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. 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. 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. Picasso returned to modeling, somehow managing to obtain enough clay and plaster to produce human and animal figures for his crowded studio spaces. Nonetheless, this grim period brought with it Picasso’s enthusiastic return to the enterprise of sculpture after a hiatus of several years. Picasso was one of the few artists designated by the Germans as “degenerate” to remain in occupied Paris during WW II. 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. Never sent off for exhibition or sale, the sculptures created there remained unseen by the public.
Picasso was forced to leave the Château de Boisgeloupin 1936, as part of a separation agreement with his wife, Olga Ruiz-Picasso. The narrow ridges of corrugated cardboard, for example, served to articulate the drapery of “Woman with Leaves” and “The Orator”. Beginning in 1933, Picasso started to explore the process of imprinting plaster using everyday objects and materials. The first sculptures Picasso made there were carved wood figures. There, for the first time, he had enough space to set up his own sculpture studio. The subsequent gallery focuses on Picasso’s work from the early ‘30s, when Picasso purchased the Château de Boisgeloup. The profoundly varied works on view in this and the adjacent gallery bear no obvious reference to Apollinaire. Despite several rounds of effort, none of the ideas that Picasso offered the memorial committee were accepted. 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. All six are reunited here for the first time since leaving the artist’s studio. In spring 1914 Picasso created an edition of six unique versions of the sculpture “Glass of Absinthe”. The hybrid character of these works is typical of works in this gallery. In early 1914, Picasso reiterated his “Guitar” in sheet metal. 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. The following gallery continues with the fall of 1912, when Picasso returned to making sculpture after a hiatus of three years. The visit also encouraged Picasso’s exploration of wood carving. His encounter with the African and Oceanic sculptures catalyzed a new way of seeing. In 1907, Picasso visited the Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro. “Head of a Woman (Fernande)” and “Kneeling Woman Combing Her Hair” are modeled on Picasso’s lover Fernande Olivier.
As with many of his works, “ The Jester” began as a portrait of someone he knew, in this case the poet Max Jacob. 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. Known as “Seated Woman”, this small figure was modeled in clay in the studio of a local sculptor. The first gallery focuses on Picasso’s earliest work including his first sculpture, made in Barcelona in 1902 when he was 20. 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 exhibition brings together 140 sculptures from Picasso’s entire career via loans from major public and private collections. 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. He approached the medium with the freedom of a self-taught artist, ready to break all the rules.
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. Over the course of his long career, Picasso devoted himself to sculpture using both traditional and unconventional materials and techniques.
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