The story
For a stretch of time nobody can pin down exactly, visitors to the Museum of Contemporary Art of Caracas looked at a fake Matisse without knowing it. Odalisque in Red Trousers, painted in 1925, is one of his reclining women in Oriental costume, acquired under the museum's founder, the journalist Sofía Ímber. Around 2000 it was swapped for a crude copy in acrylic, and the switch was only spotted in 2002. Ten years later an FBI sting in a Miami hotel recovered the original, and in 2014 it came home and was shown beside the forgery.
Ímber opened the museum in 1973 in the Parque Central complex, a cluster of towers in the middle of the city, and built a collection of around 5,000 works, with pieces by Picasso, Miró, Chagall and Francis Bacon. She ran it until 2001, when President Hugo Chávez removed her live on his television programme. Her name, added to the museum's in 1990, was taken off in 2006, and in 2017 the museum was named after Armando Reverón, the Venezuelan painter known for his glaring white views of the coast at Macuto.
One of the quieter pictures here is a canvas from Claude Monet's 1886 series of the Pyramids of Port-Coton, the pointed rocks off Belle-Île, an island in Brittany, which he painted again and again in rough autumn weather.
