Picasso’s Daughter Donates Two Works to Struggling Paris Museum

Paris’s Musée Picasso, which has been going through some tough times. Anne Baldassari, its president since 2005, was fired in May—she was replaced by Centre Pompidou-Metz director Laurent Le Bon in June—and its reopening following an excruciating and oft-delayed five-year renovation project was pushed back once more until late October. But now, finally, some good news: Pablo Picasso’s eldest daughter, Maya Widmaier-Picasso, has donated two works by her father to the institution, Le Figaro reports.

The gifts include a 1908 drawing of a woman’s face in a Cubist style, with a portrait of the poet Guillaume Apollinaire on the reverse of the page. The other object, from much later in the Spanish artist’s career, is a sketchbook of 38 pencil drawings, all of them nude studies, dating from April 1960. The sketchbook drawings have never been seen in public before.

The Musée Picasso Paris’s collection already includes some 5,000 works by Picasso, including 300 paintings and 300 sculptures. When it reopens this fall, the museum will have more than doubled its exhibition space, to about 41,000 square feet.