict access to the space – hanging artwork, namely works by Spanish painter Pablo Picasso, in a female toilet cubicle.
Now there’s a new twist in the tale, with Kaechele revealing last week that the so-called Picassos were, in fact, the work of her own hand.
Kaechele took to the MONA blog on Wednesday in a post entitled ''Art is Not Truth: Pablo Picasso", saying she was revealing herself as the works’ creator, following questions from a Guardian reporter and the Picasso Administration in France about their authenticity.
What was unbelievable to the curator, who is also the wife of the museum’s owner, was that the paintings had been displayed for more than three years before their provenance was questioned – even though she had accidentally hung one of the fake paintings upside down.
“I imagined that a Picasso scholar, or maybe just a Picasso fan, or maybe just someone who googles things, would visit the Ladies Lounge and see that the painting was upside down and expose me on social media,” Kaechele wrote.
According to Kaechele, the lounge had to display “the most important artworks in the world” – or at least the semblance thereof, as the case turned out to be – in order for men “to feel as excluded as possible.”
A spokesperson for MONA told The Associated Press that the gallery would not supply more detail about the letter Kaechele said she had received from the Picasso Administration, which manages the late Spanish artist’s estate.
When the AP asked MONA to confirm the veracity of the statements in Kaechele’s blog post, spokesperson Sara Gates-Matthews said the post was “truthfully Kirsha’s admission”.
Comments on Kaechele’s blog post show mixed reactions, with some readers dubbing the stunt "brilliant and brave". Some in the art world, however, were less impressed.
Art expert Christopher Heathcote told the Guardian he thought "the entire episode is childish, unprofessional, and reflects poorly on MONA”.
The Tasmanian museum drew the (rather more positive) attention of music fans the world over last month, when it held listening parties for the sole copy of Once Upon a Time in Shaolin, the Wu Tang Clan album dubbed the “world’s rarest album”.
The jury’s out, however, on this latest revelation – was MONA’s Picasso hoax a childish prank or poignant performance art?
