The paintings were labeled as works by Pablo Picasso, and are so valuable that an Australian art museum’s decision to display them in a women-only exhibition sparked a sex discrimination lawsuit. The paintings made international headlines again when the museum re-hung them in a women’s bathroom to circumvent a legal ruling that men could not be prevented from viewing them.
But the artworks at the centre of the uproar were not actually by Picasso or the other famous artists touted as their creators, as was revealed this week when the curator of the women-only exhibition admitted she had painted them herself.
Written by Kirsha Kaechli On the blog The director of the Tasmanian Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) announced on Wednesday that she had revealed herself as the creator of the artworks after receiving questions from a reporter and the Picasso Museum in France about their authenticity.
But she said it had been on display for more than three years before its provenance was questioned, even though she had accidentally hung one of the fake paintings upside down.
“I imagined that a Picasso scholar, or maybe a Picasso fan, or maybe just someone Googling things, would visit the ladies’ lounge, see the painting upside down, and expose me on social media,” Caicelli wrote. But no one did.
The story began when Caicelli created a women-only area at the Museum of Contemporary Art in 2020 so that visitors could “enjoy the pure company of women” and as an expression of their exclusion from male-dominated spaces throughout history.
The ladies’ lounge offered tea, massages and champagne served by male servants, and was open to anyone who identified as a woman. She added that bizarre and ridiculous name tags were displayed alongside fake paintings, antiques and jewellery that were “obviously new, and in some cases plastic”.
The gallery had to display “the world’s most important works of art,” Caicelli wrote this week, so that men would feel “as excluded as possible.”
The idea worked. MONA, a museum famous in Australia for its strange and disturbing exhibitions and events, was By order of the Tasmanian Civil and Administrative Court In March, authorities decided to stop refusing men entry to the women’s hall after a complaint from a male exhibition-goer who was upset about being barred from the venue during a 2023 visit.
“Visitors’ participation in the process of being admitted or denied entry is part of the artwork itself,” Vice President Richard Gruber wrote in his decision finding the exhibition was discriminatory.
Gruber ruled that the man had suffered a defect, in part because the artworks in the ladies’ lounge were of great value. Kaychel described them at the hearing as “a carefully selected collection of paintings by the world’s leading artists, including two paintings that show the genius of Picasso in a striking way.”
The court ordered the Monaco court to stop refusing entry to men. In his ruling, Gruber also criticised a group of women who had come to support Caichelli, wearing identical formal dresses, and silently crossing and uncrossing their legs throughout the hearing. He wrote that one of the women “was reading deliberately feminist texts”, and the group left the court “in a slow march led by Ms Caichelli to the tune of a Robert Palmer song”.
Their behavior was “inappropriate, impolite, disrespectful, and at worst hostile and contemptuous,” Gruber added.
Rather than allowing men into the gallery, Caicelli – who is married to the gallery’s owner, David Walsh – installed a working toilet in the space, converting it into a women’s toilet in order to exploit a legal loophole to allow men to refuse to continue.
The world’s media covered the development in May, seemingly without questioning that the gallery would hang Picasso’s paintings in a public toilet. However, guardian AFP reported on Wednesday that it had asked Kaicelli about the authenticity of the work, which prompted her to confess.
A MONA spokesperson told The Associated Press that the gallery would not provide further details about the letter that Cacheli said she received from Picasso’s management. When the AP asked MONA to confirm the statements in Cacheli’s blog post titled “Art is not reality: Pablo Picasso,” spokeswoman Sarah Gates Matthews said the post was “a sincere admission by Kirsha.”
The Picasso Administration, which manages the late Spanish artist’s estate, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
“I am satisfied that people believed that my great-grandmother spent the summer with Picasso at her Swiss chateau where he and my grandmother were lovers when she threw a plate at him for some sort of indecency which bounced off his head and made the crack you see in the gold porcelain plate in the ladies’ lounge,” Caicelli wrote this week, referring to the title card on one of the paintings.
“The real painting would have killed him, it was made of solid gold. Well, it would have scratched his forehead because the real painting is actually a coin.”
—Charlotte Graham McClay, Associated Press
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