CAN YOU SEE THE “PICASSO SCULPTURE” EXHIBIT AT MOMA FROM HERE?

 

September 16, 2014, by Jack Dziamba. New Post Goes Up Every Wednesday.

Picasso’s “Woman With Hat,” made of painted sheet metal in the early 1960s, is in “Picasso Sculpture” at the Museum of Modern Art. Credit 2015 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, Philip Greenberg for The New York Times

PICASSO SCULPTURE AT MOMA

From the MoMA Picasso Sculpture webpage:

“Picasso Sculpture is a sweeping survey of Pablo Picasso’s innovative and influential work in three dimensions. This will be the first such museum exhibition in the United States in nearly half a century.”

The New York Times review by Roberta Smith describes the exhibit by saying,

“The Museum of Modern Art’s staggering “Picasso Sculpture” is [l]arge, ambitious and unavoidably, dizzyingly peripatetic, this is a once-in-a-lifetime event.”

Picasso’s Effect on Sculpture

The MoMA webpage states that,

“The exhibition, which features more than 100 sculptures, complemented by selected works on paper and photographs, aims to advance the understanding of what sculpture was for Picasso, and of how he revolutionized its history through a lifelong commitment to constant reinvention.”

How Can You See the Exhibition?

The purpose of this blog is to review and report on Fine Art in the New Media – the use of the internet and other New Media tools to make Art accessible to everyone – everywhere. So, instead of focusing on the exhibition itself which presents, according to the NYT, “a ring of 11 grand spaces on the museum’s fourth floor, tracing the serial genre-bending forays into three dimensions wrought by this 20th-century titan of painting,” we will focus on whether the exhibition is accessible to those who may not and cannot see the exhibition live at the MoMA. This is especially important since the exhibition contains approximately 140 sculptures.

“The show, … is the latest in a string of landmark Pablo Picasso exhibitions for which the Modern has been justly famous since 1939. It is full of loans that perhaps only this museum has the clout to secure, including about 50 pieces from its collaborator, the Musée Picasso in Paris. The approximately 140 sculptures here were made between 1902 and 1964; encompass at least 10 media — among them wood, plaster, sheet metal, clay, beach-smoothed pebbles — and, in assemblage, all manner of found objects great and small. The galleries are dotted with works never before exhibited in New York, and reunite related efforts not seen together since they were in Picasso’s studio.” (NYT).

Fine Art in the New Media

Beside the Introduction video, the MoMA site contains three other videos, one on Head of a Woman,1909, Guitar, 1912, and Glass of Absinthe, 1914. These videos are voice overs over a still image of the sculpture. The voice over emphasizes the 3-D nature of the sculptures, but the image does not rotate. The 3-D nature of sculpture is obvious, even with the Wall StreeT Journal telling is that, “‘Picasso Sculpture’ [is] A Master’s Genius, in 3-D at the Museum of Modern Art'” Aside from the videos, there are no images of any of the 140 sculptures on the MoMA website. This is unfortunate because those with access to the New York Times can see a slideshow if 10 images. The WSJ shows 2 images, AOL has a gallery of 14 images, and there is some additional material on YouTube, such as the video below ( not produced by MoMA), and which seems to show mostly the artist’s paintings, with an “interesting” musical background.

MoMA does offer an exhibition book Picasso Sculpture for $85.00, but there is no “Look Inside” feature for us. We wish MoMA had done better for so momentous exhibition.

H/T Mark Dziamba