Culture Chronicle

Picasso to the Rescue
The Wall Street Journal - April 16, 2010
By Candace Jackson

In tough times, museums play it safe by raiding their own closets; a repaired 'Actor' returns

For its spring blockbuster exhibit, the Metropolitan Museum of Art is pulling together hundreds of Pablo Picasso's works, from the rarely seen "Erotic Scene," to iconic paintings like "Gertrude Stein" to a newly discovered image of a puppy found beneath layers of paint in "The Blind Man's Meal." The paintings, drawings, sculptures and prints in the exhibit all come from a single source: the museum's own vault.

As museums around the country confront tight budgets and shrunken endowments, many are turning to a tactic well-suited to challenging economic times. They're cutting back on costly exhibits that travel among several venues and involve complicated art loans. Instead, they're dusting off the works they already have.

Several museums are pulling out their Picassos this spring, drawing on an artist who is universally popular. "Picasso in the Metropolitan Museum of Art," which opens to the public April 27, will feature about 300 of the 493 works by Picasso in the museum's permanent collection. On view now at New York's Museum of Modern Art is an exhibition that includes 100 of Picasso's printmaking works, all from the museum's collection. (MoMA owns about 1,100 of Picasso's 2,400 known prints.) At the Philadelphia Museum of Art, visitors can see works like "Three Musicians," the colorful Cubist painting of masked performers, along with more than 200 other works by Picasso and his contemporaries, nearly all owned by the museum. None of these exhibits will make stops at other museums. For the full article, click here