It Turns Out the Picassos Anchoring a Gallery’s Exhibit Were Not by Picasso
The New Guinean spears were presented as antiques collected by the artist’s grandfather on an expedition to the Pacific but were, in fact, brand-new. The jewelry, advertised as precious heirlooms from the artist’s grandmother, were plastic. A mink rug was low-grade polyester.
And the three Picassos that were at the center of the exhibit? All fake.
The artist and curator, Kirsha Kaechele, claims that she forged them herself to match the green theme of her installation.
The ruse, concocted by Ms. Kaechele for the Museum of Old and New Art in Hobart, the capital of the Australian state of Tasmania, was the latest in a long running list of stunts after an Australian court ruled that her show could not be exclusive to women.
Ms. Kaechele had opened the exhibition “Ladies Lounge” in 2020 as a space where women could “indulge in decadent nibbles, fancy tipples and other ladylike pleasures,” and had limited entry to women. This spring, the Tasmanian Civil and Administrative Tribunal found the exhibition to be discriminatory against men. Ms. Kaechele said at the time that the discrimination was part of the point.
After the ruling, Ms. Kaechele looked for workarounds and moved parts of the installation, including several pieces that she claimed were by Pablo Picasso, into a women’s restroom in the museum. But in a blog post on the museum’s website on Wednesday, Ms. Kaechele said that she had received a letter from the Picasso Administration in Paris, which manages the rights to the artist’s works, asking about the pieces on display in her exhibit. She came clean, saying that not only were the purported Picasso artworks fake but so, too, were other items in the original exhibition.
“When I began visualizing the ‘Ladies Lounge,’ I knew it had to be as opulent and sumptuous as possible,” she wrote in the post. “If men were to feel as excluded as possible, the ‘Lounge’ would need to display the most important artworks in the world — the very best.”
