Seattle Art Museum is on a Role with Picasso Exhibition

A few weeks ago I wrote about how the Seattle Art Museum was burdedned with a 60-million-dollar debt when collapsed Washington Mutual pulled out of their lease with the museum. Washington Mutual had paid 5.8 million a year to rent out space in the museum’s building.  It was a dire situation for the Seattle Art Museum until Nordstrom’s stepped in to save the day, taking up the lease and paying 75 percent of the sum lost in the Washington Mutual mess.

The Seattle Art Museum can now celebrate another victory. It was announced a few days ago that the museum is the first U.S. museum to score big with an exhibition of works on loan from the Musée National Picasso in Paris, which closed in August for major renovations. Initially, the Musée National Picasso claimed it would not be lending any of its over 5000 Picasso works while undergoing renovations, but that no longer seems to be the case. The exhibition, titled “Picasso: Masterpieces from the Musée National Picasso, Paris,” will open on October 8 and run until January 9, 2011 and it will include more than 150 paintings, sculptures, drawings, and photographs.

The exhibition is sure to draw huge crowds and provide even more help to the Seattle Art Museum, which, in a not-so-great year for museums, has had quite the string of good luck.

via Seattle is First U.S. stop for Picasso exhibit.