An Outsider in Paris

In 2015, New York’s Museum of Modern Art mounted the first major retrospective of Pablo Picasso’s sculpture in a half-century, with over 100 pieces, from stylized ceramic heads to “found” metal weldings to wood deconstructions. His genius poured forth in three dimensions, building on breakthroughs in painting and collage. One period stood out for its darkened, austere galleries: the World War II years, when he remained in Paris during the Nazi occupation. The objects here were stripped-down, elemental, toying with minimalist representation during an epoch of maximalist anguish, as in “Bull’s Head,” which fuses a bicycle seat and handlebars, evoking his perennial theme of the bullfight, and opening a portal onto fear and vulnerability, a striking counterpoint to the self-assured, protean figure Picasso presented to the world. We’re used to seeing the great man play offense, not defense.