The Picasso Museum in Paris will close for two years

Paris - The Paris Picasso Museum, which attracts half a million visitors from all over the world every year, will close for two seasons next year for extensive renovations. Its management announced this. They stated that over the next two years, a collection of about 300 works from its collections will be traveling to several world capitals, with the first stop in Madrid.
    The last major events of the museum before the closure will be an exhibition titled Picasso the Cubist and an exhibition dedicated to Guernica, taking place from October to January. The first is held to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of the creation of Picasso's painting Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, regarded as the starting point of cubism. The impetus for the second is this year's seventieth anniversary of the destruction of the Basque village of Guernica by the Nazi German air force, which was aiding General Francisco Franco's rebellion against the republic at that time. This act inspired Picasso to create the famous anti-war canvas Guernica, which is now housed in the Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid.
    This museum will be the first stop for the selection of 300 Picasso works, which will be traveling around the world from 2008 to 2010. The next stages are planned to be Tokyo and then probably Beijing during the Olympic Games, Abu Dhabi, New York, Sao Paulo, and Moscow.
    Renovations of the 17th-century palace in the Marais district of Paris, where the museum is located, will begin in October 2008 and will cost about 20 million euros (560 million crowns). Part of the costs will be covered by revenues from the aforementioned traveling exhibition.
    The museum will then reopen at the end of 2010 with exhibition spaces expanded by 1,000 square meters and improved facilities.