Picasso's Private Menagerie

...These companions of Picasso's life are now on view in a stunning exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art The show, to end January 1, includes 290 pieces, most of them drawn from the artist's personal collection Coinciding with the exhibition, the Museum has issued a handsomely illustrated catalogue (The Sculpture of Picasso, 232 pp , $15 00 hardbound, $5 95 paperback) with a text by Roland Penrose, who selected the work for the current show and for the earlier exhibition held at the Tate Gallery m London this summer...

...A prim, blank-faced young lady has sprung to life...

...Picasso's sculpture, however, is not the most familiar aspect of his prodigious oeuvre Although he has worked in the medium since 1901, he has tended to keep his sculptural production close to home Over the years separate castings 'have entered private collections, and individual pieces--like the Museum of Modern Art's famous goat made from found objects, or the baboon with a head formed from two toy automobiles--have been publicly available, but the full range of his sculpture was not placed on view until the huge 85th anniversary exhibition in Pans last year Of course, his early Cubist works--hose guitars and violins created out of cut paper, metal, and wood between 1912-14--have long been familiar through reproductions So, too, have the direct metal sculptures which he developed under the guidance of his compatriot, Julio Gonzalez during the late '20s and early '30s...

...ON ART By James R. Mellow Picasso's Private Menagerie With picasso, what begins in love ends in parody He is a man who cannot help seeing the ridiculous side of even those things he feels deeply about He was perfectly capable of discarding the intellectual rigor of his early Cubist work to produce a whole series of whacky and outrageous subversions of the style He set aside the tender charms and obvious sentiments of his Rose and Classical Period paintings--those sweet madonnas, harlequins and ballerinas--to create a race of lumpen nudes, elephantine goddesses cavorting at the seaside with a tread that must set the earth shaking for miles around...

...The Sculptors Studio, as well as a number of Brassai photographs of the small torn-paper forms Picasso made during the German occupation of France This, therefore, is the most complete exposition of Picasso's sculpture we are likely to see...

...In his paintings, Picasso will sometimes take incredible liberties with the human form, splaying it out along the surface of the painting like a Mercator projection In much of his sculpture, where he is intent upon retaining the identity of the object which first produced his analogy, he settles for the most ordinary conventions of the figure A simple, unadorned plank of wood is fitted out with sticks for arms and legs, the lid of a paint can is nailed to the surface for a face, a summary application of paint does the rest and??voila...

...Even masterpieces of the past--Delacroix's The Women of Algiers, for example, a painting he envies and admires--are not safe He redoes them all as irreverent paraphrases Sometimes his humor takes a grim turn When he took up ceramic sculpture in the mid-40s, he fashioned the pieces from the long-necked vases produced in a pottery m Vallauns Working with a magician's skill, he punched, slapped and pinched the soft clay vessels into the shapes of women and birds "To make a dove," he commented, "you must first wring its neck ". Nowhere in Picasso's work is humor as a mode more consistently applied than m his sculpture Scanning his paintings over the years one notices long stretches of breathtaking, and occasionally banal, dedication to the principles of classical beauty His draftsmanship has always been superb, and it is with good reason that he has often been compared to the French master, Ingres But in his sculpture, with a few exceptions like Man with Sheep (1944), there is inevitably some farcical analogy between an abandoned piece of junk and animal or human form A garden claw becomes a human hand, a stove pipe becomes a woman's torso, a bicycle handlebar and seat, welded together, create a bull's head...

...Picasso has never feared banality in his subject-matter Little Gul Skipping Rope, on first appearance, seems to be nothing more than a touchingly awkward portrait of a child with, so to speak, two left feet But when we learn that it also relates to a remembered image from Picasso's years as a young artist in Pans, the sculpture takes on additional, private meanings As related by Francoise Gilot, Picasso had been struck by the picture of the concierge's daughter playing outside his studio window in the Bateau Lavou ("She was so sweet I would have liked her never to grow up ") Years later, when he returned to the scene of his early struggles, he discovered that the cherished image, in life, had grown fat and ordinary The sculpture, then, combines m one image an audacious formal assault upon the conventions of high art and a parody of the artist's own sentimental attachments But that, after all, is what Picasso has taught us to expect from a master--the most radical forms of art conceived in the most vigorous and most personal terms...

...Mixed media work--a merger of painting with sculpture--is currently much in vogue But Picasso, since the beginning of his career, seems to be the modern artist for whom these two forms of art have existed m the easiest commerce It is amazing how often, without loss and with years intervening, he has taken similar visual ideas, turning them into painting and turning them out into sculpture His Cubist painting, with its clinical interest in three-dimensional form, moved readily into the collage reliefs of 1912-14 A theme like Woman m a Garden, a 1929 sculpture, has been transliterated into a painting eight years later The zany bathing figures of his paintings m the '20s have been produced as free-standing metal cut-outs m the '60s In the '30s, when there were no commissions for such works, he made paintings of monumentally constructed heads situated in landscapes In 1965, he was commissioned to produce just such a sculpture for Chicago To further compound the mixing of media, sculptures created out of found objects (Goet Skull and Bottle, Crane Woman Reading) have been cast in bronze and then painted...

...The irony is that an artist who has been known principally for his painting should have had such an enormous effect, without regular exhibitions, upon the development of contemporary sculpture Just as his Cubist sculptures informed the Constructive style developed in Russia, Picasso's later works can be said to have initiated the open-form and found-object approaches which came to prominence in the '30s I find it difficult to explain the difference m attitude which, according to most accounts, Picasso maintains toward his sculpture To Fran-coise Gilot, one of the women in his career (whose Life with Picasso still remains the best antidote to the adulatory prose threatening to smother the artist), Picasso once explained "No doubt about it, the sculptors are very much m contact with reality " Whereas a Picasso painting is often taken up with its own formal innovations, his sculpture seems more intent upon establishing the solid presence of its subject matter This may be one explanation for Picasso's proprietary concern For the most part his sculpture has been devoted to women, children, animals and birds--all of which, in life, he has kept around the house Scattered throughout the studio, they perhaps provide the land of permanent m?¦nage--or menagerie--he prefers to live and work in...

...If I concentrate upon two pieces in the midst of this profusion, it is because they illustrate so admirably the range of Picasso's sculptural achievement The first is Construction in Wire (1928-29), a sculpture in which the figure is sketched out in thin strands of metal wire The style certainly relates to Picasso's point-and-line illustrations for Balzac's he Chef d'oeuvre inconnu, but its imagery seems almost to prefigure the marvellously complex painting of four years later, Girl before a Mirror It is one of the earliest and most successful attacks upon conventional monolithic sculpture, opening up its forms until nothing remains but an airy, skeletal structure Small though it is, it maintains a visual tension that few later sculptors have been able to achieve It remains at one and the same time an elegant two-dimensional drawing and a superb spatial exercise...

...Beautifully installed, the exhibition spans the 66 years of Picasso's sculptural activity, ranging from the early figurative bronzes to the maquette for the monumental head recently installed in the Plaza of the Chicago Civic Center Special galleries within the exhibition are devoted to the early Cubist reliefs and to those large, round, transmogrified heads of women that derive in equal part from the Surrealist anatomy which Picasso invented in the '30s and from Mane-Therese Walter, his favored model and mistress of the period In addition, the show includes a selection from his suite of etchings...

...The second work, Little Girl Skipping Rope (1950), cast in bronze from found objects, is uncompromisingly ugly The little girl is made not of sugar and spice but of the most unlikely combination of elements a wicker basket for a body, a thin disk for a face with features scratched m a childish fashion Her short legs dangle in mid-air, shod in a pair of real shoes that have been placed on the wrong feet The whole figurative ensemble is held aloft by a bronze jump-rope supported on either side by a twisted snake and a flower whose center has been made from a discarded heating element...