When the state appointed him president in June and dispatched him on this emergency mission, French headlines hailed Mr. Le Bon in the name of that fictional masked outlaw who battled tyrannical officials. And riffing on an English translation of his last name and his reputation for diplomacy, curators in the international art world called him Larry the Good.
His task: reopen the museum’s regal 17th-century mansion after five years of construction and renovation, with several missed start dates and an employee revolt that led to the firing in May of the previous president on the grounds of autocratic management.
“I don’t think I’m Zorro,” said Mr. Le Bon, 45, who presided over the opening of the Centre Pompidou Metz, that museum’s branch in northeast France, in 2010 and is a specialist in the art of 16th- and 17th-century garden design. “I don’t believe we are at war. There is no conflict. My method is very simple: to assess the situation, to read what has been produced and to listen.”
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The Picasso Museum, in the Hôtel Salé, has had its public space more than double to house the largest collection of Picasso paintings in the world and is now scheduled to open on Oct. 25, which would have been Picasso’s 133rd birthday.
On Sept. 20 and 21, visitors will get a free preliminary peek at the empty mansion and its grand staircase, extravagant Corinthian pilasters and cupids before some 500 paintings are hung, including some from Picasso’s personal collection. In the meantime, Mr. Le Bon is waging a charm offensive, including reaching a preliminary accord with the ousted president, Anne Baldassari, a Picasso scholar who had invested much of her career in the museum.
This week, the ministry of culture and Mr. Le Bon were wrapping up an agreement to bring her back as a curator for the opening exhibition that she had already planned. (She was claiming a form of copyright on the arrangement of the paintings.) Her lawyer, Henri Leclerc — who made the novel claim — said he would not comment.
Mr. Le Bon has also reached to the broader circle of people affected by the expansion and has sought to mend frayed relationships, including some with Picasso’s descendants.
This state-run museum, started in 1985, owes its existence to the Picasso family, which donated a trove of more than 5,000 artworks after the artist’s death in 1973 under a law permitting heirs to contribute art in lieu of tax payments.
When the management shake-up happened, Claude Picasso, the artist’s son and a member of the museum board, erupted in fury, scorning any replacement as an impostor. However, since Mr. Le Bon’s appointment, Mr. Picasso has muted his criticism and declined to comment about the opening.
Mr. Le Bon met with him and also visited Maya Widmaier Picasso, the artist’s daughter by his mistress — and frequent model — Marie-Thérèse Walter. Soon after that encounter, she offered a public demonstration of her support for the new leadership with a gift of Picasso sketches and a partial drawing of the French poet Guillaume Apollinaire that matches the other half, which is owned by the museum.
The choice was calculated to deliver a message of harmony, according to her son, Olivier Widmaier Picasso, a filmmaker in Paris who produced a documentary, which will air on local television, about the family and the museum. “It symbolizes reunification,” he said. “We walk in the same direction. My mother was sad to see that her father’s work had become a hostage in this story. She felt that people at the museum were like survivors on a raft, and they didn’t know whether we were against them.”
In addition to wooing the family, Mr. Le Bon hosted a flurry of personal and group meetings. The strategy was meant to turn the page on what the French press at one point called a psychodrama that figured in the departure of the most recent culture minister, Aurélie Filippetti. She was criticized for being slow to handle the museum affair, while costs soared to 52 million euros (about $68.3 million), and a string of employees left.
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Mr. Le Bon met with the employees, the local union, gallery owners and neighbors miffed by the endless construction. There is now discussion underway about changing the metal pergola facing a garden and public space that provoked neighborhood criticism.
François Margolin, a documentary filmmaker and a neighbor who, together with a local preservation group, lodged complaints about the museum’s construction permits, said he met with Mr. Le Bon and came away impressed with his collegial style, an impression shared by the union.
“He is not egotistical,” Mr. Margolin said. “He has real experience opening museums. He is more open and has a method of working with other people, listening to the opinions of others. He is really professional.”
Beyond the neighborhood, Mr. Le Bon has also initiated contact with major French museums that had had frosty relations with his predecessor after she spurned some requests for Picasso art loans. In October, he is lending three Picasso works to the Musée d’Orsay for its exhibition on the theme of the Marquis de Sade, and he is planning more loans to museums in France and New York. Loan fees for some of the works, which had traveled for years on the international exhibition circuit, had helped finance the restoration. Mr. Le Bon said he expects to produce more revenue through touring exhibitions, in part because the museum is expected to finance more than 60 percent of its annual budget, which has not been set yet by the government.
“It’s a public collection and does not belong to me,” Mr. Le Bon said on Tuesday in an interview at his office. “I am delighted that we have such a huge stock in reserve. And I also am glad that there are people that want to use it for great projects. That’s part of our métier: collection, exhibition.”
On Tuesday, the scaffolding that laced the mansion was gone. Police stood guard, barricading the passageway except for trucks transporting the first Picasso artworks to arrive after a long absence. President François Hollande is expected to inaugurate the museum as part of a round of high-profile openings. (The Louis Vuitton contemporary art center, designed by Frank Gehry, opens the same week.)
“It’s like preparing a play, or a film, or a musical spectacular,” Mr. Le Bon said, recalling how he was moved to tears when the first person walked in the door of the Centre Pompidou Metz “An opening is magic.”
In this spectacle, the stars making a reappearance include Picasso’s gigantic work “The Pipes of Pan” (1923), from his neo-Classical period, along with the works from his personal collection, by Renoir and Gauguin, a gaunt self-portrait from Picasso’s Blue Period, in 1901, and his grand collage “Femmes à Leur Toilette” (1938). The works by other artists will be housed in a luminous room with exposed beams natural light and a sweeping view of Paris.
Out of habit, some neighbors in this medieval neighborhood are bracing for further delays, but Mr. Le Bon insists that the grand double doors will open on time and that the museum has restored its serenity.
“It’s certain that it will open,” he said. “That’s for sure. This is my job and my passion.”