CORY REYONLDS | DATE 10/28/2015

Picasso Sculpture

In their introduction to Picasso Sculpture, MoMA curators Ann Temkin and Anne Umland write, "To the end, Picasso's sculpture represents in the extreme the reinvention that characterized his work in every medium. He changed the language of his painting throughout the decades, but paint and canvas remained a constant. In contrast, each return to sculpture brought a fresh start technically and materially. From the Cubist years onward, he questioned the definition of sculpture as even he himself had most recently defined it. The history of art includes pioneering sculptors—Constantin Brancusi to name just a one—who transformed nineteenth-century sculpture into that of the twentieth. But Picasso's radicality was of another order, one that must be considered in terms of revolution rather than evolution. Throughout his life, Picasso approached sculpture less as a sculptor than as an artist. In so doing, he was unburdened by any legacies of process and method and anticipated a present-day situation in which the boundaries have blurred between painting, sculpture and other genres." Featured image is "Head of a Woman" (1929-30), shot by Brassaï in 1943.