'Picasso Sculpture'

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'Picasso Sculpture'
Picasso, the sculptor | Master of Surprises; Why the Spanish artist was as inspiring a sculptor as he was a painter. Economist, Sept 26, 2015.
http://www.economist.com/news/bo ... er-master-surprises

Note:
(a) This is an exhibition review on Picasso Sculpture. MOMA, Sept 14, 2015 - Feb 7, 2016.
www.moma.org/visit/calendar/exhibitions/1559

(b) "When Umberto Boccioni first saw Picasso’s faceted Cubist 'Head of a Woman' (1909)—one of the few early sculptures to be displayed in a gallery—he suddenly saw how to infuse static form with Futurist dynamism, conveying a sense of the figure opening up in space and moving through time."
(i) Umberto Boccioni
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umberto_Boccioni
(1882-1916; an Italian painter and sculptor; helped shape the revolutionary aesthetic of the Futurism movement as one of its principal figures; Picasso not mentioned in the entire Wiki page)

Quote: "In May 1916, he was drafted into the Italian Army to fight in WWI, and was assigned to an artillery regiment at Sorte, near Verona. On Aug 16, 1916, he was thrown from his horse during a cavalry training exercise and was trampled. He died the following day, age thirty-three.

(ii) Umberto is Italian form of Humbert.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humbert
(iii) Picasso, Head of a Woman. 1909 (collected by Metropolitan Museum of Art).
www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/1996.403.6
(iv) The photo of a sculpture at the top of the article is

Picasso, Head of a Woman. Boisgeloup [name of the château where the sculpture was made), 1932
http://www.moma.org/collection/works/81148?locale=en
(Picasso's inspiration for Head of a Woman was his young companion, Marie-Thérèse Walter")

* He painted her a lot of times. Search images.google.com with (marie-thérèse walter picasso) -- no quotation marks -- an dyuo will see paintings and her in real life (with a prominent nose).

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(c) "In 1914 Vladimir Tatlin, a Ukrainian-born artist and architect, paid a visit to Picasso’s studio where he recalled seeing a 'violin sawn up into pieces, hanging by threads on various planes.' Returning to Russia, he radically transformed how he worked. Alberto Giacometti and Marcel Duchamp also learned vital lessons from Picasso’s sculptures."
(i) Vladimir Tatlin
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Tatlin
(1885-1953)
(ii) Alberto Giacometti
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alberto_Giacometti
(1901-1966; Swiss of Italian descent)
(iii) Marcel Duchamp
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcel_Duchamp
(1887 – 1968; French)

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(d) "Nothing in his earliest work * * * prepares viewers for the subversive 'Apple' (1909), a modest form of carved plaster in which the fruit has been invested with an unexpected monumentality through cubist faceting. Not only does this humble object upend traditional distinctions between solid and void, surface and interior, but it overturns centuries of artistic tradition in which the human figure was deemed to be the only subject worthy of the sculptor’s attention."

The Apple plaster is the last photo in
http://www.picasso.fr/us/journal/horta/horta5.htm
("Ill.30 Apple[.] Musée Picasso Paris)
(i) Musée Picasso
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musée_Picasso
(ii) The Collection. Musée Picasso Paris, undated
www.museepicassoparis.fr/en/the-collection/
("Picasso’s personal collection was given to the State by his heirs, in accordance with the artist’s wishes")
(iii)
(A) Cubism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cubism
(“In Cubist artwork, objects are analyzed, broken up and reassembled in an abstracted form—instead of depicting objects from one viewpoint, the artist depicts the subject from a multitude of viewpoints to represent the subject in a greater context”)
(B) Cubism. Encyclopaedia Britannica, undated (under the heading "Art")
www.britannica.com/art/Cubism

Quote:

"Cubism derived its name from remarks that were made by the critic Louis Vauxcelles, who derisively described [Georges] Braque’s 1908 work Houses at L’Estaque as being composed of cubes.

“It was, however, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, painted by Picasso in 1907, that presaged the new style; in this work, the forms of five female nudes become fractured, angular shapes.

* Georges Braque (1882-1963; French)
* Houses at l'Estaque (French: Maison à l’Estaque). The UNESCO Works of Art Collection, undated
www.unesco.org/artcollection/NavigationAction.do?idOeuvre=2943
* French English dictionary:
^ maison (noun feminine; from Latin [noun feminine] mansiō, mansiōnem abode, home, dwelling, from verb stem manēre ‎stay)): “house”
^ demoiselle (noun feminine; plural: demoiselles): “damsel"
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/demoiselle
^ jardin (noun masculine): “gardin”
* l’ = the. See French articles and determiners
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_articles_and_determiners
(section 1.1 Definite article)
* Les Demoiselles d’Avignon
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Demoiselles_d'Avignon
(The work portrays five nude female prostitutes from a brothel on Carrer d'Avinyó (Avinyó Street [Avinyó is Spanish and Avignon is French, which is the name of a city in Provence) in Barcelona)

Yet the title of the painting is French.
* French de (d’: before vowel or mute h) may be either an indefinite article (see section 1.2 in French articles and determiners), OR a preposition.

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(e) "Even more ground-breaking are the constructed sculptures Picasso made a few years later from studio scraps and found objects, beginning with the revolutionary 'Still Life with Guitar' (1912), a work pieced together out of cardboard, wire, string and other junk."

For Still Life with Guitar, view the photo in
Holland Cotter, When Picasso Changed His Tune. New York Times, Feb 11, 2015.
www.nytimes.com/2011/02/11/arts/design/11picasso.html

(f) “ ‘Picasso Sculpture’ abounds in diminutive works that contain the seeds of enormous ideas. The delicate little wire and sheet-metal maquettes that Picasso fabricated with the help of his childhood friend Julio González—intended for a monument to Guillaume Apollinaire, a French poet and critic—marked another transformation in the way sculpture is conceived, one in which void as well as solid is given a starring role and where the sculpture merges seamlessly with its environment.”
(i) Picasso, Project for a Monument to Guillaume Apollinaire. 1962 (enlarged version after 1928 original maquette; MOMA number: 72.1979)
www.moma.org/collection/works/80899
(ii) English dictionary:
marquette (noun, etymology): “a usually small preliminary model (as of a sculpture or a building)“
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/maquette

Compare Jacques Marquette
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Marquette
(iii) Guillaume Apollinaire
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guillaume_Apollinaire
(1880-1818)

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(g) “In sculpture, even more than in painting, Picasso refused to settle on a signature style; he seemed determined to reinvent the wheel with each change of mood or of mistress. The painted iron ‘Woman in the Garden’ (1929) is all dangerous spikes, a frightening vision of the woman as predator. But only a year or two later, under the spell of a new companion, Marie-Thérèse Walter, Picasso went in the opposite direction, modelling female forms of voluptuous, pneumatic softness.”

Femme au jardin (Woman in a Garden). Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, undated (Register number: DE00547)
www.museoreinasofia.es/en/collec ... jardin-woman-garden
(i) au (‎contraction of à le: used with a singular masculine noun): “to the, for the, at the”
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/au
(ii) See French English dictionary above for the definition of “jardin.”
(iii) Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mu ... o_de_Arte_Reina_Sofía
(officially inaugurated in1992 and is named for Queen Sofía

(h) “The exhibition also reveals that, when he wanted, Picasso could create ravishing forms of unsettling power. Few works convey existential dread as effectively as his ‘Death’s Head’ (1941), made during the darkest days of the war, or convey human dignity in the face of adversity as hauntingly as “Man with a Lamb” (1943), a work that looks distinctly modern but that conveys the timeless authority of a Sumerian votive figure."
(i) Death’s Head is a collection of Musée Picasso. Go to images.google.com, to view the sculpture.
(ii) Early Dynastic Sculpture, 2900–2350 B.C. The Met, undated
www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/edys/hd_edys.htm
(“It was perhaps due to this lack of access that the elite commissioned images of themselves to be carried into the god's presence. These statues embodied the very essence of the worshipper so that the spirit would be present when the physical body was not”)