Mara Naselli at Literary Hub:
On that gray February morning, the exhibit galleries smelled of perfumed wool and vibrated with a hushed reverence for Picasso’s creatures—two-legged, four-legged, winged, taloned, hooved. A man with a goat, a tiny horse with casters for feet, a girl jumping rope, Picasso’s ever-present Minotaur. And many, many women.
“Subjects are a bore, anyway,” Picasso told his friend the art critic Carlton Lake in 1957. “I’ve always said there are no subjects anymore.” And yet in the galleries I was surrounded: a Venus in a stove burner, a cock in bronze, a hand in plaster, the head of a woman in sheet metal and kitchen tools. Bodies changed from one form into another. Everyday objects transformed.
More here.