Picasso to the Rescue
In tough times, museums play it safe by raiding their own closets; a repaired 'Actor' returns


For its spring blockbuster exhibit, the Metropolitan Museum of Art is pulling together hundreds of Pablo Picasso's works, from the rarely seen "Erotic Scene," to iconic paintings like "Gertrude Stein" to a newly discovered image of a puppy found beneath layers of paint in "The Blind Man's Meal." The paintings, drawings, sculptures and prints in the exhibit all come from a single source: the museum's own vault.

The Met Bets on Picasso


Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society, New York
More Photos: Picasso and His Cubist Kin

As museums around the country confront tight budgets and shrunken endowments, many are turning to a tactic well-suited to challenging economic times. They're cutting back on costly exhibits that travel among several venues and involve complicated art loans. Instead, they're dusting off the works they already have.

Several museums are pulling out their Picassos this spring, drawing on an artist who is universally popular. "Picasso in the Metropolitan Museum of Art," which opens to the public April 27, will feature about 300 of the 493 works by Picasso in the museum's permanent collection. On view now at New York's Museum of Modern Art is an exhibition that includes 100 of Picasso's printmaking works, all from the museum's collection. (MoMA owns about 1,100 of Picasso's 2,400 known prints.) At the Philadelphia Museum of Art, visitors can see works like "Three Musicians," the colorful Cubist painting of masked performers, along with more than 200 other works by Picasso and his contemporaries, nearly all owned by the museum. None of these exhibits will make stops at other museums.

Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Picasso's 'Woman in a Hat with Pompoms and a Printed Blouse,' 1962, will be included in the Metroplitan Museum's exhibit.

An exhibit from a museum's permanent collection is typically considerably less expensive than a big traveling show that borrows from other museums. On top of transportation costs, traveling exhibits often require greater security and hefty insurance policies. LeConte Moore, a managing director and fine-art specialist for the insurance broker DeWitt Stern, says that insurance costs for an exhibit requiring valuable art loans can run close to $1 million. When a museum arranges a show with its own collection, it is typically covered by its existing policy.

Museums across the country, which generally operate as non-profits, are looking for ways to work with less, with many laying off staff and limiting opening hours to cut costs. The Met saw a 22% drop in its endowment for the fiscal year ended June 30, although the museum says the upcoming year-end statement is expected to show improvement.

From the Vaults
A selection of exhibits from permanent collections at museums around the country

The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis
Walker Art Center
Benches Binoculars' Through Nov. 21 Works from the permanent collection, some of which had been in storage for more than 20 years, were hung salonstyle, floor to ceiling, for this exhibit. As the name suggests, visitors look at the artworks through binoculars as they sit on benches. The works on display include a self-portrait by Andy Warhol and Edward Hopper's "Office at Night."

Denver Art Museum
Chuck Close/PaceWildenstein, New York
'Exposures: Photos from the Vault' April 30-Oct. 31 This exhibit showcases the photographs the museum has been collecting since the 1930s, with works by Diane Arbus, Chuck Close, Ansel Adams and others. The museum recently established a department of photography for its holdings.

The Art Institute of Chicago
Art Institute of Chicago
Looking After Louis Sullivan' June 19-Dec. 12 Architect Louis Sullivan, a mentor of Frank Lloyd Wright, was known during his lifetime as the "father of the skyscraper" and for his design of the Chicago Stock Exchange Building. The exhibition is drawn from the permanent collections of the museum's departments of photography and architecture ad design.

The Brooklyn Museum
The Brooklyn Museum Costume Collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art
'American High Style: Fashioning a National Collection' May 7-Aug. 1 Pieces like designer Elsa Schiaparelli's surrealist insect necklace and ensembles by Arnold Scaasi will be on view from the museum's costume collection. Many of the items have long been in storage, the museum says. The exhibit will also highlight the museum's new collaboration with the Costume Institute of the Met, which now houses the Brooklyn Museum's Collection.

"Even as we continue to organize significant loan shows, I'm also encouraging my staff to look again at our own collections and really make the most of them," says the director of the Met, Thomas Campbell.

Despite financial woes, the American Association of Museums reported that half of art museums saw a rise in attendance last year. (The Met had 4.8 million visitors last year at its Fifth Avenue location and its medieval branch in northern Manhattan, the same as the previous year.) An Association of Art Museum Directors survey released last month found that 70% of museum directors planned to feature more of their permanent collection in future exhibitions.

Most museums display less than 10% of the artwork in their collection at any given time. The works in storage often include a mix of museum-worthy pieces that can be pulled out for special exhibitions, and others that aren't fit for public viewing because they are fragile, damaged or simply no longer considered examples of great art. The Met has 34 Picasso paintings, but usually shows only 25 to 28 of them at a time. The artist's drawings and prints are generally not on view at the museum, because they are more fragile, but they will be included in the spring exhibit.

Though not every museum has a closetful of Picassos to draw from, institutions across the country have come up with creative ways to put together shows from their own storerooms. At the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, museum-goers can take another look at the museum's permanent collection—using binoculars. The "Benches & Binoculars" exhibit features a salon-style gallery, hung floor to ceiling with works from of the museum's collection, like "Office at Night" by Edward Hopper. Visitors are encouraged to view the works through binoculars. Chief curator Darsie Alexander says the exhibition was meant to be "experimental, maybe even light-hearted," and to her surprise, has become one of the most popular galleries in the museum, requiring additional security guards because of the crowds.

Exhibits drawn entirely from permanent collections can sometimes feel incomplete or unsatisfying, museum observers say. "Very few museums have got a deep enough collection to pull this off convincingly," says David Gordon, the former director of the Milwaukee Art Museum who now works as a museum consultant. He adds that the Met's extensive holdings make it one of the possible exceptions.

But many curators say that permanent collection shows give them a chance to pay closer attention to familiar works, and to show them to visitors in a new light. For the Met's Picasso show, curators and conservators spent months researching the works and re-examining them using new technology—in some cases discovering additional paintings and drawings underneath some of the artist's well-known works. "When it's your own collection, you have unprecedented access, whereas if it's a loan show it tends to come framed and you only have it for three months," says Rachel Mustalish, a conservator who worked on the show extensively.

Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
'Blind Minotaur Led by a Girl through the Night,' 1934

Picasso's prolific career—he has more than 18,000 known works—and his pioneering styles, from Classicism to Cubism, make him consistently popular with tourists and scholars alike. The several Picasso shows this spring weren't planned in connection with one another, say organizers. "Perhaps in difficult straits one's mind leaps to Picasso," says Gary Tinterow, the curator of the Met's show. The Met says its show was conceived before the down economy was a factor.

If the other Picasso shows on view this spring are any indication, the Met's exhibition is likely to draw a big crowd, whether or not it gets rave reviews. The Philadelphia Museum of Art recently extended the run of "Picasso and the Avant-Garde in Paris" by an additional week, staying open late and on some Mondays, when the museum typically is closed, to accommodate demand. A Picasso exhibition last year by the Réunion des Musées Nationaux in Paris drew 783,000 visitors.

Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
'Self-Portrait,' 1906

With a $20 special exhibition fee for adults, the Philadelphia Museum of Art could see a boost to its bottom line from its crush of Picasso visitors. Museums also tend to see a jump in paid memberships when a high-profile show opens. Though the Met's suggested admission price of $20 is technically voluntary, and the museum won't charge a separate fee for the Picasso exhibition, Mr. Campbell says, "We're always trying to encourage people to become members." Many of the Met's members will get the chance to see the Picasso exhibition a week before it opens to the general public.

Drawing from the permanent collection also appeals to donors, who don't like to see their treasures ending up in a storage basement. "People who have given us works of art in the past want to see them used. They want to see them on display," says Malcolm Rogers, the director of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. He says he's focusing more on working with the collection these days, partly for that reason.

For the Met's Picasso exhibit, Mr. Tinterow says the works will be installed roughly in chronological order, spanning Picasso's career from ages 19 to 87. At least one work, "Erotic Scene," a 1903 oil that shows a young Picasso in an erotic embrace with a woman, will be on view at the Met for the first time. Mr. Tinterow says a parental warning will likely be posted near the entrance of the exhibit because of the work's explicit nature.

Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
'Woman in Profile,' 1901

The show will also mark the return of "The Actor," a large 1904-05 painting of a commedia dell'arte performer worth an estimated $100 million that was recently torn when a museum-goer fell onto the canvas. Mr. Tinterow says it will be repaired in time for the opening.

The museum acquired its first Picasso painting in 1947, a 1905-06 portrait of Gertrude Stein bequeathed by Ms. Stein. The museum bought a few more Picassos around the same time, through an unusual and short-lived arrangement with MoMA and the Whitney Museum of American Art. The Met agreed to refrain from buying contemporary art, but could purchase slightly older works—which MoMA and the Whitney then deemed no longer relevant—from the other two museums, at a price 20% below market value.

The Met's Picasso collection, built up over the following decades, grew in importance after several major gifts in the 1990s. Art dealers and philanthropists Klaus and Dolly Perls gave the Met one of its early Cubist-style Picasso paintings in the late 1990s, "Woman in an Armchair," an abstract portrait painted in 1909-10.

Fifteen Met staffers have worked for a year to prepare the Picasso show and an extensive catalog, taking advantage of recent technology. Conservators used a powerful infrared camera, designed to read radiation from distant stars, to gauge molecular-level reactions of materials in paintings and drawings. X-ray cameras were used to see the layers underneath the surface paint.

What Lies Beneath
X-radiography revealed more images underneath layers of paint in 'The Blind Man's Meal,' painted in 1903, including one of a crouching female figure. Fifteen staffers at the Metropolitan Museum worked for a year to prepare the exhibit, re-examining many familiar paintings with infrared and x-ray cameras to gain new insight into the artist's work process.

Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
The Metropolitan Museum of Art

"The Actor," the Met has found, was painted on top of a landscape. The practice was common early in Picasso's career: He often reused canvases to save money. One of the Met's best-known "blue period" paintings, "The Blind Man's Meal," a moody painting of a gaunt man, originally included a puppy in the foreground; it was removed in later versions. Another layer beneath is the figure of a crouching woman. Descriptions alongside the paintings, and a video accompanying the exhibit, will display many of the findings.

Conor Jordan, the head of the Impressionist & Modern Art department at Christie's in New York, says the market for Picasso's work has remained strong in recent years, despite the economic downturn. Picasso's "blue period" and "rose period" works, along with some Cubist works and paintings from 1932—a productive year for Picasso in which he frequently painted his mistress, Marie-Thérèse Walter—are among the most sought after. In recent years, works from the 1960s and later in his career have also risen in value at auction, says Mr. Jordan.

A rare Picasso work, "Nude, Green Leaves, and Bust," will hit the auction block next month. The 1932 painting of Ms. Walter hung in the Los Angeles home of Sidney F. Brody, who passed away in November. Christie's is handling the sale and estimates that the painting could fetch $70 million to $90 million. The piece hasn't been on public display since 1961.

Though many of Picasso's works are familiar to art lovers, Mr. Tinterow says that enough mystery still surrounds the artist that the current wave of exhibits is warranted. "There is still much more to learn," he says.