Pablo Gargallo

Studies in World Art, Book 129

By: Edward Lucie-Smith

Narrated by: Richard M. Pshock

Pablo Gargallo is often described as "Cubist" sculptor, partly thanks to his signature technique of hollowing out or reversing volumes, and partly due to his links with Picasso, one of the two undoubted inventors of cubism. In the strict sense, the idea of cubist sculpture is an oxymoron. Despite its undoubted early links to the African tribal sculptures that partly inspired Picasso’s transition to a new and radical style, cubism was essentially an attempt to find a better and more complete way of representing forms on a flat surface, springing off as much from experiments already made by Cézanne than it did from anything African.

If one looks carefully at Gargallo’s development, what one sees, I think, is a very different story, with complex links to developments in early 20th-century culture that have little to do with orthodox cubism or indeed with Africa, though certainly something to do with Picasso, whose work and career had an inescapable an inescapable allure for every artist who ventured within his personal orbit.

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