Curated by Ann Temkin and Anne Umland with Virginie Perdrisot
This American survey of Picasso’s sculpture, the first in almost fifty years (since the 1967 MoMA show), will be unforgettable. With roughly 150 works, many from the Musée National Picasso–Paris, the chief lender and coorganizer, the exhibition will trace Picasso’s continual upending of the medium. The curators have decided to stay out of the way, allowing the story to unfold in chronological chapters corresponding to distinct periods when the painter threw himself into three-dimensional work. Sculpture, which suggests carving, is too tame a word for all the stuff that poured out of the playground known as Picasso; it is even hard to believe that it all came from a single artist. One highlight will be the first-ever reunion of the six ripped-open “Glass of Absinthe” bronzes of 1914, each embellished differently, mixing casting and assemblage, patina and painting, humor and monumentality, in a combined act of revolution. But there will be many others.
