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Picasso’s step-daughter scraps plans to open the world’s largest museum dedicated to the Cubist Master

Plans to establish the world’s largest Pablo Picasso museum have been abandoned after negotiations over the property, a former convent in the south of France, broke down.

In 2018, Catherine Hutin-Blay, the artist’s step-daughter by his second wife, Jacqueline Roque, announced that she was purchasing the Couvent des Prêcheurs in the French town of Aix-en-Provence and turning it into a museum for her 2,000 piece Picasso collection. Now, that arrangement has fallen through, reports the Art Newspaper.

Hutin-Blay had entered into an agreement to buy the property for €11.5 million ($14.1 million) in December 2017. The town had agreed to a purchase price below the property’s value of €12.2 million ($15.2 million) because the museum had the potential to become a major tourist destination, with a projected annual attendance figure of 500,000.

The deal fell apart when the town tried to add a clause to the contract requiring that the site, which had most recently served as a middle school, would operate as a museum for at least 15 years after work to adapt the building, expected to take five years, was completed (the initial plan was to open in 2021).
Courtesy of Artnet News
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