In the fall of 1909, the young Pablo Picasso modeled a clay and plaster sculpture of a female head, a searching, experimental work that now, cast in bronze, is considered a modernist icon, a benchmark in the development of Cubism. Head of a Woman (Fernande) is both radically new and strangely traditional; it simultaneously questions and reaffirms the time-honored conception of sculpture as solid form. (At the time Head of a Woman was made, Picasso and his friend Juli Gonzálezs reinvention of the discipline as open construction was still two decades in the future.) Confronted by the sculpture, you are acutely conscious of its dense singularity and just as acutely aware of the action of Picassos hand, pinching and patting the clay, tweaking sharp-edged planes and squeezing blunt ones into being. Features—details of hair, a tensely turned neck—are all accounted for, translated into aggressive ridges and hollows where you mi ...

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