Hürriyet Daily News & Economic Review
Curator behind ‘Picassos’ that sparked gender war in Australia
Billed as artworks by Pablo Picasso, paintings thought to be so valuable that an Australian art museum’s decision to display them in an exhibition restricted to women visitors provoked a gender discrimination lawsuit. The paintings again prompted international headlines when the gallery re-hung them in a women’s restroom to sidestep a legal ruling that said men could not be barred from viewing them.
But the artworks at the center of the uproar were not really by Picasso or the other famed artists billed as their creators, it emerged this week when the curator of the women-only exhibition admitted she had painted them herself.
Kirsha Kaechele wrote on the blog of Tasmania’s Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) on July 10 that she was revealing herself as the works’ creator after receiving questions from a reporter and the Picasso Administration in France about their authenticity.
But they had been displayed for more than three years before their provenance was questioned, she said, even though she had accidentally hung one of the fake paintings upside down.
“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,” Kaechele wrote. But no one did.
The saga began when Kaechele created a women-only area at MONA in 2020 for visitors to “revel in the pure company of women” and as a statement on their exclusion from male-dominated spaces throughout history.
The so-called Ladies Lounge offered high tea, massages and champagne served by male butlers, and was open to anyone who identified as a woman. Outlandish and absurd title cards were displayed alongside the fake paintings, antiquities and jewelry that was “quite obviously new and in some cases plastic,” she added.
The lounge had to display “the most important artworks in the world,” Kaechele wrote this week, in order for men “to feel as excluded as possible.”
It worked. MONA was ordered by court in March to stop refusing men entry to the Ladies Lounge after a complaint from a male gallery patron who was upset at being barred from the space during a 2023 visit.
“The participation by visitors in the process of being permitted or refused entry is part of the artwork itself,” tribunal Deputy President Richard Grueber wrote in his decision, which found the exhibition was discriminatory.
Grueber ruled that the man had suffered a disadvantage, in part because the artworks in the Ladies Lounge were so valuable. The tribunal ordered MONA to cease refusing men entry.
Rather than admit men to the exhibit, Kaechele installed a working toilet in the space, turning it into a women’s restroom in order to exploit a legal loophole to allow the refusal of men to continue.