Doodles of Genius

For Pablo Picasso, sculpture has always been a kind of three-dimensional doodling, a device to work out ideas he intends to enshrine in oil. He keeps his numerous constructions of found objects, sheet-metal cutouts, bronzes and wooden figures at his home near Cannes. Occasionally, his black eyes dancing, he will show off his motley assembly of talismans, to test the mettle of his visitors. But he rarely sells them--at most one piece in ten.

It was only when the French government staged its mammoth 1966 Paris retrospective in honor of his 85th birthday (TIME Dec. 2), that Picasso agreed to let his own private sculpture trove be used to supplement the few Picasso sculptures available from other owners. Subsequently, Sir Roland Penrose, author of a biography of Picasso, prevailed on him to let the sculpture travel on to London's Tate Gallery this summer. Last week Americans got their chance to see what all the excitement was about when 290 pieces, selected by Sir Roland, went on view at Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art.

Unseen Goddesses. In listing the lenders to the show, Director Rene d'Harnoncourt wound up "thanking most of all an old friend, Pablo Picasso himself." And well he might, for 90% of the sculptures, from massive bronzes to toy stick figures carved to amuse children, comes from Picasso's own collection. As the throngs who jammed the show's opening days agreed, they indeed make a diverting display. Though Picasso may consider them doodles, they are clearly the doodles of genius. They reflect a fantastic fertility of invention, a sculptural technique to match every one of the myriad styles that Picasso has used in his 70-year painting career. As Sir Roland observed: "There could be 100 different sculptors in this exhibit. Yet all of them are named Picasso."

Among the most dramatic exhibits set up by d'Harnoncourt is a circular roomful of giant, moonlike women's heads with protruding noses and eyes set in their cheeks that seem to float like his "classic" line drawings and etchings of the 1930s. The busts were inspired by Marie-Therese Walter, Picasso's mistress of that period, modeled in clay and cast in bronze--yet the world heretofore has known them only by the paintings he made of them.

In the 1950s, Picasso turned to bronze castings of sculptures made with "found objects." Many of them, such as the Baboon and Young, with toy auto for a head and metal spring for a tail, are so well known that they set all sorts of precedents for the neo-Dadaists of the 1960s. But in this category, too, there are delightful examples of Picasso's wit never seen before, including a little girl caught skipping rope in mid-jump, and a pipe-tube, stiffly starched nurse pushing a baby in a pram.

Effervescent & Erotic. To Picasso fanciers, the most entertaining parts of the exhibit are among the largest and smallest items on display. Both are the handiwork of the 1960s, and both show that even at the age of 85, Picasso remains astonishingly inventive. The largest works, of course, are Picasso's monuments, represented by the model for the recently installed Chicago Civic Center sculpture and a photomontage of a heroic female figure to be installed in The Netherlands. The smallest are the impish, effervescent, often forthrightly erotic metal cutouts. Brightly painted and deftly bent, they look like cubist paintings in 21 dimensions--and, by a curious coincidence, 21 dimensions is what dozens of younger painters are going for right now.

In retrospect, Picasso's reluctance to have his sculpture judged on a par with his painting seems a needless reticence. For, although he has treated sculpture as something he did with his left hand, the present exhibition proves that his left hand knew quite well what the right hand drew, and on occasion did it better. Even the simplest piece--a hawk's head snipped from a piece of sheet iron--needs no signature. The work is plainly Picasso.

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