Sculpture, Photograph, Book: The Sculptures of Picasso (1949)

The photograph highlights how different Picasso&s;s sculpture was from the aesthetics of direct carving, which at the time dominated in Britain, favouring artists who worked &s;directly on the stone&s; such as Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth. As Alex Potts highlights in his discussion of the twentieth-century sculptural imagination, the idea of modern sculpture as a significant aspect of a modernist aesthetic ‘gathered momentum relatively late, in the 1930s, coming to a head with the spate of publications in the 1950s specifically dedicated to the subject’, yet remained a sideline ‘to the master narratives of modern painting’. This places The Sculptures of Picasso at the beginning of the postwar flowering of a process Brassai had been very much part of, with his involvement with the Surrealist French magazine Minotaure . According to Kahnweiler, many of his paintings were actually of sculptures Picasso did not have the money or the commissions to execute, so he had to paint them instead.