Claude Picasso’s anger at the Picasso Museum’s delayed opening

Pablo Picasso’s son, Claude, has reacted angrily to the French culture ministry’s announcement that the reopening of the Picasso Museum in Paris has been postponed.

The museum, which closed for renovation in 2009, was scheduled to reopen this June after a number of prior delays. But last week it was announced that they would need until September to recruit and train new museum staff. ‘This opening was supposed to be a great party’, Claude Picasso told Le Figaro this weekend. ‘They are turning it into a fiasco’.

The Telegraph’s report on the heated – and increasingly public – exchanges between Claude Picasso, the ministry, the museum director Anne Baldassari (who Picasso supports), and existing museum employees, is a reminder that tensions have run high for some time. As the project edges towards completion, it looks as though the eventual reopening may not be an altogether happy one.