It is a commanding work from which only one bronze was made. It demonstrates Picasso's radically improvisatory working technique. The body of the figure was fabricated by pushing plaster through a chicken wire armature, and the figure's toga skirt and is made from a cast of a rumpled sheet of corrugated cardboard.

Beginning in 1933, Picasso started to explore the process of imprinting plaster using everyday objects and materials. The narrow ridges of corrugated cardboard, for example, served to articulate the drapery of Woman with Leaves (1934) and The Orator (1933–34). He also used plaster to bind together a variety of found items, combining the expedient solutions of bricolage with those of conventional modelling to create works such as Head of a Warrior (1933), whose eyes began as tennis balls.

Picasso was trained as a painter but not as a sculptor; from the start, this facilitated a natural disregard for tradition in his sculptural work. Although Picasso’s sculpture is a relatively unfamiliar aspect of his career, it is one that has been profoundly influential throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. It is characterized primarily by the sheer pleasure of invention and experimentation.

Over the course of six decades, Picasso redefined the terms of sculpture again and again, setting himself apart not only from what his colleagues were doing but also from what he himself had previously done. Whether portraying humans, animals, or objects, he invested his sculptures with a powerful charisma that belies their inanimate status.

Relative to painting, sculpture occupied a deeply personal place in the artist’s work. During his lifetime, Picasso kept most of his sculptures, living among them as if they were family members. After his death, many became part of the founding collection of the Musée National Picasso–Paris.

Regarded as one of the greatest and most influential artists of the 20th century, he is known for co-founding the Cubist movement, the invention of constructed sculpture, the co-invention of collage, and for the wide variety of styles that he helped develop and explore. Among his most famous works are the proto-Cubist Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907), and Guernica (1937), a portrayal of the bombing of Guernica by the German and Italian airforces at the behest of the Spanish nationalist government during the Spanish Civil War.

Exceptionally prolific throughout the course of his long life, Picasso achieved universal renown and immense fortune for his revolutionary artistic accomplishments, and became one of the best-known figures in 20th-century art.

Size of Photo: 9.5 x 9.5 cm approx
Size of Frame: 21 x 25 cm approx