Picassos so rare only women can view them? Turns out curator Kirsha Kaechele painted them

They were billed as artworks by Pablo Picasso, paintings so valuable that an Australian art museum’s decision to display them in an exhibition restricted to women visitors provoked a gender discrimination lawsuit.

The paintings again prompted international headlines when the gallery re-hung them in a women’s restroom to sidestep a legal ruling that said men could not be barred from viewing them.

But the artworks at the centre of the uproar were not really by Picasso or the other famed artists billed as their creators, it emerged this week when the curator of the women-only exhibition admitted she had painted them herself.

Kirsha Kaechele wrote on the blog of Tasmania’s Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) on Wednesday that she was revealing herself as the works’ creator after receiving questions from a reporter and the Picasso Administration in France about their authenticity.

But they had been displayed for more than three years before their provenance was questioned, she said, even though she had accidentally hung one of the fake paintings upside down.

“I imagined that a Picasso scholar, or maybe just a Picasso fan, or maybe just someone who googles things, would visit the Ladies Lounge and see that the painting was 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 for visitors to “revel in the pure company of women” and as a statement on 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.

Outlandish and absurd title cards were displayed alongside the fake paintings, antiquities and