They said You Can't Miss the Picasso Sculpture exhibit....

... at MOMA, and I'm certainly glad I went, although I would have lived nicely without it.  I was supposed to be teaching at NYU, but the class was cancelled for parent teacher conferences at Manhattan Village Academy where they rent space!  And I was already scheduled to meet Ingrid.

Picasso is amazing:  I always feel I am in the presence of an amazing artistic intelligence.  Some of the pieces have always been delightful  (the baboon with the toy car head and babies), the goat-- lots of them.  He's always trying something.  They don't move me the way some other artists do, but are always worth seeing.  This time, I especially enjoyed his early absinthe glasses--six of them, bronzes with spoons and sugar cubes that he then painted.  They are early and delightful.

Some of the monumental stuff was impressive, and I liked reading about how he stayed around Paris during the Nazi occupation, and how casting his statues became a political act.  That was nice.  I liked the smallish tan boxes, especially one with a glove, and a small statue called woman with plants.  She has a nice square face and a Grecian-type skirt that the notes said was decorated with corrugated cardboard pressed into the clay.

So Picasso was fun and instructive.  The Andy Warhol had all of the Campbell's Soup can paintings circling a gallery, and the  intense little series of Jackie Kennedy images before and after JFK's assassination. There were crowds of Asian young people snapping pix of the big Marilyn silk screens.

Actually there were crowds of people everywhere.

Last thing I'll mention was in a sort of general modernist exhibit, a couple of Robert  Rauschenberg  collages (he called them Combines) I didn't expect to like but did:  especially the one with the illegal dead eagle called Canyon  (wasn't there a brouhaha about that?  Yes.  Click here.  It is illegal for its owners to sell it, but it gets a hefty tax because it's a famous maybe great work of art.).

Finally, a room of new stuff, and a big wall sized Kara Walker called Gone .