It took me four years to paint like Raphael but a lifetime to paint like a child. Perhaps more than any other Modernist artist, Picasso understood the complexity involved in creating abstract images—possibly more so in sculpture than in painting. Picasso Sculpture, which opened this week at the Museum of Modern Art, brings together the pieces that represent the pinnacle of his achievements beyond painting, in the order in which they were made. Almost.

The exhibition, located in the fourth floor collections galleries, opens with a grove of his painted sheet metal sculptures (below), made toward the end of his life. Based on maquettes he created from freely cut and folded card stock, the 11 pieces grouped in a light-flooded gallery were done over the course of a decade, starting in 1954. Several striking portrayals of his wife Jacqueline mingle with bathers, children, and creatures that share a lightness of spirit that belies their complex forms and intricate construction.

The lively quality of Picasso’s mockups was easily translated into larger sheet metal equivalents by the artist’s assistants. This fulfilled Picasso’s life-long wish to create sculptures on a monumental scale. Sylvette (1954) was among the many sheet metal sculptures that became enormous outdoor works; its 20-fooot-tall concrete enlargement, placed at New York University’s housing complex on Bleecker Street in 1968, remains there today.  

The exhibition continues in episodes of intense work that occurred over the course of Picasso’s lifetime, and closely related to the various places where he lived. The first gallery includes a bronze cast of a head he made in 1902, during his formative years as an artist. Created in the workshop of local sculptor in Barcelona, Seated Woman shares similar qualities with his transitional paintings of the Blue Period. By the time he had moved to Paris, in 1904, Picasso was forging a new way of seeing through abstraction, taking inspiration from the African and Oceanic masks he saw in the Musée d'Ethnographie du Trocadéro. The angular shapes and surfaces of Head of a Woman (1909) embody the fractured planes and surfaces of Picasso and Braque’s Cubist paintings, and point towards the next phase of Picasso’s oeuvre.

Working is sculpture, for Picasso, was an episodic enterprise, often based on moving to a new studio, taking up a new set of tools and materials, and sometime, a new muse. The exhibition continues with the cut and folded cardboard Still Life With Guitar (1912); its painted sheet metal variant, Guitar (1914); and 15 or so more pieces in which he explores three-dimensional variations inherent in his Cubist paintings. The highlight of this gallery is the presentation of all six bronze castings of Glass of Absinthe (1914). Although the castings are identical, the artist made each one unique by decorating the surfaces differently with paint. 

Each subsequent phase in Picasso’s work in sculpture is strongly focused on the use of a particular material. At the end of the 1920s, working on a commission for a memorial to the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, centered on diagrammatic wire constructions named “drawings in space” by his dealer, Daniel Kahnweiler, and complex works in welded metal, realized in collaboration with the sculptor Julio Gonzales. Although none of the works (among them, Woman in the Garden, 1929-30, above) were accepted by the memorial committee, the work led to another new phase in his career.

On his move to an estate northwest of Paris, in the 1930s, Picasso finally had enough space to dedicate a separate studio to sculpture. There he took up plaster as his signature material, creating his first monumental figures in the round, including a series of simultaneously female and phallic heads (below). Noses, mouths and eyes double as male and female sexual organs, and the sculptures’ surfaces conjure both the softness of flesh and the hardness of bone.

During World War II, Picasso remained in Paris—one of the few artists labeled “degenerate” by the Nazis who stayed in the besieged capital. During the grim period of the Occupation, the difficulty of getting by and finding materials for work inspired the artist to further experimentation. Found object made their way into his work through new interpretations; in 1942, a bicycle seat simply combined with handlebars forms Bull’s Head. Cast in bronze, the ordinary objects are transformed. Similarly, in The Venus of Gas, the iron burner of a stove, combined with some pipes, become a modern incarnation of a fertility goddess from antiquity.

In an adjacent gallery are photographs of Picasso’s sculpture by Brassaï, who had met the artist on an assignment from the Surrealist periodical Minotaure. Between 1932 and 1946, the photographer was a regular visitor to the studio, where he became the “official photographer” of Picasso’s works in three dimensions.

After the liberation of Paris, in 1944, Picasso visited the Riviera for the first time in many years. The sun, sand and light of the Mediterranean inspired the artist to delve into subjects from classical Greek and Roman art. Working in ceramics, a medium new to him that dated back to ancient times, he pushed his materials to their limits in terms of size and patterning, creating ornamental vessels boldly patterned and colored, and small clay figures that recall the ancient art of the Cyclades, at a pottery in Vallauris. A few years later, he bought an abandoned perfume factory nearby, and mined the junkyard at the pottery for objects that would find their way into new assemblages, including MoMA’s She-Goat (1950). Right: Picasso in Vallauris, 1954, © Yousuf Karsh; Musée National Picasso, Paris.

In 1955, Picasso moved with his second wife, Jacqueline Roque to the villa La Californie, near Cannes. There was no metal scrapyard there, but the artist found salvaged wood everywhere, from discarded canvas stretchers to old furniture, crates and lumber scraps that were transformed into playful characters. The charismatic Bathers (1956), six figures arranged in a sequence by the artist, is the only multi-figured ensemble of Picasso’s career. 

Although he ceased making sculpture in the early 1960s, Picasso continued to supervise the large-scale transformation of his sheet metal sculptures into concrete, as well as overseeing new bronze castings of his assemblages, until his death in 1973. 

Picasso Sculpture continues through February 7 at the Museum of Modern Art. 11 West 53^rd Street, NY, NY. Information. Special events. Member early hours, 9:30-10:30am, continue throughout the run. Photos: Peggy Roalf except as noted.