Picasso Sculpture
The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) presents a sweeping survey of Pablo Picasso’s profoundly innovative and influential sculptural work titled Picasso Sculpture.
Over the course of his long artistic carer, Picasso periodically devoted himself to sculptural work, making use of both traditional and unconventional materials and techniques. Featuring more than 150 sculptures from his entire career, Picasso Sculpture provides an opportunity to explore rarely seen aspects of Picasso’s diverse and dynamic career.
The exhibition will include a selection of relevant works on paper and about 30 remarkable photographs of the sculptures taken by renowned photographer Brassaï. It forms the largest museum exhibition of Picasso’s sculptures to be shown in the United States in nearly half a century.
We spoke to exhibition curators Ann Temkin and Anne Umland to get a deeper insight into Picasso’s sculptural practice, unveiling a less known side of his artistic career.
fluoro. What do the sculptures communicate about Picasso?
Temkin and Umland. Picasso’s sculptures convey the great pleasure he took in invention and experimentation. Throughout the decades of his art making, he redefined what sculpture can be again and again. He not only reinvented his own practice many times over, but also continuously set himself apart from other artists.
Sculpture was also something deeply personal to Picasso. His sculptural vision centred on creatures and things that exist in the world and with which he surrounded himself. He lived among his sculptures as if they were his family members, moving them along whenever he took up a new residence.
f. In your opinion how were Picasso’s sculptures affected by the fact that he was self-taught?
T&U. Picasso was trained as a painter, not as a sculptor and the rules imposed by tradition did not confine him. Since he did not know them it was easier for him to break them. This freedom and his singular ability to recognise the sculptural potential of things in the world allowed him to turn objects as mundane as garbage and junk into sculpture.
f. How did the sculptures change over time?
T&U. Over the decades, Picasso’s sculptural practice and his use of materials became more refined. Early on Picasso moved from a figurative mode of representation to more abstract renditions of things in the world. During the early 1950s, he returned to a kind of hyper figuration in which, for example, a purely fabricated goat becomes more like a goat than a real goat. He then returned again to an abstract imagination and sculptural forms that, however, always originated from things in the world. Picasso committed himself to sculpture episodically rather than continuously. The sculptures produced during each of these episodes are distinct from one another but continuities can be found in, for example, his use of specific materials, his vision of scale, and subject matter.
f. In what ways did the sculptures differ from the painting arts, apart from the 3D effect?
T&U. From the point of view of Picasso’s artistic practice his commitment to sculpture was episodic rather than continuous. Unlike in his painting, in which he was trained, he sought the expertise and help of sculptor friends and collaborators such as the artist Julio González in order to accomplish his sculptural vision. From a biographical point of view, sculpture was something very private to Picasso and while he sold many of his masterpiece paintings he rarely let go of his original sculptures.
f. For what reasons are the sculptures less known to the world than the painting artworks?
T&U. Relative to his two-dimensional masterworks, Picasso only rarely let go of his sculptural masterpieces. He kept most of them until his death in 1973. This close personal connection helps to explain why Picasso’s sculptures constitute a lesser-known aspect of his oeuvre. Although accessible since the 1910s, compared to his two-dimensional works his sculptures were not as widely exhibited until the late 1960s. Until today, many of his sculptures are less likely to be included in exhibitions in part because they do not travel easily.
f. What are the materials mostly used, and what effect do they have on the sculptures?
T&U. The encounter with Picasso’s sculpture shows an astonishing variety of materials ranging from conventional clay, plaster, wood, and bronze to numerous unorthodox ones, including sheet metal, sand, wire, and paint and a plethora of everyday objects such cake molds, forks, chicken wire, wicker, pitchers, absinthe spoons, spigots, colanders, push bells, upholstery fringes, pebbles, and palm fronds.
Two overarching and very powerful effects are revealed by this abundance in material variety: Picasso’s drive to experiment, and the effectiveness with which he transformed the simplest of objects into powerful subjects. Being able to see what the original object or material had been before and what it had turned into is in a large part, what renders Picasso’s sculptures so fresh, humorous, charismatic, and still relevant to us today.
f. Why are you showing these pieces at MoMA?
T&U. Although Picasso’s sculpture is a lesser-known aspect of his oeuvre, it is one that has been profoundly influential throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and it is a great privilege to bring this broad survey, spanning the years from 1902-1964, to MoMA. [We] strove to allow for a reflection on Picasso’s styles, collaborators, and muses in a largely unfamiliar and exhilarating way.
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Picasso Sculpture will be on display at MoMA In New York, United States from Monday 14 September 2015 – Sunday 7 February 2016.
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