4 TRUE TO FORM

Sculpture was never the same after 1912, when Pablo Picasso started experimenting with three-dimensional forms. Up until then, artists would carve and model figures and portrait busts using their hands, or perhaps a chisel and awl. But not the avant-garde Spaniard – he instead arranged pieces of cardboard to make a guitar and incorporated a real absinthe spoon into a bronze glass of absinthe – breaking new ground and shocking the establishment. Unlike with painting, Picasso had no training as a sculptor. He picked up and dropped sculpture several times during his career, going through various phases in which he used di erent tools, materials and processes. He was inspired by African sculpture and whittlewood carvings, he created assemblage using found objects such as cake moulds and watering cans scavenged in junkyards, and he fashioned people from bits of old furniture, tree branches, wooden planks and sheet metal. He is pictured examining one of his sculptures at his house near Cannes in France c1960. Picasso kept his sculptures and lived among them, apparently as if they were family members.