In a MoMA retrospective, Pablo Picasso’s sculpture is still full of surprises

In 1933, the Hungarian photographer Brassai photographed Picasso’s studio for an extensive article in a high-end art magazine. One image featured the artist’s sculpture arranged in the doorway of a former stable on the grounds of his chateau, Boisgeloup, north of Paris. The doors are flung open, but they reveal little of the interior. A few forms are seen just inside the arched portal, behind which is inky darkness.

The image can stand for a series of assumptions about Picasso's sculptural output that are questioned by an exhibition “Picasso Sculpture” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York until February 7.

The exhibition is billed as the first major survey of his sculpture in almost half a century, and includes some 140 works.

The show, which has been a highlight of New York’s autumn and winter season, has a basic argument: that far from being a side channel in the artist’s career, sculpture was fundamental to his practice; and despite the received historical sense that he didn’t circulate his sculpture, it was in fact well known, and influential, throughout the artist’s career.

So the obscure depths of the studio glimpsed in the Brassai photograph are more mythologising than reality, and photography turns out to be essential to the promotion of Picasso’s three-dimensional output. Brassai was a favourite photographer of Picasso, and he made moody black-and-white images of the master’s sculpture that become frustratingly indelible once you’ve seen them.

The curators of the show, Ann Temkin and Anne Umland, have devoted a room just to Brassai’s images, and it’s worth visiting only after a full pass through the other galleries. One needs to see the work from all angles before Brassai fixes it on paper from a single vantage point, enhancing one limited but compelling perspective.