In short:
The artist who created a space at Tasmania’s Mona gallery at the centre of a discrimination complaint has admitted Picasso artworks hung there were faked by her three years ago.
The artist, who is also the wife of Mona’s founder, now says she had expected to be found out over the faked works for years, and that she had “imagined that a Picasso scholar … or maybe just someone who Googles things would … expose me on social media”.
What’s next?
It remains to be seen whether the Picasso Administration based in France intend to take any action against the museum.
Tasmania’s Museum of Old and New Art (Mona) has admitted to displaying three fake Picasso paintings for more than three years.
In a blog post published on Wednesday, curator Kirsha Kaechele said she forged the fakes herself to match the colour scheme of the museum’s Ladies Lounge.
Last month, Kaechele announced three Picassos were being displayed in a female toilet as a response to a successful discrimination complaint by a man who couldn’t access the venue’s Ladies Lounge where the works were previously on display.
Mona was found to have discriminated when it refused to let a New South Wales’ man entry into its women-only Ladies Lounge in April last year.
It meant the Ladies Lounge would have to start allowing men in, but the museum decided to close the exhibition.
Kaechele used a loophole in Tasmania’s anti-discrimination laws and hung three paintings purporting to be Picassos in a ladies bathroom and described it as an exhibition for women only, and a form where the Ladies Lounge could live on.
She said she had “waited patiently … three years and seven months to be exact” to be exposed for faking the artworks and had to make the admission publicly due to enquiries from a journalist and the Picasso Administration in France.
Kaechele said the fakes came about when she was designing the Ladies Lounge several years ago, a space she wanted to be as “opulent and sumptuous” as possible.
“And if men were to feel as excluded as possible, the lounge would need to display the most important artworks in the world — the very best,” she said.
She said she filled the lounge with “invaluable objects” that centred around fictional and absurd stories.
The Picassos were said to be inherited from her “great-grandmother” who had been a “lover” of Picasso’s and “went on holidays” with him.
Other fake items include brand new spears presented as antique New Guinean artefacts, plastic jewellery said to be precious family heirlooms and a mink rug linked to royalty that was actually polyester.
Kaechele said while she could have borrowed genuine Picasso paintings, she wanted them to be in a green colour scheme to match the green velvet aesthetic of the Ladies Lounge.
She said she decided to make the paintings herself.
“I chose the paintings for their colour palette and sensual depictions of the female form, exquisite against the green silk curtains of the Lounge,” she said.
Kaechele said she told no one about the fake paintings, and on the Ladies Lounge opening day she received a phone call that one of pieces was hung upside down.
She thought the mistake would be the forgeries’ undoing.
“I waited for weeks. Nothing happened. I was sure it would blow up. But it didn’t.
“Three years ago I fantasised there would be a scandal: ‘Fake Picassos Exposed: Art Fraud!’ 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.”
But instead, the Ladies Lounge received glowing reviews from various respected publications, she said.
“I am relieved I have told you because now we can revel together in this madness. Assuming you still want to speak to me. (I hope you can forgive me.)”
Mona, founded in 2011 by Kaechele’s husband David Walsh, has a long history of provocative exhibitions and activities, billing itself a a celebration of “sex and death”.
Events held under the banner of its Dark Mofo festival have included a proposal to soak a Union flag in the blood of Aboriginal people as part of an art show, a gallery exhibition which simulates the human digestive process and erecting upside-down Christian crosses throughout Hobart’s CBD.
Other notable Mona incidents held during its Dark Mofo winter festival have included a show which featured a slaughtered bull’s carcass and a hugely popular annual nude swim at winter solstice.
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