Picasso.Sculptures

For Picasso, the dialogue between painting and sculpture started when he was 10, while he was first studying art at La Coruña. During his free time at school, his interest for three dimensional art materialized into tiny nativity figurines.¹

Throughout his 60 year long career, he used all sorts of materials: clay, metal, bronze, discarded objects, paper and pieces of wood. He learned sculpture techniques thanks to his circle of sculptor friends, such as Basque artist Francisco “Paco” Durrio de Madrón, and embraced them while creating new forms of expression.

While Pablo Picasso’s paintings are well known to the public, few museums have displayed his sculptures in a completely independently. Pablo Picasso considered them as an integral part of his work, an active decor of his every-day life. Yet, he protected them as one of his best kept secrets. During the 1966 exhibition, held at the Petit Palais in Paris for the artist’s 85^th birthday, a large selection of his sculptures, along with a series of drawings², were unveiled to the public for the first time.

Since then, the Centre Pompidou, the French National Museum of Modern Art, presented in 2000 Picasso sculpteur, the first retrospective ever held in France of Pablo Picasso’s sculptures.  Thanks to the collaboration between the Picasso Museum and the New York Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the exhibition featured a selection of his most important sculptures.

Today, Picasso.Sculptures, sequel of the MoMA retrospective Picasso.Sculpture, gathers more than 240 works, classified into 15 chronological sections, from the very first 1902 modeling (a one-foot high woman, sitting³), to the scale model of the famous Chicago Picasso (1967), a fifty-feet high monumental sculpture installed in Chicago.⁴ This exhibition aims at examining the artist’s sculptures from a new perspective by highlighting their dimensional multiplicity, through series and variations, cast iron moldings, prints and enlargements, all stemming from originals which were initially sculpted.

Picasso.Sculptures
Musée national Picasso-Paris
5 rue de Thorigny
75003 Paris
Tél. +33 1 85 56 00 36

From Tuesday to Friday : 11h30 am to 6pm.
Weekends and French Holidays : 9h30 am to 6 pm.

NOTES
¹ p.18,  Picasso Sculpture, The Museum of Modern Art, 2015
² Press release Picasso Sculpteur
³ Seated Woman, Barcelona, 1902, unfired clay, 14.5 × 8.5 × 11.5 cm
Musée national Picasso–Paris. Dation Pablo Picasso
⁴ p.35, Picasso Sculpture, The Museum of Modern Art, 2015