19th and 20th century sculpture

Michael Ayrton (1921-1975) was a true 20th century renaissance man. He was a sculptor, painter, printmaker of figures and landscapes, illustrator, draughtsman, theatrical designer, filmmaker, writer and art critic. Well-known for his sculptures and drawings, Ayrton saw himself simply as an “image-maker”.

Picasso is an artist whose name rightly dominates the history of art, and particularly painting, in the Twentieth century. As the initiator of Cubism, and creator of over 4,500 paintings, his two-dimensional work is perhaps without match. Nonetheless, the artist’s three-dimensional, sculptural work, is an important part of his oeuvre that deserves focus. Since the artist created at least 700 sculptures, this facet of his work should be far more widely recognised. Such a lack of public appreciation for his sculpted oeuvre can be distinctly ascribed to the artist’s refusal to exhibit these works early in his career.Indeed, it wasn’t until near the end of his life that public recognition was truly achieved, in the retrospective Hommage à Picasso, held in Paris in 1966, which first showed the great master’s sculpture in number. This exhibition was soon followed by The Sculpture of Picasso at MOMA, NY, in 1967, the first major exhibition in America to showcase a significant portion of his sculptures. Recently, there has been a re-emergence of interest in Picasso’s sculptures thanks to the seminal exhibition Picasso Sculpture –held again at MOMA in 2015, which then travelled to the Musée Picasso in Paris in 2016.