On Art: Picasso's Many Dimensions

[caption id="attachment_47254" align="alignleft" width="511"] Pablo Picasso, Glass of Absinthe, 1914. Painted bronze with absinthe spoon, 8 1/2 x 6 1/2 x 3 3/8 in. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. © Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.[/caption]

By Helen A. Harrison

Among the revelations that abound in “Picasso Sculpture,” the blockbuster survey on view through Feb. 7 at the Museum of Modern Art, is the extent of the artist’s penchant for recycling. Long before he famously combined a bicycle handle and seat to evoke a bull’s head (1942), or adapted a toy car as a baboon’s face (1951), he was using scraps of this and odd bits of that to make three-dimensional objects which, at the time, could not have been termed sculpture by any orthodox definition.

One critic has called the show a “dumbfounding triumph,” which is only half true. It’s a triumph, all right, comprising the full range of Picasso’s sculptural output in all media, including many pieces never before exhibited in this country. But it’s not dumbfounding; quite the opposite. Eye-opening is more accurate. By tracing Picasso’s progress from his very first sculpture to his very last, with examples of everything in between, we can see clearly, perhaps for the first time, why he was a protean figure in 20^th century art.

The show posits that Picasso was such an innovative sculptor because he had no formal training in the craft, so he wasn’t limited by convention. He was schooled in drawing and painting by his artist father, but didn’t begin to play with clay until 1902, at age 20, in the studio of a local Barcelona sculptor. His maiden effort, a tiny seated female figure, is lumpy and awkward, not unlike his juvenile drawings. But as with his draftsmanship, his mastery of three-dimensional form quickly blossomed, and within a year or two he was handling clay (later cast in bronze) with assurance. Also in the gallery devoted to his first sculptures are some wood carvings indebted to Gauguin, as well as to African and Oceanic precedents. Made from discarded lumber, these are the earliest surviving examples of his use of recycled materials.

Picasso’s packrat instinct was astonishingly fruitful. By the 1910s, having already developed cubist painting in tandem with Braque, he wrestled it off the canvas into real space, using cardboard, sheet metal, wire, string — even, in one small shadow box, upholstery fringe. Each of the six versions of his 1914 painted bronze absinthe glass sports a real strainer for the sugar that sweetened the liquor’s bitter taste. Whimsically painted with patterns that suggest the spots before a drinker’s eyes, they are together for the first time since they left the artist’s studio.

You might say that Picasso never found an object he couldn’t turn into something else, but what he turned it into was almost always a creature, either animal or human. A colander becomes a woman’s head, broken jug handles form a baby’s legs, a jump-roping girl’s body is fashioned from a straw basket, an entire party of beachgoers materializes out of scrap lumber, and in the gallery devoted to Picasso’s final sculptures, a charming little horse is made entirely of six metal table legs and four casters. These and many other examples demonstrate Picasso’s playfulness, as well as his uncanny ability to re-imagine, re-combine and re-invent forms in space.

These objects began with one or more existing things that the artist has transformed, but the show also includes many other works that don’t incorporate found materials. For example, after a 10-year hiatus from sculpture, in 1927 Picasso was commissioned to create a monument to the poet Apollinaire. His maquettes, fabricated by Julio González from welded metal rods, are cage-like structures that sprout miniature heads and hands. (The memorial committee didn’t know what to make of such an unorthodox design, and the commission was rejected.)

In the 1930s, at his own sculpture studio at Boisgeloup, Picasso experimented with working directly in plaster. Inspired by the voluptuous body of Marie-Thérèse Walter, his young lover at the time, he created a series of monumental heads and busts that distort facial features and body parts into ambiguous, sexually suggestive abstractions. The swollen forms look almost pillow-like, contradicting the rigidity of the plaster.

For the next three decades, Picasso continued to innovate in numerous sculptural media, from ceramics and wood to plaster and metal, as well as found objects. Even during World War II, when bronze casting was forbidden, he managed to get around the restrictions. His final piece, the 1964 maquette for the Daley Center in Chicago, made of sheet metal and wire, harks back conceptually and formally to his 1914 “Guitar,” as if to bring his prodigious sculptural imagination full circle.