These Picassos sparked a gender war in an Australian gallery. Now the curator says she painted them

WELLINGTON, New Zealand (AP) — They were touted as works of art by Pablo Picasso, paintings so valuable that an Australian art museum’s decision to display them in an exhibition reserved exclusively for female visitors sparked a gender discrimination lawsuit. The paintings made international headlines again when the gallery rehung them in a women’s restroom to circumvent a court ruling that men could not be barred from viewing the paintings.

That the artworks in question this year were not actually by Picasso or the other famous artists credited with creating them became clear this week when the curator of the women-only exhibition admitted that she had painted the pictures herself.

Kirsha Kaechele wrote on the blog of the Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) in Tasmania, she announced on Wednesday that she was identifying herself as the creator of the works after being questioned by a reporter and the Picasso administration in France about their authenticity.

However, they were on display for more than three years before their origins were questioned, she said, even though she had accidentally hung one of the fake paintings upside down.

“I imagined that a Picasso expert, or maybe just a Picasso fan, or maybe just someone who Googles things, would visit the Ladies Lounge and see that the painting was hanging 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 where visitors could “enjoy the pure company of women” and as a sign of 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. Extraordinary and absurd title cards were displayed alongside fake paintings, antiques and jewelry that was “quite obviously new and in some cases plastic,” she added.

Kaechele wrote this week that “the most important works of art in the world” should be exhibited in the lounge so that the men “feel excluded as much as possible.”

It worked. MONA – famous in Australia for its strange and subversive exhibitions and events – was ordered by the Tasmanian Civil and Administrative Court in March to no longer deny men access to the Ladies Lounge after a male gallery visitor complained that he was upset at being denied access to the space during a visit in 2023.

“The participation of visitors in the process of granting or denying access is part of the artwork itself,” wrote the tribunal’s vice-chair, Richard Grueber, in his decision declaring the exhibition discriminatory.

Grueber ruled that the man had been discriminated against, in part because the artworks in the Ladies Lounge were so valuable. Kaechele had described them at the hearing as “a carefully curated selection of paintings by the world’s leading artists, including two paintings that demonstrate Picasso’s genius in a spectacular way.”

The court ordered that MONA no longer bar men from entering. In his ruling, Grueber also sharply criticized a group of women who showed up in support of Kaechele, dressed in appropriate business attire and crossing and uncrossing their legs in silence and in unison throughout the hearing. One woman “purposefully read feminist texts,” he wrote, and the group left the court “in a slow march, led by Ms. Kaechele to the strains of a Robert Palmer song.”

Her behavior was “inappropriate, rude and disrespectful and, at worst, shameful and contemptuous,” Grueber added.

Instead of allowing men into the exhibition, Kaechele, who is married to gallery owner David Walsh, installed a working toilet in the space and converted it into a women’s restroom, thus exploiting a loophole in the law and continuing to deny men access.

International news agencies reported on the development in May and apparently did not question the gallery’s decision to hang Picasso paintings in a public toilet. However, the Guardian reported on Wednesday that Kaechele was asked about the authenticity of the work and she made a confession.

A spokesperson for MONA told the Associated Press that the gallery would not provide further details about the letter Kaechele allegedly received from the Picasso administration. When AP asked MONA to confirm that the statements in Kaechele’s blog post, titled “Art is not truth: Pablo Picasso,” were accurate, spokeswoman Sara Gates-Matthews said the post was “truthfully Kirsha’s admission.”

The Picasso Administration, which manages the estate of the late Spanish artist, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

“I am flattered that people thought my great-grandmother was spending the summer with Picasso in her Swiss castle, where he and my grandmother were lovers, when, for (some sort of) indiscretions, she threw a plate at him, which bounced off his head and caused the crack you see slowly running through the gold ceramic plate in the Ladies Lounge,” Kaechele wrote this week, referring to the title card of a painting.

“The real plate would have killed him – it was made of solid gold. Well, it would have left a dent in his forehead, because the real plate is actually a coin.”