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May 30, 2023

Drinking In the Beauty of Picasso’s Sculptures at MoMA

Advertisement Supported by By Roberta Smith At the moment, Lynda Zycherman, the

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By Roberta Smith

At the moment, Lynda Zycherman, the Museum of Modern Art's sculpture conservator, is in her element. She's supervising what might be called the care and feeding of the 120 objects in the Modern's extraordinary "Picasso Sculpture," an array that traces the artist's breathtaking inventiveness in bronze, wood, clay, plaster, sheet metal and stones through six decades.

The chance to study closely — and to handle — so many sculptures by such a great master doesn't happen very often, even to a veteran like Ms. Zycherman. At the Modern since 1984, she was conservationally in charge of the 2007 Richard Serra retrospective and the sculpture in a 2009 Matisse retrospective. Her responsibilities for the museum's recent Björk survey included some repair to the famous swan dress and its glove-leather beak. But the Picasso show is definitely a pinnacle, she acknowledged, in terms of variety and art history.

At that point, I didn't realize that learning more about Ms. Zycherman's job would be a bit of a pinnacle for me, too. It's one thing to be interested in how artworks are made — as I very much am — and to understand that much of our nonverbal response to art is really to the artist's use of materials. But it is entirely something else to get close to the magical thinking such intimacy can inspire, to see how a professional thinks through a work's being, tracks physical clues and subjects them to forensic scrutiny and scientific testing, with results that potentially yield new art-historical knowledge. It's Art "CSI."

One thing I quickly learned is how much can be overlooked even when you think you’re looking.

I met Ms. Zycherman when the Picasso show was in the final stages of installation. The air was thick with restrained euphoria and fastidious care. Many art handlers are creative types, and you could sense that they were having their own personal epiphanies. One told me how thrilled she was to see Picasso's painted bronze "Goat Skull and Bottle" displayed in the round for the first time, rather than against a wall.

I was looking at Picasso's six painted bronze "Glass of Absinthe" sculptures when I found my way into one of those humbling wormholes of knowledge that makes a critic's life shift a bit on its axis. It is one of the feats of the show to reunite these charming diminutive works for the first time since they left Picasso's studio in 1914, the year they were made. But truth be told, I’d never given much thought to the Modern's version or the other two I’d seen; they seemed like cute little toys.

This attitude evaporates in the show's second gallery, where the entire complement of six "Glass" works greets you like a chorus. The casts are identical, but some are relatively plain, painted just two colors, while others are speckled with Pointillist veils of red, blue and green dots. Two — including the Modern's — have a prominent curl of black paint that scholars refer to as a cat tail.

Picasso made the "Glass" pieces just after completing his great "Guitar," an assemblage of sheets of cut and welded ferrous iron (it is hanging nearby). "Guitar" brought the thin planes of Cubist collage into three dimensions, opening sculpture to abstract space, but after this breakthrough, Picasso returned to figurative sculpture, never to be distracted again.

The "Glass of Absinthe" sculptures begin this turning back. Barely nine inches high, their stacked elements form a fractured glass of alcohol, topped by an absinthe spoon — flat and perforated like a little pie-server — on which rests a painted bronze sugar cube. The alloy metal spoons — all different, like the paint — are an early instance of a ready-made object incorporated into a sculpture, a year after Duchamp made the first one by nailing a bicycle wheel to a stool.

Picasso's absinthe sculptures are fantastic little puzzles: You see the rim of the glass, a plane that is the top of the liquid, and also beneath it. There's jagged flange on one side that is apparently a handle. The more you look, the more figurative they become. The flanges suggest haughty Sitwellian profiles and from certain angles a constellation of protrusions and openings resembles a droopy mouth and eyelids. With the spoon and sugar cube serving as a slouchy hat, you’ve got a face that looks amazingly like Buster Keaton's.

I asked a passing staff member whether the bronze-colored upper half of one "Glass" was exposed, unpainted bronze. Soon I was introduced to Ms. Zycherman, who quickly disabused me of that idea. No, the bronzes are all painted. The upper portion of the piece in question is covered with brown paint mixed with sand. "Of course, you idiot," I said to myself. "What's wrong with your eyes? Didn't you notice the texture?"

She asked me if I would like to know more, and there followed a whirlwind demonstration of the fine art of very close looking, including new discoveries that she made in the time leading up to the show (and that are footnoted in its catalog).

Ms. Zycherman outlined the order of the casts, gave me peeks at the numbers scratched in the bottom edges, and pointed out the embossed "P" on each exterior. The first bronze cast — upper half white (now yellowed), lower half rusty red, as if to mimic terra cotta — was made from Picasso's wax model, which his dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler took to a foundry. There a plaster mold was made, followed by a trial bronze cast that Kahnweiler took back to the artist for approval.

Ms. Zycherman also told me that she had made actual-size models of the "Glass" pieces, a wax version and a version in fast-drying clay that she speckled with dots à la Pablo. All this was to better fathom the sculpture's fine, three-part construction.

How was it held together? Performing X-radiography on four of the pieces in the months before the show, Ms. Zycherman was the first to confirm the brilliant, invisible means: a tiny pin attached to the bronze sugar cube that passes through one of the perforations in each spoon into a tiny socket in the lip of each glass. She suspects that this solution was not devised by Picasso — who at that point didn't know much about sculpture — but by a skilled artisan at the foundry.

I walked away dazed by the imagination at work here — and not just the artist's. I wanted to learn more.

A couple of weeks later, I was ushered into the Modern's spacious conservation lab, which stretches across half of its building on West 53rd Street — an impressive part of the 2014 expansion. Jackson Pollock's "No. 1" from 1948 was on a large table, about to be restored for the first time in its history. The Modern acquired it in 1950, which meant that it had benefited from "not much transit," in conservator's parlance, since leaving the artist's studio.

I began to pick up the lingo: "Reversible conservation" is any repair that can be undone (cleaning is not one of them). "Proud of the surface" describes nails and screws whose heads jut out. I learned that phrase when we were discussing another of the Picasso show's highlights, "The Bathers," a group of six figures from 1956 cobbled together from pieces of plywood and wood scraps.

Given by its first owner to the Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart in 1981, the ensemble had never been lent. The Stuttgart museum was understandably cautious, agreeing only after Ms. Zycherman flew to Germany to demonstrate how the Modern had borrowed and lent similar works without incident.

One of the six, "The Woman With Outstretched Arms," had often been described as made of charred or singed wood. But Ms. Zycherman spotted a drip on its back that convinced her that black passages were not burns but paint. The Staatsgalerie seems to have taken this under consideration; adjustments will be made in the catalog's second edition.

Discoveries like this sometimes occur when experienced eyes examine an artwork for the first time. The research into the "Glass of Absinthe" sculptures was quite another story. Ms. Zycherman fastened on the idea in July 2014, when Ann Temkin and Anne Umland, the show's curators, told her of the bronzes’ pending reunion and said they had never been thoroughly analyzed.

Ms. Zycherman's carefully planned approach has been as diplomatic as scientific, with the diplomacy greatly eased because the Modern's "Glass" could go first in having its structure X-rayed, and the copper-to-tin ratio of its alloy determined. "It's not great to ask a museum if you can run a test on one of their objects if you haven't already tried it on your own," she said.

Two other "Glass" works were in the area, one at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the other in the cache of Cubist works the collector Leonard A. Lauder had promised to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She did a similar analysis of these pieces. Last January, Ms. Zycherman corralled a fourth "Glass" that the Picasso family had lent to a Picasso exhibition at the Gagosian Gallery here. The alloys of the four tested remarkably close, suggesting a level of control that is a sign of an outstanding foundry. Ms. Zycherman will be testing the alloys of the remaining two after the Picasso show closes in January.

During my visit to the conservation lab, I took a closer look at the two "Glass" models that Ms. Zycherman had made. She said that remaking an artist's work is the best way to understand how the work was created, and she drew my attention to a wall where five small canvases, each a different shade of blue, lined the cabinets. They were made by the painting conservators trying, without success, to duplicate the vibrant blue of Yves Klein's work. She noted that the chief conservator, Jim Coddington, had also tried to recreate Pollock drip paintings — which made newly clear why many forgers start out as conservators.

When I commented that her own versions of Picassos "Glass of Absinthe" sculptures weren't entirely accurate, Ms. Zycherman laughed. "Don't worry," she replied. "No one wants them to be."

An article last Sunday about sculptures by Picasso that are being shown at the Museum of Modern Art misidentified the collector who has promised to give a cache of Cubist works to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He is Leonard A. Lauder — not his brother, Ronald S. Lauder. The article also erroneously stated that Ronald's middle initial is M. In addition, the article also misstated the year that "The Bathers," an ensemble of six wood figures, was given to the Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart. It was 1981, not 1980. The article also described incorrectly the spoons included in Picasso's six "Glass of Absinthe" sculptures. They are made of a white metal alloy; they are not silver-plated. And, finally, the article misidentified the technique that researchers used to examine four of the "Glass of Absinthe" works. It is X-radiography, not X-ray fluorescence spectrometry.

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