en he was 20 and thereafter continued to produce work in a variety of materials from cardboard to bronze" (His Other Art 100). The fact that this tremendous body of sculptural work took so long to be seen publicly and analyzed by art critics and historians is partly due to the enormous body of other work Picasso produced in his lifetime and the influence of so much of what he created on canvas.
Calculating the full range of Picasso's sculptural explorations remains difficult because of the artist's uncharacteristic secretiveness about this aspect of his work. Many of his sculptures were not displayed publicly until the 1960s, and few were sold, the artist preferring to keep them in his possession. Spies quotes Jean-Jacques Aillagon: "If Picasso's sculpture remains the part of his oeuvre most likely to amaze and move us today, it is probably because it is its most secret facet" (7).
The artist's earliest surviving sculpture is a modest figure entitled Seated Woman. Dated 1902, a similar figure is found in many of his sketches, drawings, and paintings from around the same time. While some might suggest that it provided a three-dimensional model from which Picasso could then create two-dimensional representations, the figure is really too primitive to suggest its use as a model.
Instead, it appears to represent just one more way for the artist to explore a subject and a pose that interested him at the time. Indeed, sculpture offered him another medium for this restless, prolific genius to express himself. Spies contends,
"Consideration of Picasso's sculpture suggests a fundamental, decisive precondition for all the important phases of his work: the capacity for a materialization as immediate and rapid as possible . . . This explains why his sculptural world seems richer in contrast than that of his painting or drawing" (14).
Picasso next turned to work in bronze, inspired by Auguste Rodin's sculptures more than any...