Curator admits Picasso paintings in women-only section of museum were fakes

WELLINGTON, New Zealand — They were billed as artworks by Pablo Picasso, paintings so valuable that an Australian art museum’s decision to display them in an exhibition restricted to women visitors provoked a gender discrimination lawsuit. The paintings again prompted international headlines when the gallery re-hung them in a women’s restroom to sidestep a legal ruling that said men could not be barred from viewing them.

But the artworks at the center of the uproar were not really by Picasso or the other famed artists billed as their creators, it emerged this week when the curator of the women-only exhibition admitted she had painted them herself.

Kirsha Kaechele wrote on the blog of Tasmania’s Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) on Wednesday that she was revealing herself as the works’ creator after receiving questions from a reporter and the Picasso Administration in France about their authenticity.

But they had been displayed for more than three years before their provenance was questioned, she said, 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. But no one did.

The saga began when Kaechele created a women-only area at MONA in 2020 for visitors to “revel in the pure company of women" and as a statement on their exclusion from male-dominated spaces throughout history.

The so-called Ladies Lounge offered high tea, massages and champagne served by male butlers, and was open to anyone who identified as a woman. Outlandish and absurd title cards were displayed alongside the fake paintings, antiquities and jewelry that was “quite obviously new and in some cases plastic,” she added.

The lounge had to display “the most important artworks in the world,” Kaechele wrote this week, in order for men “to feel as excluded as possible.”

It worked. MONA — famous in Australia for its strange and subversive exhibitions and events — was ordered by the Tasmanian Civil and Administrative Tribunal in March to stop refusing men entry to the Ladies Lounge after a complaint from a male gallery patron who was upset at being barred from the space during a 2023 visit.

“The participation by visitors in the process of being permitted or refused entry is part of the artwork itself,” tribunal Deputy President Richard Grueber wrote in his decision, which found the exhibition was discriminatory.

Grueber ruled that the man had suffered a disadvantage, in part because the artworks in the Ladies Lounge were so valuable. Kaechele had described them to the hearing as “a carefully curated selection of paintings by the world’s leading artists, including two paintings that spectacularly demonstrate Picasso’s genius.”

The tribunal ordered MONA to cease refusing men entry. In his ruling, Grueber also lambasted a group of women who had attended in support of Kaechele wearing matching business attire and had silently crossed and uncrossed their legs in unison throughout the hearing. One woman “was pointedly reading feminist texts,” he wrote, and the group left the tribunal “in a slow march led by Ms Kaechele to the sounds of a Robert Palmer song.”

Their conduct was “inappropriate, discourteous and disrespectful, and at worst contumelious and contemptuous,” Grueber added.

Rather than admit men to the exhibit, Kaechele -- who is married to the gallery’s owner, David Walsh -- installed a working toilet in the space, turning it into a women’s restroom in order to exploit a legal loophole to allow the refusal of men to continue.

International news outlets covered the development in May, apparently without questioning that a gallery would hang Picasso paintings in a public restroom. However, the Guardian reported Wednesday that it had asked Kaechele about the authenticity of the work, prompting her confession.

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. When the AP asked MONA to confirm that the statements in Kaechele's blog post, titled “Art is Not Truth: Pablo Picasso," were accurate, the spokesperson, Sara Gates-Matthews, said the post was “truthfully Kirsha’s admission.”

The Picasso Administration, which manages the late Spanish artist’s estate, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

“I’m flattered that people believed my great-grandmother summered with Picasso at her Swiss chateau where he and my grandmother were lovers when she threw a plate at him for indiscretions (of a kind) that bounced off his head and resulted in the crack you see inching through the gold ceramic plate in the Ladies Lounge,” Kaechele wrote this week, referring to the title card on one painting.

"The real plate would have killed him — it was made of solid gold. Well, it would have dented his forehead because the real plate is actually a coin.”