The Picasso Museum in Paris has recently announced a $50 million expansion project, which will include an outdoor space for a public sculpture garden.
It has been eleven years since the last renovations at the Picasso Museum. The museum is housed in the Hôtel Salé, a seventeenth-century mansion in the Marais District of Paris. Though the museum first opened in 1985, the Hôtel Salé desperately needed updates to make the museum more operational and manageable. The project ran over schedule and over budget, resulting in the dismissal of the museum’s director by the French cultural minister. And now, a little over a decade later, the Picasso Museum recently unveiled an expansion project it is calling Picasso 2030. The centerpiece of this expansion project will be the acquisition of the small park adjacent to the museum, Jardin de l’Hôtel Salé Leonor Fini. This park will be transformed into a public sculpture garden that will be able to hold some of Picasso‘s sculptures and other three-dimensional works curators might find difficult to display in the galleries. The museum owns 368 such works, including bronze sculptures like L’Homme au mouton (1943), La Chèvre (1950), and Métamorphose I (1928). The Picasso Museum’s director, Cécile Debray, stated in her announcement that she hopes the addition of a public sculpture garden will make the museum more accessible and encourage people to visit more frequently. She further commented, “The building is magnificent and very well-maintained. But as time went on, I saw its limitations”.
One of the other main focuses of Picasso 2030 is to build a new wing dedicated to temporary exhibitions, nearly doubling the amount of space available to such shows to around 8,600 square feet. This would free up wall space for works from the permanent collection, of which the Picasso Museum only has space for about 10% on the gallery walls at any given time. The museum will also gain a new restaurant, a bookstore, classrooms, and cultural mediation spaces. Unlike the last round of renovations, the museum plans on remaining open while the project is underway between 2028 and 2030. In total, the museum estimates the expansion will cost around €50 million. Normally, the French government would be willing to foot the bill. However, President Emmanuel Macron‘s government has already involved itself in several expensive cultural projects, including renovations to the Louvre and other cultural institutions. However, the museum may still do well with partial funding, as it is one of the most popular small museums in the French capital. The museum also has an extensive network of donors it can draw from, while the Picasso family itself may also be asked to contribute.