One of this year's most important exhibitions commemorating half a century since Picasso's death opened in Malaga in May. Under the direction of Carmen Giménez, the museum's first director, the Picasso Museum presented the exhibition "Picasso the Sculptor. Matter and Body", which will travel to the Guggenheim in Bilbao in the fall and is the most comprehensive exhibition on the artist's sculptural production to date.
As with most of the Malaga-born artist's works, the focus of this exhibition is on the body as the artist's instrument, but also as the ultimate goal of representation. The works gathered here date from the period between 1909 and 1964 and thus cover the most productive periods of his work and very different concerns. They were also made from a wide range of materials, from wood to bronze, iron, plaster, cement and metal.
This continuity in his use of the three dimensions and the variety of styles and techniques he employed in his sculptural work prove that this discipline was not a subordinate or secondary language for Picasso, but one of his forms of expression alongside painting, drawing, engraving and ceramics: each of them allowed him to express different aspects of his work, and on more than one occasion he emphasized that he did not establish hierarchies. This was especially true from his Cubist phase onwards, but even at the beginning of his career he created sculptures with the freedom of an autodidact who was not afraid to question rules. Many of these early works accompanied him throughout his life, from workshop to workshop and from apartment to apartment, as can be seen in many photographs (and in the various exhibitions of the artist's paintings that have been programmed in recent weeks, such as those of Blanca Berlin, the Picasso Museum in Buitrago and the Fernán Gómez Center). Not only were they part of his house, but over time he worked on the basis of their motifs and developments.
The exhibition in Málaga brings the sculptures into a dialog with the canvases from his collection, as well as placing finished pieces and models and works considered important in relation to other, less noticed works. In this way, the public can gain a complete overview of his journey through cubism, abstraction, the primitive and the found object, with the body, as mentioned, taking center stage.
The first exhibition dedicated to the sculptural work of the author of Guernica did not take place until 1966, when he was already eighty-five years old. It was organized by the Petit Palais in Paris and brought together dozens of works that the artist had kept for decades. It is estimated that there were seven hundred of his sculptures, compared to the nearly 4,500 canvases he produced. But a proper review of Picasso's development would have to take into account their mutual influences and shifts beyond numbers; his reinventions not only took shape in different disciplines, but created new connections between them.
Among his earliest works in Málaga we find his first work in clay, Seated Woman (1902), created while still in Barcelona in the studio of his sculptor friend Emili Fontbona, and Head of a Woman (Fernande) (1909), which clearly bears Cubist traits. Only three years later, he had already changed direction by transforming space into sculptural material, when this was still a novelty: his series of six polychrome bronzes Copa de absenta (Absinthe Cups, 1914), in which the emptiness indicates transparency, was therefore very surprising. At this time, in the mid-1910s, he also began to incorporate obvious materials such as string, paper, cardboard, sand, feathers, tinplate and glue into his works. He would stop using these materials around ten years later, with a guitar from 1924 being the last work designed according to these parameters before he came under the influence of Surrealism.
In the late 1920s and early 1930s, following on from his collaboration with Julio González, Picasso designed constructions in welded iron and later figures of human forms in wood or plaster, elements that allowed for a stronger suggestion of sensuality. Five of these works, created in Boigeloup, were shown in the Spanish pavilion at the 1937 French Universal Exhibition.
His next studio was the Grands-Augustins, where he set up a special area for the creation of sculptures. If family and everyday scenes dominated his canvases in the forties and fifties, this was also the case in the three dimensions. His new interest in ceramics, awakened in him by Georges and Suzanne Ramié, had to do with his establishment in Vallauris in 1948, where he also created numerous assemblages.
These works accompanied him when he settled in Cannes, then in Vauvenargues and Mougins: his houses were practically interior sculpture gardens, as immortalized by Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Douisneau, Irving Penn or David Douglas Duncan. We can assume that he preferred neither to show these works in his exhibitions nor to sell them because he wanted them to remain part of his everyday life.
In the fifties, he used old wood, pieces of furniture and metal plates, among other things. Some of these projects were transformed into sheet metal by the artisan Joseph-Marius Tiola, who enlarged them and even painted them (in others, rust was allowed to leave its mark). In works of this period, such as Bathers, the void continued to take on the same structural significance as the volumes.
This evolution towards larger dimensions continued in the sixties: Carl Nesjar convinced Picasso to enlarge his designs so that they could be shown outdoors in different cities, and to use resistant concrete for the same reason. We will see a model for the sculpture of the Richard J. Daley Center (1964) in the center of Málaga. The finished work is 20 meters high, made of steel and has been on display in front of the Civic Center in Chicago since 1967: It is a geometric face whose volume is suggested by the contrasts between emptiness and matter.