It was to be expected that the opening of the Musée Picasso in Paris would be a capital event, and so it has turned out to be. No secret had been made of the number and quality of the works of art which had come to the museum from the artist’s estate. A blizzard of publicity had inevitably attended the deals that were made between Picasso’s heirs and the French government in the aftermath of his death in 1973 at the age of ninety-one. Some of the more outstanding works which came to the museum as a result of those tax-settlement deals had already been exhibited in the historic Picasso exhibitions shown in Minneapolis and New York in 1980, and were much remarked on at that time. There was no question, then, that the museum would be an important repository of the master’s work. Exactly what the full scope of the collection would be, however, remained something of a mystery. Picasso had long been known to be a hoarder of his own work, and in virtually every period of his long career he had, of course, been one of the most copious producers in the entire history of art. It was also known that as he grew older and commanded great wealth, Picasso had gone to some trouble to buy back, either through purchase or exchange, examples of his earlier work which remained in private hands and which he deemed especially important. The well-known masterworks permanently reposing in the