Karen Wilkin
AT THE GALLERIES
The notion of what sculpture could be-even of what
could be thought of as sculpture-changed irrevocably in the late
1920s when Pablo Picasso and his compatriot Julio-Gonzalez be–
gan to build angular, linear objects with slender pieces of metal.
Architecture had already abandoned symmetrical stone mass–
ing in favor of light frameworks, transparency, and symmetry;
now sculpture did the same. Picasso and Gonzalez made planar,
skeletal sculptures by putting together disparate elements, instead
of carving or modelling solid volumes, as sculptors had done in
the past. Traditional sculptures were self-contained masses that
excluded their surroundings; Picasso and Gonzalez's construc–
tions were all line and edges. These open structures, penetrated
by space, had to declare their unlikeness to the rest of the world
by other means, by formal daring.
It was sculpture that came out of painting, out of the fictive
planes and transparencies of Cubist paintings and the real planes
of Cubist collage. Its subject matter was not particularly new.
Picasso and Gonzalez's heads and figures owed little to the legacy
of Greece and Rome, but the same could be said of the work of
many other inventive twentieth-century sculptors-Brancusi, for
example-who nonetheless continued to employ traditional
methods of carving and casting. What set Picasso and Gonzalez's
work apart most clearly was what it was made of and how it was
made. Instead of stone and bronze: scrap metal, iron, and steel–
industrial materials with no freight of art history; instead of time–
honored fine art techniques: the same methods used to construct
the frameworks of tall buildings and the bodies of automobiles.
Since the late 1920s, many forward-looking sculptors
including, among others, David Smith in the United States and
Anthony Caro in Great Britain, embraced these new notions of
what sculpture could be, using them as a basis for invention the
way earlier sculptors once used the conventions of Greek and
