Focus: Picasso Sculpture

Jul 3–Nov 3, 2008

MoMA

Pablo Picasso. Guitar. Paris, January–February 1914. Ferrous sheet metal and wire, 30 1/2 × 13 3/4 × 7 5/8″ (77.5 × 35 × 19.3 cm). Gift of the artist. © 2016 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Jonathan Muzikar
  • MoMA, Floor 4, Collection Galleries The Werner and Elaine Dannheisser Lobby Gallery

Pablo Picasso is perhaps best known for his paintings, but his sculptures are among the most radical, thought-changing artworks of the modern period. While the artist’s two-dimensional work was frequently exhibited during his lifetime, the first comprehensive exhibition of Picasso’s sculpture was mounted in 1966, when the artist was eighty-five years old. This installation provides a broad overview of the artist’s career as a creator of three-dimensional objects through selections from The Museum of Modern Art’s collection. The strength of the Museum’s collection in this area is due, in part, to the support it received from the artist himself, who donated his sheet-metal construction Guitar (1914), on view here, to the Museum in 1971.

Picasso turned to sculpture with particular rigor at several key moments in his career, using the medium as a testing ground for ideas that would catalyze crucial shifts in his practice at large. The sculpture Woman’s Head (Fernande) (1909), also on view, helped Picasso conceptualize the break of solid volume into shifting masses suggestive of varying perspectives, and served as a foundation for the development of Cubism. In much of his subsequent sculptural work, Picasso abandoned the traditional art of modeling in favor of assemblage and construction. Picasso introduced non-art materials into his artwork, radically incorporating everyday objects into his sculpture much as he used found print materials in his famous collage works. The transformation from banal item to sculptural element is never complete, and much of the great visual wit of the objects seen here comes from the play between these two roles.

Organized by Leah Dickerman, Curator, with Nora Lawrence, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Painting and Sculpture.

This exhibition, part of an ongoing series highlighting noteworthy aspects of the Museum’s collection, is made possible by BNP Paribas.

Publication

  • Press release 2 pages

Artist

Installation images

How we identified these works

In 2018–19, MoMA collaborated with Google Arts & Culture Lab on a project using machine learning to identify artworks in installation photos. That project has concluded, and works are now being identified by MoMA staff.

If you notice an error, please contact us at [email protected].

Licensing

If you would like to reproduce an image of a work of art in MoMA’s collection, or an image of a MoMA publication or archival material (including installation views, checklists, and press releases), please contact Art Resource (publication in North America) or Scala Archives (publication in all other geographic locations).

MoMA licenses archival audio and select out of copyright film clips from our film collection. At this time, MoMA produced video cannot be licensed by MoMA/Scala. All requests to license archival audio or out of copyright film clips should be addressed to Scala Archives at [email protected]. Motion picture film stills cannot be licensed by MoMA/Scala. For access to motion picture film stills for research purposes, please contact the Film Study Center at [email protected]. For more information about film loans and our Circulating Film and Video Library, please visit https://www.moma.org/research/circulating-film.

If you would like to reproduce text from a MoMA publication, please email [email protected]. If you would like to publish text from MoMA’s archival materials, please fill out this permission form and send to [email protected].

Feedback

This record is a work in progress. If you have additional information or spotted an error, please send feedback to [email protected].