ART-TRIBUTE:Picasso Sculpture

Over the course of his long career, Picasso devoted himself to sculpture using both traditional and unconventional materials and techniques. Unlike painting, in which he was formally trained and through which he made his living, sculpture occupied a uniquely personal and experimental status for Picasso. He approached the medium with the freedom of a self-taught artist, ready to break all the rules.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: MoMA Archive

The exhibition “Picasso Sculpture”, on view at the Museum of Modern Art offers a broad survey of Pablo Picasso’s work in three dimensions, spanning the years 1902 to 1964. The exhibition brings together 140 sculptures from Picasso’s entire career via loans from major public and private collections. The installation occupies the entirety of MoMA’s 4th floor galleries, allowing sufficient space for the sculptures to be viewed fully in the round. The first gallery focuses on Picasso’s earliest work including his first sculpture, made in Barcelona in 1902 when he was 20. Known as “Seated Woman”, this small figure was modeled in clay in the studio of a local sculptor. Following his move to Paris in 1904, Picasso continued to rely on the tools and studios of friends and explore subjects parallel to those of his paintings. As with many of his works, “The Jester” began as a portrait of someone he knew, in this case the poet Max Jacob. “Head of a Woman (Fernande)” and “Kneeling Woman Combing Her Hair” are modeled on Picasso’s lover Fernande Olivier. In 1907, Picasso visited the Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro. His encounter with the African and Oceanic sculptures catalyzed a new way of seeing. The visit also encouraged Picasso’s exploration of wood carving. The following gallery continues with the fall of 1912, when Picasso returned to making sculpture after a hiatus of three years. Among the first works he realized was the cardboard “Guitar”, whose open structure allowed Picasso to introduce negative space into the solid forms customary to sculpture at that time. In early 1914, Picasso reiterated his “Guitar” in sheet metal. The hybrid character of these works is typical of works in this gallery. In spring 1914 Picasso created an edition of six unique versions of the sculpture “Glass of Absinthe”. All six are reunited here for the first time since leaving the artist’s studio. Picasso’s return to sculpture at the end of the ‘20s had roots in a commission to create a monument for the tomb of the poet and critic Guillaume Apollinaire, who had died in 1918. Despite several rounds of effort, none of the ideas that Picasso offered the memorial committee were accepted. The profoundly varied works on view in this and the adjacent gallery bear no obvious reference to Apollinaire. The subsequent gallery focuses on Picasso’s work from the early ‘30s, when Picasso purchased the Château de Boisgeloup. There, for the first time, he had enough space to set up his own sculpture studio. The first sculptures Picasso made there were carved wood figures. Beginning in 1933, Picasso started to explore the process of imprinting plaster using everyday objects and materials. The narrow ridges of corrugated cardboard, for example, served to articulate the drapery of “Woman with Leaves” and “The Orator”. Picasso was forced to leave the Château de Boisgeloupin 1936, as part of a separation agreement with his wife, Olga Ruiz-Picasso. Never sent off for exhibition or sale, the sculptures created there remained unseen by the public. Then, in spring 1937, coincident with the Nazis’ saturation bombing of the Spanish town of Guernica, Picasso selected five of his Boisgeloup sculptures to accompany his antiwar mural Guernica as part of the Spanish Pavilion in that summer’s World’s Fair in Paris. Picasso was one of the few artists designated by the Germans as “degenerate” to remain in occupied Paris during WW II. Nonetheless, this grim period brought with it Picasso’s enthusiastic return to the enterprise of sculpture after a hiatus of several years. Picasso returned to modeling, somehow managing to obtain enough clay and plaster to produce human and animal figures for his crowded studio spaces. All bronze casting was prohibited, as precious metal was reserved for wartime purposes, but Picasso had his sculptures secretly transported to and from the foundry by night. During the summer of 1946 he visited the ceramics workshop of George and Suzanne Ramié in Vallauris and began to experiment in a medium that dated back to ancient times but was new to him. In 1949 he bought an abandoned perfume factory, which he converted to a studio for the making of a series of assemblages created from a vast array of found objects held together by plaster and armatures of wood and metal. Picasso’s work in assemblage intensified throughout the early ‘50s, as he produced larger and ever more complex sculptures constructed from everyday objects. His renewed status as a family man also informs the subjects of many of these sculptures. “Baboon and Young” with a head formed by his son’s toy cars, reads convincingly as a self-portrait of this proud and exuberant parent. In 1955, the artist moved with his new partner Jacqueline Roque to the villa La Californie, outside Cannes. There the artist found new ways to satisfy his passion for scavenging. Wood sculptures made from lumber scraps and other salvaged items took center stage in the years 1956–58. Bits of old furniture, crates, and tree branches from Picasso’s garden now formed the basis for his playful transformations. Picasso’s final phase of making sculpture, on view on Sculpture Platform, centered on sheet metal, a popular material for both design objects and utilitarian purposes. In 1954, he became acquainted with the products of a commercial sheet metal workshop in Vallauris. That year, and again in 1957, he created a number of heads in cut and folded paper or cardboard, and had these templates fabricated as sheet metal sculptures at 1:1 scale. The Maquette for Richard J. Daley Center Sculpture, the artist’s last sculpture, was translated into a 15 meter-tall work of Cor-Ten steel that was unveiled in the plaza of the Chicago Civic Center in 1967 and quickly became a landmark of that city.

Info: Curators: Ann Temkin & Anne Umland, MoMA, The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), 11 West 53 Street, New York, Duration: 14/9/15-9/2/16, Days & Hours: Sun-Thu 10:30-17:30, Fri 10:30-20:00, www.moma.org