The French government has appointed a new president to the Musée Picasso, bringing what it hopes will be a close to a messy succession of missteps and public embarrassments at the museum, which has been closed for a delayed and over-budget expansion project for nearly five years.

Laurent Le Bon, who currently heads the Centre Pompidou-Metz, was named president late Tuesday, the French Culture Ministry said in a statement. Mr. Le Bon, an expert in the history of garden art who in the past decade has focused more on contemporary art, possesses “all the qualities required to make the opening of the Musée Picasso the party awaited by all the French and, well beyond that, by all lovers of this artist of genius,” said Aurélie Filippetti, the culture minister.

Mr. Le Bon, 45, succeeds Anne Baldassari, a Picasso scholar who was dismissed last month after nine years as the museum’s president. Mr. Le Bon oversaw the opening of the Centre Pompidou-Metz in 2010. The Metz museum, a satellite of the Pompidou Center in Paris, is one of France’s most prominent museums outside the capital, and is widely viewed as a successful example of an effort to “decentralize” the country’s art holdings, bringing high culture to what the French sometimes call the “provinces.”

Still, Mr. Le Bon had twice attempted unsuccessfully to leave Metz, in France’s gray northeastern plains, with bids for the Parisian presidencies of the Louvre and the Musée National d’Art Moderne, at the Pompidou Center in the capital....Continue Reading

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