Picasso was a titan of painting. But the painting was not the only one of his concerns. Although he had no training as a sculptor, he made sculptures practically from the beginning of his career, although he never sold any and kept them always close to him, as if they were part of his family. And only when he had already turned 85 did he agree to show them in an exhibition held at the Petit Palais in Paris in 1966. Some of those works with which he lived and which later became part of the collections of the family and the Musée Picasso de Paris, they have traveled to Malaga to be part of the amazing sculptor Picasso. Matter and Body, the first major exhibition that can be seen in Spain dedicated exclusively to a discipline in which the artist moved freely. A space for experimentation that, from his self-taught condition, allowed him to carry out a high-risk exercise and go far beyond what his brushes allowed him to do.

It sounds strange and may even seem exaggerated at this point, but what we now see in the Museo Picasso Málaga is a new Picasso to discover. A Picasso who is more himself in three dimensions. It is estimated that throughout his life he made 700 sculptures (compared to 4,500 paintings) and sixty works have been gathered here, all of them centered on the human figure. Why did he always want to keep them private? “He probably felt hurt when his proposal for a monument to Apollinaire was rejected, because they did not understand his sculpture, he was not a traditional sculptor and he wanted to be free, so he ended up turning it into a private activity. He made them for him”, says Carmen Giménez, the curator of the exhibition and first director of the Malaga museum, in whose creation, which is now twenty years old, he played a decisive role together with two other women, Christine Ruiz-Picasso and Carmen Calvo.

Giménez refers to the harsh criticism received by his proposal for the funerary monument to Apollinaire, who, inspired by his story The Murdered Poet, projected a wire sculpture, like a drawing in space made of lines and emptiness. Picasso, who was already a star, must have found it unbearable – and left an impression on him – that his work was described as “bizarre, monstrous, crazy, incomprehensible, almost obscene,” in the words of the writer André Billy.

Picasso sculptor. Matter and Body (until September 10), which will later travel to the Guggenheim Bilbao in an enlarged version, is part of the Picasso Celebration and is full of loans that will hardly be able to meet again. The works cover six decades of constant reinvention, as if it were the trajectory of a magician, from the cubist Head of a Woman (Fernande), from 1909, made after his stay in Horta de Sant Joan and modeled in clay in the Parisian studio by Manolo Hugué, to the model of what would be his last and -most monumental- sculpture, created in 1964 for the Daley Center plaza in Chicago. The artist never got to see it, but it marked the end of his time as a sculptor.

Picasso submits all kinds of materials and there is no idea that he is not capable of materializing: some screws become the legs of a girl who is reading, a woman’s nose is transformed into a phallus and with some humble wooden tablets he composes a marvelous family of beings that seem alive. He models contemplative or furious eyes, hands, almost pornographic objects, women lying down with their bodies made into a sensual mess, threadlike beings reminiscent of Giacometti and bold metal plates. There is so much to see and nothing, even the humblest, seems trivial.

From a corner, as if observing everything, The Offering Lady (1933), the beauty of Marie-Thérèse represented as someone who gives without asking for anything in return. With one arm she offers a vessel, the other is mutilated. It is a bronze copy of one of the cement sculptures that she showed in the Pavilion of the Republic in Paris next to Gernika. A second copy exists: she presides over her tomb in the garden of the Château de Vauvenargues”.