NASHER SCULPTURE CENTER ANNOUNCES ACQUISITION OF MAJOR PICASSO BY THE RAYMOND AND PATSY NASHER COLLECTION
2/1/2002 12:00:00 AM
Dallas, TX, February 1, 2002 - The Nasher Sculpture Center of Dallas today announced the addition of a monumental, groundbreaking sculpture by Pablo Picasso (Spanish, 1881-1973) to the renowned Raymond and Patsy Nasher Collection. Head of a Woman from 1958 is cast in concrete and gravel and stands 10 feet tall. It will go on public display with other selections from the Nasher Collection in the garden of the new Nasher Sculpture Center in downtown Dallas, currently under construction and scheduled to open in Spring 2003.
Raymond D. Nasher, founder of the Nasher Sculpture Center, comments: "This is one of Picasso's most important outdoor sculptures and adds even greater depth to our remarkable holdings of work by this great artist. Picasso's daughter Maya recently termed this work 'the mother of all the sculptures in concrete and gravel.' Our collection will continue to expand up to and beyond the opening of the Sculpture Center." Steven Nash, Director of the Nasher Sculpture Center, adds: "We feel certain that Head of a Woman will become one of the most popular works installed at the new Center. It will represent a side of his work that is not well known and will complement the six, smaller-scale, indoor sculptures by Picasso in the Nasher Collection."
The Nasher Collection comprises fourteen works by Picasso including seven sculptures, presenting one of the most complete representations of Picasso's work as a sculptor outside the Picasso Museum in Paris. Other sculptures in the collection are the plaster Head of Fernande of 1909, one of the so-called Boisgeloup heads in bronze from 1931, the bronze Pregnant Woman from 1950/59, Faune assis from 1951, the plaster and metal Flowers in a Vase from 1951-53, and the Head of a Woman, also titled Head of Jacqueline, in painted sheet metal from 1957, a work with particularly strong conceptual and visual affinities with the gravel and concrete Head.
With its monumental head mounted on a tall, thin column or neck, it has a totemic quality that nevertheless admits a sense of the wittiness and delight with which Picasso explored his new medium. As one walks around the sculpture, its facial expression changes as do the patterns of light and shadow that play across its flat, intersecting shapes. With her combination of geometric and organic forms, she is both an abstract invention and an approachable human presence.
The Nasher Sculpture Center is a new cultural institution dedicated to the display and study of modern sculpture under construction in downtown Dallas. The $70 million Center will occupy a 2.4-acre site adjacent to the Dallas Museum of Art in the heart of the Dallas Arts District. Renzo Piano is the architect of the Center's 50,000 square foot building. Piano is working in collaboration with landscape architect Peter Walker on the design of the sculpture garden.
This project is a longtime dream of Raymond Nasher and his late wife Patsy, who together formed one of the finest collections of modern sculpture in the world. The Nasher Sculpture Center will present rotating exhibitions of works from Nasher's holdings as well as special exhibitions of modern sculpture. In addition to approximately 10,000 square feet of indoor gallery space, the Center will contain an auditorium, classrooms, a café, library and offices for staff and the Nasher Institute of Modern Sculpture.
Particularly famous as a painter, Picasso was also one of the 20th century's most inventive and prolific sculptors, working with a wide variety of materials and stylistic languages throughout his long career and indelibly influencing the development of modern sculptural thought. A vital dialogue often appears in his art between two-dimensional and three-dimensional forms. From Picasso's pioneering work with Cubist sculpture and three-dimensional collage early in the century, to his use of found objects, to his exploration of welded form and seemingly endless variations on the construction and modeling of human anatomy, his ideas in one medium constantly nurtured his work in another.
The concrete and gravel Head of a Woman now in the Nasher Collection illustrates the complexity of this process. In a series of paintings and smaller-scale wood, paper, and sheet metal sculptures from the mid-50s, Picasso had explored the idea of constructing the human head from two or three flat planes that intersect vertically and fan open to introduce angular pockets of space. The somber coloration in these works, including both paintings and sculptures, generally consists of greys, blacks, and whites. Picasso typically painted the separate planes with different combinations of facial features to produce multiple, changing faces and profiles. It is a formal concept that relates back to his invention of Cubism many years earlier but is reinterpreted with a simple graphic strength and ultimately with new materials that allowed him finally to realize his plans for outdoor sculptures on a grand scale.
Picasso was approached in the mid-50s by a Norwegian artist named Karl Nesjar who had developed a process for casting large works in gravel and concrete with indelible surface designs that resemble painted strokes. He called it the Betograve technique, combining the French words for concrete and engraving. It involved casting a form in a mixture of gravel and concrete that was covered entirely with a thin layer of darkened concrete. Designs on the surface were produced by sandblasting the "negative" spaces to reveal the color and texture of the gravel underneath while leaving contrasting areas of dark concrete untouched, producing the effect of painted marks.
Nesjar proposed to Picasso that they work together. Always anxious to try fresh ideas, Picasso saw immediately the potential to blow up drawings and models to a scale he had heretofore only dreamed about. In the case of Head of a Woman, he worked from a small maquette that is now in the Picasso Museum in Paris, which relates in turn to a number of paintings and drawings from the same period. Completed in 1958 for a garden in Norway, Head of a Woman was the first of more than twenty sculptures executed in this new technique.
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For more information, please contact:
Kristen Gibbins
Nasher Sculpture Center
214.242.5177
kgibbins@nashersculpturecenter.org
www.NasherSculptureCenter.org