JOY IN WOOD AND STEEL
The year’s first art blockbuster, Picasso Sculpture at MoMA, sets out, simply, on plain white pedestals, 140 works, inside the fourth floor galleries. The pieces aren’t captioned but numbered, so that visitors wander through with the show’s little white guide book open in their hands before them, dodging others engrossed with their own guide books, frozen, statue-like, throughout.
The sculptures are, each one of them, crazily energetic, animated by unorthodox compositions and a sense of perpetual discovery. Each era of work brings distinct pleasures. The artist’s abstract Cubist sculptures have the same pictorial complexity and ambiguity as his contemporary paintings. The artist’s straightforward figural sculptures are surprisingly tender. The startling, life-size Man With Goat has the naturalistic proportions and unchallenged authority of a classical figure, and an emotional presence that rivals that of a real live human.
The most exciting pieces are those from the 1950′s and 60′s, that straddle the abstract and the figural. Each depicts one thing very clearly (a girl jumping rope, a woman holding a child, a jug filled with flowers) while also showing at the same time exactly what it is made from (screws, tin cans, colanders, baskets, canvas stretchers, a bicycle seat). Picasso was a master form-maker and also a master bricoleur, collecting and combining found objects so skillfully that the assemblies, even the large metal ones, seem to have flown together spontaneously, driven by magnetic force. These artworks have the simple, joyful charisma of children’s toys.