David Rockefeller’s Absent Cubist Picasso to Return to MoMA (finally!) UPDATED

Picasso, "The Reservoir, Horta de Ebro," 1909, Museum of Modern Art, fractional and promised gift of David Rockefeller
© 2009 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

At last, David Rockefeller's 1909 seminal Cubist Picasso, above, will return to view on Friday at the Museum of Modern Art, after an absence of more than four years. It will be part of the museum's very small, very brief exhibition, Cézanne to Picasso: Paintings from the David and Peggy Rockefeller Collection, July 17-Aug. 31.

As I mentioned here and here, the presence at MoMA of David's picture was cited as justification for the museum's 2003 disposal of another 1909 Horta Picasso, bequeathed to MoMA in 1979 by David's brother, Nelson:


Picasso, "Houses on the Hill, Horta de Ebro," 1909, Museum Berggruen, Berlin (formerly bequeathed to MoMA by Nelson Rockefeller)

In my PowerPoint lectures on deaccessioning, I've characterized MoMA's sale of its very early Cubist Picasso (above), purchased by the late dealer/collector Heinz Berggruen, as "the most deplorable of the deaccessions that I have seen." The lame theory behind that disposal was that the museum really didn't need that seminal modern masterpiece because it had David's from the same year.

The problem was, the museum didn't actually own David's picture. He had promised his "Horta" to the museum in 1970 and gave the museum a 10% fractional interest in the painting in 1991. Presumably, it's been gracing the collector's home, rather than the museum's walls, ever since its four-month stint at the inaugural installation of the museum's new Taniguchi-designed facility.

I have e-mailed MoMA, asking whether the "Horta" will return to its owner after it briefly sees the light of day in this summer's nine-work Rockefeller show. (I'll update here, if and when I get MoMA's answer.)

This puzzlingly fleeting "intimate installation," as MoMA calls it, may have less to do with delighting the public than with satisfying the IRS's new fractional-gift requirements for periodic physical possession by the museum.

UPDATE: Kim Mitchell, MoMA's communications director, confirmed that David's "Horta" will leave the building and return to its (fractional) owner after the Aug. 31 close of the show. Where's that Nelson Picasso when they really need it? Oh right...it's here, where it's described as "one of the most significant" works acquired by the Museum Berggruen museum since its 1996 opening in Berlin.