VI.

Cubist Sculpture

While he was creating this revolution in painting, Picasso was doing almost equally innovative work in sculpture. Traditionally there had been two approaches to sculpture—modelling (in which the form is built up from a substance such as clay) and carving (in which the form is created by removing material from a block of stone or other suitable material). Picasso changed this by putting together sculpture from pieces of commonplace material (a development of the collage elements that he sometimes included in his Cubist paintings). An example is Guitar (1912, Musée Picasso, Paris), made of cardboard, paper, and string.

Picasso’s sculptures in this vein were generally small and almost in the nature of jokes, but the idea was soon taken up by other sculptors in much more ambitious form. Among them was the Russian painter and sculptor Vladimir Tatlin, who visited Picasso in 1914. Tatlin’s variations on Picasso’s method became the foundation of Constructivism, a major movement in abstract art.