Picasso daughter to donate father’s works to Paris museum

Picasso's eldest daughter has promised to donate one of her father's drawings and a notebook of sketches to the newly renovated Paris museum dedicated to his life's work, The Guardian reports.

Maya Widmaier Picasso said the works would be handed over for the reopening of the museum on 25 October, the 133rd anniversary of the artist's birth in Spain.

The renovation of the museum in the Marais district, which has taken five years, has been mired in controversy and crisis, and the reopening date has been postponed several times.

The work has run over budget and schedule, staff have issued complaints and the culture minister, Aurélie Filippetti, fired the director in charge of the project.

The museum already has 5,000 works by Picasso, often regarded as the 21st century's greatest artist, including 300 paintings and a similar number of sculptures.

Enlarging the museum, which opened in 1985, included the purchase of a neighbouring building to create offices, and will more than double the exhibition space from 1,600 sq metres to 3,800 sq metres.

Until now, lack of space has meant only a fraction of the Picasso works held by the museum could be displayed and many were held in storage.

Widmaier Picasso, 78, appears in several of her father's works, including the celebrated series Maya with her Doll. She is the painter's daughter with Marie-Thérèse Walter, his companion from 1927 to the mid-1930s, who hanged herself in 1977 four years after his death.

She announced her donation through her lawyer.

The drawing, completed in 1908 during Picasso's cubist period, shows a woman's face. The bottom half of the face of the French poet Guillaume Apollinaire is drawn on the back. The drawing of the top half of Apollinaire's face is already in the museum. The notebook contains 38 pencil studies of nudes completed in April 1960.

The museum's sacked director, Anne Baldassari, 58, has spent 23 years at the 17th century baroque Hôtel Salé where the collection is held, nine of them in charge. She is a renowned Picasso expert and had made the renovation the pinnacle of her career. Despite its running three years over schedule and €22m (£17.5m) over its €30m budget, much of which Baldassari raised by organising exhibitions of the collection abroad, she was optimistic the final result would be worth it.