By Stephen May
NEW YORK CITY — Pablo Ruiz Picasso (1881–1973), the inventive Spanish-born artistic genius, was not only the most famous artist of the Twentieth Century, but also widely regarded as the most significant, versatile and influential. One of the most prolific artists ever, he created 15,000 paintings, 600 sculptures and countless drawings and prints.
Fueled by inexhaustible energy, boundless creativity and supreme talent, Picasso participated in and fathered diverse forms of modern art, notably Cubism in collaboration with Georges Braque. At the age of 26, he created “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon,” an epochal work heavily influenced by distinctive African masks. Some say “Demoiselles” marked the beginning of Modern art.
By the outbreak of World War I, Picasso had replaced Henri Matisse as the leader of the avant-garde. Many of his lovers modeled for often distorted portraits as he experimented with academic classicism and large, rounded figures. His powerful antiwar mural, “Guernica,” documented his opposition to General Francisco Franco in the Spanish Civil War.
Often overlooked in this profusion of paintings and other forms of art is Picasso’s three-dimensional work. It is the subject of a large, revelatory exhibition, “Picasso Sculpture,” on view at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) through February 7. Organized by top MoMA curators Ann Temkin and Anne Umland, with the Musee National Picasso, Paris, sculpture curator Virginie Perdrisot, it comprises around 140 sculptures spanning the years 1902 to 1964.
Picasso was trained as a painter, not as a sculptor. This meant that his three-dimensional work grew not out of academic tradition, but out of the artist’s own powers of invention and experimentation. Over the course of six decades, Picasso redefined the manner of his sculpture repeatedly, setting himself apart from his colleagues and indeed from what he himself had done previously.
Picasso’s commitment to sculpture was episodic rather than continuous. Each gallery in the exhibition covers his shift from one studio to another; each new workspace brought with it new tools, processes and materials — and frequently a new muse. Sculpture was highly personal to the artist. He kept most of his three-dimensional objects, living among them as though they were family members.
The first gallery concentrates on Picasso’s initial three-dimensional work, starting with “Seated Woman,” a small, lumpy figure modeled in clay in Barcelona in 1902 when he was 20. Moving to Paris two years later, he continued to rely on studios and tools of friends to explore subjects in three-dimensional work that paralleled those in his paintings. He also began a pattern of using lovers and friends as models.
Picasso visited the ethnological museum in Paris and was blown away by the powerful display of African and Oceanic sculptures. The angular shapes and faceted surfaces of “Head of a Woman,” which became one of his best-known sculptures, paralleled the fractured planes and steep inclines of Picasso and Braque’s Cubist paintings. Acquired by Modernist impresario Alfred Stieglitz, “Head” was exhibited at the Armory Show of 1913 in New York.
The second gallery covers Picasso’s Cubist years, 1912–1915, when he used simple craft processes — cutting, folding and threading — to create “Guitar,” first in cardboard and then in sheet metal.
Especially eye-catching during this period is a “Still Life” with a distinctive upholstery fringe and protruding tabletop, which displays a complex series of inversions. The texture of the salami slices consists of nail heads daubed with dots of paint.
Also noteworthy are six unique versions of “Glass of Absinthe,” reunited for the first time since they left the artist’s studio. Rather than following the conventional process of having works within a bronze edition look the same, Picasso decorated each small work differently. Each integrates an actual absinthe spoon, which holds a painted bronze depiction of a sugar cube over which liquor would be poured into a glass. All this within an object that measures around 9 by 5 by 4 inches.
In the late 1920s, Picasso was commissioned to create a monument for the tomb of poet/critic Guillaume Apollinaire. It was an opportunity for the artist to pay homage to a man who had been a close friend and an early and eloquent champion of his work. The varied works on view in this and the adjacent gallery were designed for Apollinaire’s grave. They include thick, almost comically grotesque, volumes in bronze of “Metamorphosis I” and “Metamorphosis II,” and three spindly iron wire and sheet metal constructions each called “Figure” and dubbed by Picasso’s art dealer “drawings in space.”
In spite of several rounds of experimentation, none of the ideas Picasso offered the memorial committee was accepted. Its members did not approve of the radical innovations of the submitted sculptures.
Most interesting here is a series of complex works in welded metal made by Picasso in collaboration with sculptor Julio Gonzalez. He welcomed Picasso into his small metalworking studio in Montparnasse, where he translated the artist’s line drawings into wire. They worked together on constructions with complicated planes and angles. The highlight here is Picasso’s monumental “Woman in the Garden,” his final and most ambitious effort to craft a memorial sculpture for Apollinaire. Composed of a large number of salvaged metal elements welded together and unified by an overall coat of white paint, it reflects in form and spirit Picasso’s admiration for the African and Oceanic figures he had seen at the ethnological museum and that he subsequently avidly collected.
In the early 1930s, Picasso purchased the Chateau de Boisgeloup, a property 45 miles northwest of Paris. He created there a diverse group of three-dimensional work: slender, carved wood figures, mostly titled “Standing Woman,” whittled from odds and ends of wood found around the studio or on the forest floor; a series of heads and busts of women conveying sexual messages; and anatomical fragments in luminous white plaster, along with a bunch of smaller female bathers, exotic creatures and birds in bronze.
Around 1933 Picasso began to experiment with implanting plaster with everyday objects and materials. The tall, wimpy figure of “The Orator” suggests the artist’s low regard for speakers, particularly as compared to robust depictions of “The Reaper” and “Head of a Warrior,” both modeled in plaster. A rare sense of whimsy makes the elongated “Woman Carrying a Vessel,” consisting of painted wood and objects, stand out.
During the grim war years, 1939–1945, Picasso was one of the few artists designated by the Germans as “degenerate” who was allowed to remain in occupied Paris. He took up sculpture again, somehow managing to scrounge enough clay and plaster to create an imposing gaggle of animal and human figures.
The ghastly “Death’s Head” reflects the artist’s somber response to war. The largest work, the 7-foot-tall “Man with a Lamb,” grew out of a long series of drawings. Picasso denied its religious symbolism.
Some witty works were created during these sober times: “Bull’s Head” pairs a leather bicycle seat and a pair of metal handlebars for an arresting image, while “The Venus of Gas,” consisting of the burner and pipe from a gas stove, suggests a modern iteration of an ancient fertility goddess.
The next gallery contains 25 photographs of Picasso sculptures taken by iconic French photographer Brassai, many on assignment for a Surrealist periodical between 1932 and 1946. Picasso came to trust Brassai as a photographer of his sculptures more than any other cameraman.
Soon after the end of the war, Picasso visited the French Riviera for the first time in years. The Mediterranean’s sun, light and sand, combined with its connections to classical Greek and Roman culture, ushered in a new phase in Picasso’s three-dimensional work. Working in a studio in the town of Vallauris, he experimented with the classic shapes of ceramic vessels along with a range of surface effects achieved with the use of glazes and slips.
After converting an abandoned perfume factory into a studio, Picasso created a series of assemblages from a variety of found objects that were held together by plaster and armatures of wood and metal. Ceramic vessels or fragments were converted into the breasts and belly of a robust “Pregnant Woman.”
Spades, screws, cake molds and a watering can were used to make “Flowery Watering Can,” as well as bouquets and “Crane” and other birds. Although they became parts of new creations, these everyday objects retained their original identities, even when cast in bronze.
Picasso’s assemblages became larger and more complex throughout the early 1950s, when his renewed status as a family man inspired works like “Baboon and Young,” in which the head was crafted of his son’s toys. The whole can be viewed as a self-portrait of a proud and animated 69-year-old father.
In 1955 Picasso moved to the villa La Californie, outside Cannes, with his new companion, Jacqueline Roque. There were no junkyards in the elegant residential neighborhood, but for his playful transformations the artist made do with lumber scraps, crates, bits of old furniture, tree branches from his garden and other salvaged items. For a fascinating group of six “Bathers” the artist assembled painting stretchers, wooden planks and found objects in elongated figures. A formidable “Bull” is crafted of blockboard, palm frond and various other tree branches, eyebolt, nails and screws, with drips of alkyd and pencil markings.
The final phase of Picasso’s sculpture-making, 1954 to 1964, focused on using sheet metal. Some portray the striking profile of his wife Jacqueline, while some — mothers, bathers and other sympathetic characters — share a lightness of spirit that belies their complex conception and intricate execution. They include a sheet metal “Chair,” painted white, and a witty “Woman with Outstretched Arms.” Also created in this last hurrah are heads of women and women with children, some painted in vivid hues.
Picasso’s longtime dream of creating monumental sculptures was finally realized with “Sylvette,” a 20-foot-tall figure erected in 1968 alongside a New York University housing complex, where it remains today. Picasso’s last three-dimensional work, a sculpture for the Richard J. Daley Center, became a 50-foot-tall work of Cor-Ten steel dating to 1967 that graces the plaza of the Chicago Civic Center.
“Picasso Sculpture” is not only an abundant feast for the eyes, but a fascinating examination of a neglected facet of an illustrious career. Spurred episodically to work in three dimensions, unfettered by tradition and challenged for materials, Picasso ends up a larger-than-life sculptor, as we knew all along he would.
MoMA is at 11 West 53 Street. For information, 212-708-9400 or www.moma.org.
