Picasso in 3D offers pleasures and a few rare insights
European folk art and tribal masks are among the objects that inspired Picasso as a sculptor, as an exhibition at Bozar shows
Objects of desire
Picasso was trained in drawing and painting, and was clearly talented from a very young age. His work in three dimensions, on the other hand, was unschooled and seems more tentative. Early on he worked in the shadow of other sculptors, and in his own shadow as a painter, and throughout his career he needed technical help to realise his ideas.
The Bozar show has 80 pieces of sculpture, from 1902 up to the 1960s, accompanied by about 20 paintings, 15 ceramic items, and various non-European art objects from Picasso’s personal collection. Most come from the Picasso Museum in Paris and FABA, the foundation set up by Picasso’s grandson, and rarely travel.
The earliest sculptures come from the turn of the century, when Picasso was in his 20s. Modelled in clay, these apply the technique of masters such as Rodin to themes familiar from Picasso’s painting, such as The Jester (1905).
Next come wooden sculptures from a period spent in the Pyrenees and Paris, which show the influence of Catalan folk art and painted religious statues. The primitivism emerging in these works gets stronger in the years to come, when Picasso began to collect masks and statues from Africa and the Pacific.
Affront to convention
The inclusion of these objects is one of the exhibition’s great strengths. These are not generic examples of non-European art that may or may not have inspired Picasso, but objects he held dear and saw every day.
Knowing this adds force to the suggestion that a Grebo mask from Ivory Coast may hold the key to the deconstructed musical instrument in Violin (1915), or the meaningful juxtaposition of Woman’s Head (1931-32) and a large Nimba mask from Guinea.
The dialogue between Picasso’s painting and sculpture is also interesting, though somewhat one-sided. Cubism, which Picasso developed with Georges Braque, was a revolutionary way of treating three-dimensional space in painting, and yet he is not particularly innovative when it comes to translating these ideas back to three dimensions.
The highlight here is meant to be the small bronze Absinth Glass (1914), which plays with form and volume, and includes a real silver spoon in the same way that the Cubist paintings incorporated scraps of newsprint and wallpaper. And, in an affront to convention, the bronze is painted.
These are not generic examples that may have inspired Picasso, but objects he held dear and saw every day
Yet this hardly has the same power as Alexander Archipenko’s Cubist Woman Walking (1912) or Boxers (1914), both a few rooms away in Bozar’s show The Power of the Avant Garde.
Failure is also interesting, of course, particularly in a genius like Picasso. One of the most intriguing rooms in the exhibition shows him failing, in the 1920s, to produce a monument for the grave of his friend, the poet Guillaume Apollinaire.
A series of vaguely erotic biomorphic sculptures entitled Metamorphoses was rejected, as was an open lattice work of welded iron that suggests the connected stars in a constellation. So was Woman in the Garden, a large figure made of scrap metal.
This is not to dismiss Picasso’s assemblages altogether. Bull’s Head (1942) is just a set of handlebars welded to a bicycle seat, yet it has a strange totemic power. Head (1958) is simple and silly, a face conjured from a wooden box and a pair of buttons.
Picasso Sculptures, until 5 March, Bozar, Ravensteinstraat 23, Brussels
Photo: The Sculptor © Succession Picasso/SABAM Belgium 2016. Photo © RMN-Grand Palais (musée Picasso de Paris)/Béatrice Hatala
