The artist’s rare archives were released ahead of a dedicated study center slated to open near the museum later this year, Radio France Internationale reported on Sunday. The center is intended for researchers and artists in residence.

This digital portal, however, makes accessible the museum’s vast collection of Picasso artworks, essays, conferences, podcasts, and interviews. A total of 19,000 photos, which have never been seen by the public, are included.

An additional 200,000 texts from Picasso’s workshops are also slated to be digitized and added to the portal in the coming years.

The Spanish painter and sculptor is one of the most influential artists of the 20th century, most notably as cofounder of the Cubist movement with Georges Braque. Born in 1881, he lived most of his life in France; he died in 1973. In 1992 his family archives were entrusted to the French state, which has continued to oversee them.

Last year, in honor of the 50th anniversary of the painter’s death, there were a number of exhibitions highlighting his lasting legacy.

THE HEADLINES

RECORD CHARDIN. A Jean Siméon Chardin still-life painting The Sliced Melon sold to a European collector for a record $28.7 million (€26.7 million), more than twice its high $12.9 million estimate (€12 million) estimate at Christie’s on Wednesday, according to French reports. The painting was shown at France’s official Salon in 1761, the same year as another much-talked-about Chardin painting of a basket of strawberries, which sold two years ago for $26 million with fees, and is now in the Louvre’s collection, thanks to a public funding campaign and private donations.

SOTHEBY’S DOWNGRADE. The S&P has downgraded Sotheby’s debt to B-minus from B, due to a 22 percent revenue drop and higher costs in the first quarter of 2024, reports The Wall Street Journal. The company’s bond prices have dropped about 8 percent in a month, as concerns mount over whether it can refinance loans by 2026. Revenue fell as Sotheby’s launched a new fee structure to boost margins, just as costs rose as larger consignor advances and sales exhibition expenses raised costs. “Despite the hit to both its top and bottom lines, Sotheby’s continues to pay shareholder dividends, doling out $8.5 million in the first quarter and $90 million last year, according to S&P,” reports the WSJ.

THE DIGEST

The newly launched Artists & Mothers grants aims to help New York–based artists with their childcare needs. The inaugural winner is Carissa Rodriguez, who last month opened her first institutional solo exhibition in Europe. [ARTnews]

Ukrainian artist and musician Artur Snitkus, 36, was killed in combat near Donetsk. His death comes amid intense fighting in eastern Ukraine against the Russian military offensive. Snitkus was described as an “icon of [the] Ukrainian queer underground,” by arts worker Natalia Martynenko. [The Art Newspaper]

British actor Stephen Fry compared the removal of the Parthenon marbles from Greece to the hypothetical scenario of the Nazis stealing the Arc de Triomphe while they occupied France. Speaking on Australian TV, he said it would be “classy” for the British Museum to return the sculptures. [The Guardian]

Influential figures in France’s art scene have signed a petition arguing the planned closing of Paris’ Centre Pompidou for renovation is a “serious error.” Former Pompidou president Alain Seban, art critic Nicolas Bourriaud, the artists Daniel Buren and Gérard and Elisabeth Garouste, are among those who signed the letter published in Le Figaro, and arguing for alternatives to a total museum closure, which they say would give private art institutions a competitive advantage. Rather, they insist closing individual floor sections as they are renovated is a doable alternative. [AFP and Le Figaro]

Later this month, at a Sotheby’s modern and contemporary sale in London, Jean-Michel Basquiat’s 1982 triptych Portrait of the Artist as a Young Derelict, will head to auction for the second time in three years, for an estimated value that is half its price two years ago. Christie’s estimated it was worth $30 million in 2022, but withdrew it, and now Sotheby’s estimates it is worth $15 to $20 million. [ARTnews]

The entertainment company Live Nation has cut ties with Barclays, after a number of artists pulled out of their events in protest against the bank’s tie to Israeli defense industries. [The National]

The Center for Italian Modern Art (Cima) in Manhattan, announced it will close permanently June 22. Its current exhibition about the Italian experimental artist and novelist Nanni Balestrini will be the last. [The Art Newspaper]

The Picasso museum in Paris has launched an online archive of artworks, photos, and other memorabilia from the artist, many of which have never been shown, ahead of a dedicated study center set to open near the museum later this year. [RFI]

Performance art has gained popularity in Hong Kong, particularly among younger audiences hungry for lived experiences, and despite the region’s new national security laws reducing freedom of expression. [South China Morning Post]

THE KICKER

LOST IN THE ALGORITHM. Social media algorithms influence what is blasted on our screens, and as Kate Brown examines for Artnet News, it is also shaping how performance artists work—whether consciously or not—along with what versions of their creations we are experiencing online. The costs can be significant. “More and more, their content finds traction if it makes sense to us in under ten seconds. What gets buried and seen is tightly bound up in what fits into the rules of virality,” writes Brown of performance art in particular, which she says has been booming thanks to Instagram’s latest reel-era. As a result, a repeated recipe for viral success increasingly risks dictating creative output, leaving little room for nuance and depth, which, even when initially embedded in the work, are edited out of online clips, argues Brown. “Social media has, at the same time, made a lot of artists a lot of money and brought the art world new levels of attention. But it is worth asking if it is pushing forward the medium,” she writes, “… if performance art follows the push of the algorithms and is formed and made anew under virtual logic, then it can risk, like painting did, to become equalized and rendered average in the face of the flattened feed, to fade into ambient buzz.”

In a statement, Picasso Museum president Cécile Debray said Gilot, who died in 2023 at age 101, was finally “being given her rightful place as an artist.”

The Picasso Museum’s new installation of the Hôtel Salé will look at several decades of Gilot’s artistic career, including “her close association with the Réalités nouvelles group to the great totemic compositions of the ’emblematic paintings’ of the 1980s,” according to a press release.

Located in room 17, on the museum’s third floor, this section will also include a discussion of her best-selling 1964 memoir Life with Picasso, which presented a less than flattering view of her relationship with Picasso and which the Cubist tried to prevent from being published.

Additionally, the room will be solely focused on Gilot as an artist and not feature paintings or photos of her by Picasso or look at her as his muse. According to a museum spokesperson, this is the first time the Picasso Museum will consider Gilot in this way. The display will be on view for the next year.

Picasso museum curator Joanne Snrech told the Guardian it was important to include a display of Gilot’s paintings to dispel the idea that she was “just Picasso’s partner.”

Snrech continued, “She was an artist in her own right with a very long career during which her work evolved. What we show here is the diversity of her work. We thought it was important to show not just her place in Picasso’s life but also that she was much more than just his companion. After all, she spent just 10 years with him out of more than 100.”

Gilot met Picasso in 1943 when she was 21; he was 40 years her senior. They had two children, Claude and Paloma, together during their 10-year relationship during which time she also continued to paint. Gilot left Picasso in 1953, taking their children with her, and he did not take the break-up well.

According to the Guardian, Picasso destroyed Gilot’s possessions, including letters to her from Henri Matisse, demanded the Louise Leiris Gallery end its representation of her work, and insisted she no longer be invited to exhibit with the prestigious group of French artists Salon de Mai.

In Life with Picasso, which was written with art critic Carlton Lake, Gilot writes, “He burned all the bridges that connected me to the past I had shared with him. But in doing so he forced me to discover myself and thus to survive. I shall never cease being grateful to him for that.”

After the publication of her memoir, and the uproar it caused in France, Gilot was essentially forced to leave the country, settling in the United States by 1970. Around this time, she would meet the virologist Jonas Salk; they were married from 1970 until his death in 1995. Shortly before her death last June, a painting by Gilot, who continued making art into her final months, sold for $1.3 million at Sotheby’s in 2021.

THE HEADLINES

MUSEUM HEIST. “Ultra-specialized” thieves made off with a $1.3 million-stash of jewelry and gold sculptures by Umberto Mastroianni, on display in an exhibition at the northern Italian Museo d’annunzio Segreto at the Vittoriale degli Italiani, reported Garda Post. The Mastroianni exhibition included the largest number of pieces by the 20^th-century gold sculptor ever publicly displayed from the artist’s estate collection. Thieves snatched a total of 48 objects, leaving only one behind, and they didn’t touch the permanent collection, though valuable. To complete the reportedly carefully planned heist, several suspects entered the museum by uprooting a bathroom sink and breaking a hole through a wall around 5:30am on March 6, and outwitting the museums’ alarm systems. By morning, museum staff arrived to find the exhibition empty. Specialized local Carabinieri are on the chase, but the museum fears pieces may have already been melted down.

A ROOM OF HER OWN. Virginia Woolf would have approved. The artist Françoise Gilot will get her own room dedicated to her artworks at the Picasso Museum in Paris. The initiative is an attempt to redress decades of dismissal of Gilot’s artistic practice, overshadowed by her famous relationship to Picasso. “She is not being presented as Picasso’s muse or inspiration. There are none of the pictures he did of her or photographs; instead it concentrates on Françoise Gilot as an artist,” a museum spokesperson told The Guardian. Gilot was the only woman to have walked out on Picasso, but she paid a price, and he reportedly tried to sink her career, leading Gilot to eventually settle in the US, and write all about it. She died in 2023 at age 101, and painted until the end.

THE DIGEST

Over 150 staff, fellows, and volunteers at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art are urging the institution to call for a ceasefire in Gaza and make a statement about Israel’s responsibility in the loss of lives there. The group wrote their demands in an open letter, calling themselves Met Workers For Palestine. [Hyperallergic]

The Houthi rebel attacks on cargo ships are delaying and adding costs to the shipment of art. The conflict in the Red Sea is forcing some companies to resort to air freight, rather than sea, for the safe delivery of artworks. [The Art Newspaper]

Critics complain a planned sculpture of Jane Austen for the Winchester Cathedral in Hampshire will lead to the “Disneyfication” of the area where the author was from. “I don’t think the Inner Close [where the statue is set to be placed in the cathedral] is the place to attract a lot of American tourists to come and have a selfie with Jane Austen,” said Elizabeth Proudman, a leader of The Jane Austen Society. [The Independent and The Guardian]

The Swiss company Art Recognition has used AI to identify a portrait of a peasant as very likely painted by the Renaissance artist Albrecht Dürer. The artwork is also signed and dated with Dürer’s name, but its authenticity had long been a debate. [The Art Newspaper France]

The Barbier-Mueller collection of tribal, Oceania and African art sold for 73 million euros last week at Christie’s in Paris, marking a record high for the category. [Le Quotidien de l’Art]

Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA) workers protested on March 7 at a staff meeting. Unionized workers disagree over their unresolved autumn 2022 contract. Protestors held signs that read, “pay up PMA.” [The Art Newspaper]

THE KICKER

END OF DOCUMENTA? The art historian, curator, and Documenta scholar Harald Kimpel, is stirring up art world milieux with a startling suggestion: to put an end to Documenta, the prestigious contemporary art exhibition held in Kassel, Germany every five years. Kimpel’s solution comes amid ongoing controversy around the event, including massive resignations by Selection Committee members. But with Documenta’s status as a Nobel Prize-like event for contemporary arts, his views may have more shock value than lead to an actual cancellation. “The situation is so screwed up that we could say: ‘after seven decades and 15 events, let’s just let it go,'” Kimpel told Frankfurter Rundschau.

A group of workers at the museum announced plans to strike for five days in September, during which time the institution will be installing “The Echo of Picasso,” a survey of the artist’s influence on others across the years that is set to open in October. The show is one of many being held around the world this year to mark the 50th anniversary of Pablo Picasso’s death.

Because this venue is sited in Málaga, the artist’s birthplace, events there may receive more attention than those at other Picasso collections around the world.

The strike is scheduled for September 18–22, but may last longer “if the company stubbornly continues in its failure to respect the current labour agreement and to evaluate the improvements to the fifth one that workers are requesting, such as the workday, flexible working hours, life-work balance and a sense of belonging to the institution,” the announcement from the workers’ committee said.

The committee said that a survey of 10 other Spanish museums, including the Picasso Museum in Barcelona and the Museo Carmen Thyssen Málaga, found that wages at Picasso Museum Málaga are “far lower” than at those other institutions.

A spokesperson for the Picasso Museum said the institution remained focused on celebrating its 20th anniversary and that it did not support the strike.

Workers at the museum have staged several protests this summer. They held a three-hour strike in May that forced the museum to temporarily shutter a survey of Picasso’s sculpture. While visitors were able to visit only the permanent collection galleries, the protesters stood outside the museum, where they wore masks recalling figures from some of Picasso’s most famous paintings.

In June, they led strikes on two separate days, one of which coincided with two cruise ships pulling into port.

Cynthia Daignault Is Now Represented by Kasmin
Kasmin gallery in New York has added to its roster Cynthia Daignault, whose work is on view at the recently opened New Museum Triennial. Daignault paints images of landscapes that often deal with an array of political issues, including environmental crises and histories of violence. Her works in the New Museum Triennial feature grey-toned images of trees that loom over sites associated with death, among them the Angel Oak in Charleston, where some have claimed to see the ghosts of enslaved laborers. Daignault will continue to be represented by Night Gallery in Los Angeles. The Baltimore-based artist’s first show with Kasmin opens on November 18.

Carnegie Museum of Art Names New Curator of Contemporary Art
Liz Park has been appointed as the curator of contemporary art at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh. Park previously worked with the museum as associate curator of the 57th edition of Carnegie International in 2018, and has also organized exhibitions at the University at Buffalo Art Galleries at the State University of New York. She has curated exhibitions at institutions worldwide, including at Western Front in Vancouver, the Kitchen in New York, and Seoul Art Space Geumcheon.

Thursday, October 28

David Kordansky Adds Shara Hughes to Roster
David Kordansky Gallery in Los Angeles now represents Shara Hughes. Hughes is known for her lush and layered abstract landscapes. Natural motifs, such as running water and stippled night skies, are rendered in vibrant colors that reference color field paintings and Post-Impressionism. She is the subject of forthcoming solo exhibitions at the Yuz Museum in Shanghai and the Kunstmuseum Luzern, Switzerland, and her work was recently shown at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, the Garden Museum in London, and Le Consortium in Dijon, France. Galerie Eva Presenhuber and Pilar Corrias will continue to represent Hughes.

Sprüth Magers Secures Worldwide Representation of Louise Lawler
With New York’s Metro Pictures getting ready to mount its final show, Louise Lawler, who has been on that gallery’s roster for decades, has gone all in at Sprüth Magers, which has long shown her photographs at its locations in Cologne, Berlin, and Los Angeles. A member of the Pictures Generation movement of the 1980s, Lawler is best known for her photographs of artworks as they are installed in galleries and collectors’ homes. These photographs consider the contexts in which art is exhibited and typically make prominent use of visual puns. Her current show at Sprüth Magers, which debuted at Metro Pictures earlier this year, features to photographs of Donald Judd’s Minimalist sculptures at the Museum of Modern Art that appear to have been taken after hours, when visitors were not allowed inside his 2020 retrospective.

Independent Art Fair Changes Dates, Heads Back to Former Home for 2022 Edition
The Independent art fair has announced two key changes for its forthcoming 2022 edition. After moving to the Battery Maritime Building and September for 2021 (to align with the new dates of the Armory Show), Independent will now take place May 5–8, 2022, and return to its previous home of Spring Studios in New York’s Tribeca neighborhood. The fair has also hired Sofie Scheerlinck to serve as its interim chief operating officer. Scheerlinck was previously the global managing director of TEFAF.

Lucía Vidales Is Now Represented by Karen Huber Gallery 
Mexico City’s Karen Huber Gallery has added Lucía Vidales to its roster of artists. The Mexican painter depicts abstracted bodies in strange entanglements. She has been awarded numerous grants and fellowships for her work, including ones from the National Endowments for the Arts and Apex Art in New York. She recently had an exhibition at Proxyco gallery in New York.

Huntington Museum Receives Archives of Greene & Greene Architecture Team
The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens has been gifted the 6,000 item archive from the Greene & Greene architecture team. The archive includes drawings, photographs, notebooks, correspondence, and more from the Arts and Crafts movement architect-brother duo. The Arts and Crafts movement was a reaction to the increasing mass production of homes during the turn of the 20th century. Architects of this genre emphasized custom design, natural, local materials, handicraft, and visible, sturdy structure. The archive was gifted to Huntington by the Gamble House Conservancy, which oversees the 1908 American Craftsman home in Pasadena designed by Greene & Greene. Sandra Ludig Brooke, the director of the Huntington’s library, called the Greene & Greene archive an “important addition.” 

Wednesday, October 27

Peter Doroshenko to Step Down as Executive Director of Dallas Contemporary 
Peter Doroshenko, the executive director of Dallas Contemporary in Texas, is set to step down as the art space’s leader in May 2022, when his contract expires. In his 11 years there, Doroshenko has grown the budget five-fold, expanded bilingual learning programs, and overseen major exhibitions of work by Yoshitomo Nara, Eric Fischl, and others. Previously, he held roles at the Gateshead in the United Kingdom, the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, and others. A search for his replacement is currently underway. His departure comes six months after Dallas Contemporary faced controversy for firing an employee who encouraged the museum to make a statement about anti-Asian hate in light of the Atlanta Spa Shootings.

Dallas Contemporary.

Almine Rech Now Represents  Daniel Gibson
Almine Rech will now represent contemporary Mexican-American artist Daniel Gibson. Featuring natural imagery from florals to mountain tops, Gibson’s vibrant paintings are inspired by deserts landscapes of the American Southwest. Almine Rech held the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery in New York this June. A second solo exhibition dedicated to his work will take place at the dealer’s Paris outpost in July 2022.

Tuesday, October 26

Kurt Kauper Is Now Represented by Miles McEnery
Miles McEnery Gallery in New York has added figurative painter Kurt Kauper to its roster. Kauper’s paintings depict celebrities, athletes, and politicians, only some of whom are real. These naturalistic portraits have an edge of unease to them, with his subjects’ genitalia sometimes left exposed and their gazes rendered cold and uninviting. Kauper, who was born in Indiana and now works in New York, has shown at the Whitney Museum, the Centre Pompidou, the Stedelijk Museum, and other institutions.

Monday, October 25

LACMA Receives Major Gift of Korean Art
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art has received a gift of 100 works of Asian art from local patron Dr. Chester Chang and his son Dr. Cameron C. Chang. The collection is comprised of 95 Korean artworks, among them paintings, calligraphy, sculptures, ceramics, and furniture. Also part of the gift are several Chinese, Japanese, and Tibetan artworks dating from the Three Kingdoms Period (220–280) to the mid-20th century. Among the highlights of the gift are a rare folding screen depicting Neo-Confucian diagrams relating to cosmology and Confucian social structures, landscape paintings from the Joseon dynasty, and Korean ceramic vessels from the 7th century. This is the second gift of artwork from the Chang family, following the donation of 50 works of Korean art between 2003 and 2007.

Rencontres de Bamako Delays 2021 Biennial by a Year
The Rencontres de Bamako biennial, a recurring showcase for African photography in Mali, has delayed this year’s edition by almost a year. “The health and wellbeing of our artists, team and visitors is an absolute priority for the biennale and informs this tough, but necessary decision,” the biennial wrote in a statement. Initially expected to open in November, the forthcoming edition of Rencontres de Bamako will now start on October 20, 2022, and run through December 20, 2022.

Simon Castets to Depart Swiss Institute as Director
With his second four-year contract coming to a close, Simon Castets will leave New York’s Swiss Institute as its director. He has led the art space since 2013 and will now become its executive chair. “Working alongside the artists included in our program, from exhibitions, to residencies, to live events, to education workshops, has been a privilege,” he said in a statement. A committee that includes Drawing Center director Laura Hoptman, Kunsthalle Basel president Martin Hatebur, and Swiss Institute trustees—among them artist Latifa Echakhch and publisher Michael Ringier—will lead a search for a new director.

French Ministry Names Artists Selected for Villa Albertine Residency
The French Ministry of Europe and Foreign Affairs has revealed the artists selected for the inaugural cycle of a new residency program Villa Albertine. Headquartered in New York, the residencies span cities across the U.S., including Chicago to Houston to Washington, D.C. and Los Angeles. The 80 international artists and creatives selected for the program proposed projects that examine the American landscape; 40 French partnering cultural institutions are lined up to eventually exhibit them. Among the first group of residents is (LA)HORDE, a three-artist collective working in New York City and Los Angeles. Art historian Anne Lafont’s project will focus on two American historical figures, Jean Baptiste Pointe du Sable and Marie Laveau, and French multidisciplinary artist Nicolas Floc’h will develop a photographic project centered around the Mississippi River. A full list of residents can be found here.

“It is an honour for our country to welcome these new artworks by Picasso. They will enrich and deepen our cultural heritage,” Le Maire wrote on Twitter.

At the press conference, Le Maire presented one work to the audience, the 1938 painting called Child with a Lollipop Sitting Under a Chair. According to Olivier Widmaier-Picasso, the artist’s grandson, the painting depicts his mother Maya. Widmaier-Picasso was present at the ceremony alongside Maya and his sister, Diana. The oldest work in the collection is Don Jose Ruiz, a portrait from 1895 of Picasso’s father.

Citizens of France have been allowed to settle similar debts to Ruiz-Picasso’s with a payment of arts, books, and collectibles of national importance since 1968, though such high-profile gifts are rare. The collective value of the nine objects was not disclosed.

The gifts will enter the national collections at Paris’s Musée Picasso in 2022, according to Roselyne Bachelot, France’s culture minister, who added at the press conference that that the artworks will be exhibited as a whole to the public in spring 2022.

“It is with deep emotion that I come to celebrate the entry into the national collections of the works,” said Bachelot, who called the donation an “exceptional event.”

Donald Trump.

MICHAEL VADON/VIA WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

Artists David Gleeson, Mike Stevens, and Sarah Muehlbauer have remodeled a Donald Trump bus as a conceptual work of art. Its new slogan: “Make fruit punch great again.” [USA Today]

Bartholomew Ryan has quit his job as curator of the Andy Warhol Museum, in Pittsburgh. [Pittsburgh Post-Gazette]

Ivo van Hove, the experimental theater director behind an upcoming David Bowie musical, gets profiled. [The New Yorker]

Arnolfini, an arts organization in Bristol, England, has announced that Rob Bowman is its new director of programs. [Artforum]

ColorSearch, an app created by Alexandra Chemla, the former Gavin Brown assistant who founded ArtBinder, allows collectors to look through works of art by color tones. [T Magazine]

Matthew Brannon at Casey Kaplan. [Contemporary Art Daily]

In light of one work of art being taken out of ArtPrize for using burnt religious texts, a rabbi wonders whether offensive art is ethical. [MLive]

On its 30th anniversary, Paris’s Picasso Museum opened a rehang of its collection and announced that contemporary artists would be working with the museum. [The Art Newspaper]

A county in Georgia has aspirations of becoming a “public art haven.” [Gainesville Times]

Frank Gehry.

COURTESY WIKIPEDIA

Here’s a profile of Laurent Le Bon, the new president of Paris’ long-troubled Picasso museum, which has been undergoing renovations for five years. “I don’t think I’m Zorro,” said Mr. Le Bon. “I don’t believe we are at war. There is no conflict. My method is very simple: to assess the situation, to read what has been produced and to listen.” [The New York Times]

An artist-run double decker bus is coming to Chelsea to offer tours and artsy souvenirs. [The Wall Street Journal]

“Christopher Bedford, Director of the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, has announced two major grants, both for $100,000, from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.” [Broadway World]

“The fate of Art Moscow, the city’s oldest fair for contemporary [art] scheduled to take place 17-21 September, is in limbo.” [The Art Newspaper]

Peter Brant produced a western directed by Tommy Lee Jones that premiered at the Telluride FIlm Festival. [Page Six]

“Meet the New Rich…in Myanmar: As the country opens up, a group of
high-end wealthy are showing up—and showing off—amid decay and
poverty.” Naturally that comes with some sudden and tasteless
enthusiasm for art. [The Wall Street Journal]

“Two Previously Unknown V. S. Gaitonde Works Owned By George Gund to
Feature at Bonhams in New York on Sept. 17th Ahead of Guggenheim
Retrospective” [Art Market Monitor]

“First ‘Pop-up Pompidou’ to open in Malaga next spring” [The Art Newspaper]

In 2009 the museum began construction on an expansion that will eventually double its size. Over the years the budget ballooned to approximately $70 million (twice the initial estimate) and the re-opening date moved from October 2013 to this coming June to, most recently, September. The past two years have been tumultuous: two executive directors have left, half of the staff issued a statement deriding Baldassari’s management and communication style, and the museum is currently lacking contracts for security personnel and restaurant workers.

According to an anonymous ministry official quoted in the Times, Baldassari, 59, was offered another position, overseeing the display of paintings, which she declined.