Review: PICASSO SCULPTURE, Modernism's Mastermind in Three Dimensions

By now, everybody in New York should be suffering from Picasso fatigue. It's been not even a year since Picasso & Jacqueline at Pace Gallery, Picasso and the Camera at the Gagosian Gallery, and the Picasso-dominated Cubism at the Metropolitan Museum all cropped up, all at the same time. Factor in Picasso's relentless, shifting energy -- the reason why he fascinates and why he wears lesser sensibilities down -- and it's a miracle that any museum-goers are still standing. Yet even after all this, Picasso Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art is a necessary exhibition. It is also, and more importantly, an astonishing one.

In terms of the necessary, the last American exhibition devoted mainly to Picasso's sculpture appeared in 1967. Sculpture didn't always show Picasso at his most elegant, but it frequently showed him at his most versatile -- experimenting with disparate media (clay, bronze, wood, ceramics), disparate subjects (mistresses, plant life, everyday whimsies), and disparate artistic philosophies (collage, near-abstraction, found objects, sentimental realism). Capturing this dizzying range of medium and effect is the first victory of MoMA's new show, curated with impossible lucidity by Ann Temkin and Anne Umland. Some of Picasso's sculptural inventions corresponded effortlessly with his painterly pursuits: he spent the 1910s fragmenting and rearranging 2D space in his Cubist canvases, and fragmenting and rearranging 3D reality with his wall-mounted still lifes. Others are fascinating departures: the Spanish Civil War and World War II years, after all, gave us the colorful quirkiness of Figure (1938), the frontal irony of Bull's Head (basically a bicycle seat, 1942), and the large-writ, unquestioning pathos of Man with a Lamb (1943). The more or less chronological arrangement of Picasso Sculpture allows us to see something like creativity in motion -- here Picasso building off what he's just done, there Picasso realizing he's gone as far as he can and trying something new.

In terms of astonishment, though, where can I even begin? For a long time, Picasso has been my model of an artist who is easy to admire by hard to love; his innovations are numerous, so numerous that his icily analytic temperament and stretches of unsatisfyingly predictable painting can be pardoned. Picasso Sculpture changes all this, and not just because Picasso's sculptural works are more about humor and pathos and quiet craftsmanship and less about his politics and his paramours. Again, his paintings and sculptures frequently speak the same language at the same time -- but only the paintings speak with fluency. This is particularly true of Picasso's 1920s-1930s semi-surrealistic phase: the human form paintings are intriguing at first, superficial once you get to know them better, but the human form sculptures of the same dates are dynamic and seductive, harder to conceptualize away.

The begin-at-the-end layout that Temkin and Umland have arrived at has its own attractions. High culture buffs will claim that MoMA's treatment is "Proustian" in structure (if you don't know, don't bother), though everyone can enjoy the origin-story effect of the first few galleries. The curators have started with the cutout-style, painted metal sculptures that Picasso devised in the late 1950s and early 1960s. At times, he played these steel surfaces for toy-like effects, as in the angular Little Horse (1961), which even rests on spherical wheels; around the same time, though, he was crafting sheet metal works that register as displaced painting, displaced drawing, and (on the evidence of a bristling 1961 Chair) displaced home design. By 1964 Picasso had built this branch of sculpture into a larger scale, with the large planar sculpture that would eventually grace the Richard J. Daley Center in Chicago. Picasso's artistic offspring (looking at you, Calder) would be more famous for planting giant metal constructions in the open, in public, and in front of civic centers and corporate headquarters, but this first gallery accomplishes something different. Facing a picture window and situated just near MoMA's central atrium and open walkways, Picasso's sheet metal heads and animals feel almost, but not quite, in the open air. It does them good; in return, they make MoMA's own architecture feel less corporate, more like the sample of openwork modernism it should be.

Next, back to the beginning. Although the next room in Picasso Sculpture samples Picasso's wood, clay, and bronze output from 1905-1909, this room doesn't represent a full break with what's come before; the possibility of importing painting motifs into sculpture, and exporting sculpted innovations into painting, was one of Picasso's long-term preoccupations. The Jester (1905) could have wandered out of a Rose or Blue Period canvas; wood carvings such as Doll (1907) and Figure (1908) show that Picasso's interest in primitivism neither began nor ended with Demoiselles d'Avignon; Head of a Woman (1909) seems ready to be swept right into one of the more vertiginous Cubist paintings. All this is interesting, confident, valuable, and kind of a drudge. While the early sculptures helped Picasso to work through the properties of different media - and eventually blow those properties to smithereens - they were just that, "workings through," not creations with their own incidental beauties and indomitable personalities.

Solemnity, which is the dominant mood of the 1905-1909 sculptures, was also a uniquely poor fit for Picasso's sculptural talents. Just how poor of a fit becomes clear in the next three or four rooms, which are rambunctious, lyrical, overpowering, and ineffably well orchestrated. In the early 1910s, Picasso trained his sights on everyday subjects such as musical instruments and liquor glasses. The wall-mounted guitars are (famously) hybrids of painting, sculpture, and collage; they are also (less famously) studies in depth and shadow, as imposing and rich in atmosphere as good Cézanne landscapes. You need to see them in the flesh. The curators have also re-united all six of Picasso's celebrated absinthe glasses, found object and painted surface sculptures that are seldom brought together and that create a network of contrasts and consistencies that, until now, was perhaps intuited only by Picasso himself. By reuniting other works of similar styles, each of the subsequent MoMA rooms becomes a lesson in style, an installation in itself, and a node of Picasso's genius: the baroque foliage and force lines of Picasso's late 1920s sculptures make up an unsettlingly beautiful menagerie, while the smoothed, simplified, plaster heads of the early 1930s are both comforting and alien.

Once this last grouping has been left behind, Picasso Sculpture progresses far more like a connection of set pieces, experiments, documents, odds and ends. Rhythm and unity, maintained so painstakingly up to now, forsake the show. Picasso's own sculpture, for a time, was becoming more rough-hewn anyway: Woman with a Vase (1933), which is only one of many powerfully disjointed figures that he created, is made up of bulbous, useless masses atop thin, crumbly legs. Its pinched features are etched into its bullet-like head either as a culmination or an afterthought. This is as good a time as any to marvel at what Picasso has done, and a room of nicely shadowed photographs by George Brassai helps such retrospection and appreciation along. But while Brassai was recording Picasso's sculptural clout, Picasso himself was reaching for new innovations -- including a few you wouldn't expect from an artist famous for bright colors and deconstructed heads. Only a few steps over from a massy, striding, effortlessly realistic Cat is a found object called The Venus of Gas, which is little more than a pipe and burner from an old stove placed erect. It's still the same guy, right?

Then come the rapturous final rooms. Picasso in the 1940s turned to ceramics, clay, and engraved pebbles, working small but never, miraculously, seeming small: despite their peasant air, his figures of owls and bulls, cranes and women are lessons in the aesthetic pleasure -- a real pottery jar pulsing beneath a figure of clay, a few choice lines of paint on smoothly-wrought earthenware. From there, MoMA brings forth one last gallery of whimsy and excellence, with Picasso's output from the 1950s. Some of the figures in the final, sweeping room -- the comical Woman with a Baby Carriage, the seminal She-Goat -- are already fixtures in the art history books. Others should be. Even though it has been used to advertise Picasso Sculpture, the two dimensional wooden Bull (1958) is one of this show's surprises. Branches, nails, and wooden frames activate its surfaces and add color, structure, and suggestions of quivering force. Yet the main attraction and probably the last thing you'll see are the six wooden Bathers, which were constructed in 1956 and (unlike those unlucky absinthe glasses) consistently exhibited together.

Now, there really isn't anything that should qualify those six figures as a Picasso masterpiece. They aren't dramatic; they aren't polemical. Their forms -- a carved face here, a handless arm there -- appear to have been meticulously pre-conceived and then abandoned halfway through, as though Picasso had set up a few details he liked and left his contemplators to fill in the rest. Those six succeed, however, because they are both daringly inchoate and, in another way, fully thought through. Motif-wise, there is much about these sculptures that recalls the famed bather paintings of the late 1920s and early 1930s, though this time Picasso has subjected his subject to an austere intelligence that it didn't display the first time around. Picasso Sculpture isn't a mere "excellent exhibition": it is the closest thing we may ever have to an embodiment of Picasso's mind.

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