Putting It All Together

In terms of sheer administrative labor, "Pablo Picasso: A Retrospective" is the most taxing show the Museum of Modern Art has ever installed. The idea for it came in 1972, when Art Historian and Picasso Expert William Rubin was visiting the artist in his villa at Mougins, in the south of France. In the sculpture-jammed studio, on the ground floor of the house, Rubin recalls, "I almost had a sense of vertigo. There was so much invention contained in so small an area. I thought to myself: There should be a really great Picasso show that combines Picasso's own holdings with things he let out of the studio." The following year, Rubin offered to clear the whole Museum of Modern Art and for four months, in effect, turn it into a Picasso museum. Picasso, who had never seen MOMA, chuckled and said yes. A few months later he died, leaving no will and all the "Picasso's Picassos" (45,000 works) awaiting cataloguing by the experts. Eventually, after a six-year-long legal bout, the estate, valued at up to $400 million, was distributed among the various heirs, with the French government scooping up, in lieu of taxes, 3,488 works, representing one-third of the estate's value, for the proposed Musee Picasso in Paris.

Rubin, 52, set to work with the future head of that museum, Dominique Bozo, 45. Beginning in late 1977, they whittled their huge exhibition of 940 works from the Spaniard's colossal output. The logistics of getting it to New York were daunting. They involved hundreds of millions of dollars in insurance (MOMA will not reveal exactly how much), the work of 30 couriers, and some 75 air shipments from different corners of the world. The cost of the exhibition was $2 million. Of the 152 lenders, among them 56 museums, only two sources balked. One was Picasso's widow Jacqueline, who, taken ill two weeks before the exhibition paintings were to be picked up, locked the gates of her villa. At the last moment Rubin wheedled the two portraits he needed from her. The other was the Soviet government, which, in the chilling of cultural relations with the U.S. that followed the invasion of Afghanistan, canceled the loan of twelve major Picassos.

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