Goat Skull and Bottle

Pablo Picasso, 1951 (cast 1954) · Gallery 500 · Floor 5

He turns seventy this year. Decades of blowing art apart and putting it back together behind him. And now he’s down in the south of France making animals out of junk. The year before, Picasso built a whole goat. A big one. Pregnant. She’s downstairs in the sculpture garden. A year later, this. And, uh, the goat’s dead. Just the skull this time. Picasso built it out of whatever he could get his hands on. Bicycle handlebars for the horns. Two big bolt heads for the eyes. Corrugated cardboard for the fur. Nails for the scruff between the ears. And beside it, a bottle with a candle in the neck, more nails fanning out around the flame like rays of light. Now, a candle next to a skull is an old trick. Memento mori. Basically: time’s running out. You’re gonna die. So you’ve got Picasso building a skull out of trash and putting a candle beside it. Pretty dark. Except look at those horns. They’re still bicycle handlebars. You see both things at once. Goat. Bike. Skull. Pile of junk. And then, three years later, he makes it even stranger. He has the whole thing cast in bronze. The bolts. The nails. Even the cardboard. All of it. Bronze. Then he paints it gray. The same grim palette as his paintings during and just after the war. So he takes a pile of junk, turns it into bronze, then paints the bronze to look like junk again.

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