Some 300 sculptures by Picasso are being exhibited for the first time in France at the Pompidou Centre in Paris until September 25th 2000. After Gauguin and with Derain and Matisse, Pablo Picasso tried to reinvent sculpture in tackling several techniques with paper cutting, recycled objects, poor materials and assemblages.
Picasso started to make sculptures in Barcelona in 1902 before he became much inspired by African statues, which he first saw in an exhibition held in Paris in 1907. he then produced sculptures from pieces of wood, planks and furniture also using nails, paper, ropes and cardboard while not neglecting plaster and terracotta.
His first works representing faces or nudes bore much resemblance with African and primitive works and throughout his career the artist stuck to a primitive style, except when he produced Cubist assemblages with all sorts of objects, knives, lead leaves, bottles or newspaper cuttings.
After 1935, when Julio Gonzales made him discover the use of iron bars and threads, Picasso produced metal works but most of his production consisted in the use of various materials such as wood and daily life objects.
Picasso's work as a sculptor is lesser known since no exhibition of that kind had been held in France. Thanks to Werner Spies, who has organised this event, visitors can now appreciate how significant an artist he was in that domain.
One can only regret that all these sculptures are being shown without the presentation of preparatory sketches whereas Picasso used to mingle the art of sculpting with those of drawing and painting. Still he can be easily regarded as a great sculptor who was constantly in search of something new.
Picasso did not like Marble nor Michelangelo as he believed that marble offered nothing special, contrary to a corroded stone or piece of root. Marble in his view was not inspiring at all whereas man was used to representing what he saw.
«A form would suggest a woman, an animal or a monster», he once said speaking about the artists of the prehistoric times.
Picasso believed that sculpture was a way to discover any kind of representation through one object natural or not and to improve such representation in completing what such object suggested. A primitive man would recognise a leaping body in the branch of a tree, the head of an animal in a block of stone or the profile of a fish in a piece of bone. Picasso much like such approach finding the womb of a woman in the burner of a gas-stove or the horns of a bull in the handle-bar of a bicycle. As any prehistoric artist, he would improve a representation suggested by any object or piece of wood, arranging, completing and even painting it.
On discovering African masks in an exhibition held at the Trocadéro in Paris in 1907, he had the idea of painting a brothel scene, which he later called «Les Demoiselles d'Avignon» but though he was much inspired by these masks he did not copy them having in his mind to deform figures violently while as a sculptor he got the feeling that he had to work according to what a piece of wood or stone would suggest him in terms of representation.
Apart from Brancusi those artists who invented a new expression in sculpture were mainly painters like Gauguin, Derain, Matisse and Picasso. The latter expressed his incredible genius in using many techniques and various materials creating extraordinary assemblages.
His head of Fernande, executed in 1909, shows that this sculpture was an elaborate Cubist destructiveness of forms also suggesting relief derived from painting.
His first assemblage on canvas was made in 1912 and was considered by himself as an important step in his attempt to give a new dimension to painting as if he had managed to extend the limits of such domain.
Picasso often used painting to decorate his sculptures even in many monumental works whereas between 1930 and 1933 he produced three dimensional pieces inspired by Etruscan forms and primitive totems with the production of monstrous heads.
Picasso was also inspired by Matisse's works, which he reproduced in his manner though several assemblages and additions of volumes. In 1950, he continued to excel as an assemblage maker in Vallauris producing a young girl jumping over a rope with a wicker-basket suggesting her waistcoat and a large piece of crumpled paper to define her dress, real shoes, imprints of corrugated cardboard for her hair and a cake mould to represent a flower at the foot of the rope. During the same period, Picasso created some great animal sculptures and funny or ravishing pieces such as the young girl reading of 1951 leaning on her elbows, which demonstrates Picasso's deep sense of creation in the domain of sculpture whatever the materials used and the sizes, monumental or small, of his subjects as well as his inclination to adapt the forms of such materials, which enabled him to reinvent the cannons of artistic beauty.
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