Compare and Contrast by Vasilena Todorova

Exercise (A) Compare and Contrast, Tate Modern

“Head No. 2” - Naum Gabo (1916, enlarged version 1964)

“Head of a Woman” – Pablo Picasso (1924)

The first piece pictured here was produced by Naum Gabo in 1916, during World War I while he lived in Oslo, Norway. The sculpture was made from stainless steel and it is a part of a series of explorations of the human shape, emphasizing space, volume and mass. Head No.2 was Gabo's first masterpiece approved by critics. To create the sculpture the artist was inspired by the cubist paintings of Picasso and the work of Braque and for that reason, his sculpture combines constructivism and cubism.

The second piece is made by Pablo Picasso in 1924. This work is untitled and is one of the few portraits painted by him which do not have known sitter. In his work, we can see how Picasso began to move from Cubism to another direction. “Alfred Barr (1902-81), the founding director in 1929 of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, named Picasso's art of 1923-4 ‘curvilinear' Cubism, due to its exclusion of “rectilinear geometry”. This style was distinguished by a flattening of volume and space, the overlapping and transparency of planes and simultaneity of points of view, disintegration and recombination and generally the independence of colour, form, space and texture without abandoning all reference to nature.’’1 In this style, we can see an equalization of volume and space.

The artists have recreated two images of a woman. In both works, it is used different angles and sides of the head to represent the meaning of the work. Gabo’s sculpture depending on which side and angle the viewer observed it, seems different. When the viewer looks the bust from the side, she appears to be slightly sloping and looking down like she is praying or thinking. If we look at the figure from the front, we will see that she watches the viewer directly and have a completely different look, like she is asking a question or waiting for an answer from the viewer. In the second piece, we can see that Picasso depict the face like it is viewed from different angles, also he combines male and female head to show two sides of the face.

In comparison, in the first piece, the artist used flat metal pieces, leaving space between them.

In this way, the artist achieves volume. If we compare the sculpture with Picasso’s painting, we can see that Picasso creates the opposite effect. By avoiding contrasting colours and using lines, he adds flatness to the head.

1

Kathleen Brunner, revised Matthew Gale (March 2001), ‘Pablo Picasso Head of a Woman 1924’, Tate, (March 2000) <https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/picasso-head-of-a-woman-t06928> [accessed 4 November 2020]