Art lovers shocked in Turkey
Turkey today shocked art lovers who had travelled from as far as Japan to see Picasso paintings at a national museum. Four of the five works are fakes, they admitted.
The Paris-based Picasso Administration - run by the artist’s son Claude Ruiz-Picasso - examined photographs of the paintings and certified them to be fakes, Turkey’s Ministry of Culture said.
The State Painting and Sculpture Museum in Ankara may soon close its newly refurbished Picasso room, which houses five of the eight paintings. The other three are stored in the museum’s vault and not available for public viewing.
The Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg, Russia, claims the originals are safely in their care.
"Not only are they copies, but they are very bad copies,’’ Mikhail Borisovich Piotrovsky, director of the Hermitage Museum, said of the paintings in Turkey.
‘‘The originals are here with us at the Hermitage where they have always been.’’
