Le Monde reports that an art history student has raised concern over mold he observed while visiting Paris’s recently renovated Picasso Museum. The mold, resulting from poor air circulation between the cold outdoors and heated interior galleries, was also noted a few months after the museum’s highly anticipated reopening in 2014. At that time, the institution declared that the mold “poses no risk to people or artworks in the museum” and nothing was done to address the problem.

Recently, questions have arisen as to why the museum’s renovation, which cost over $30 million dollars and took nearly five years, did not anticipate what is actually a fairly common issue in a city with damp cold winters. One reason may be that the proposed solution involves drilling holes into door and window frames of the museum's original seventeenth century building, the Hotel Salé, which is classified as a historical monument.

It may ultimately be the courts who decide which party is responsible for the fungus and should therefore be charged with taking care of it: the architecture firm, the design firm, or the general contractor. The Picasso Museum is one of Paris’s major tourist attractions and has the largest collection of works by the Spanish master in the world.