Goat Skull and Bottle

Pablo Picasso, 1951 (cast 1954)

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About This Work

A goat's skull, bottle, candle, and disparate found materials become a somber bronze construction whose gray palette and assembled surfaces remain visibly legible. Picasso's choice of painted bronze shapes how the subject is encountered: the material, scale, and method are not incidental but part of the artwork's visual argument. The record is held by Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA, whose direct object page verifies the canonical title, date, medium, dimensions, and collection attribution. This catalog entry therefore distinguishes documented facts from interpretive reading and directs visitors to the institutional record for further research.

MoMA identifies the candle as a memento mori and documents the bicycle handlebars, bolts, cardboard, and nails that survived conceptually through the bronze casting. The work belongs in a broader account of Picasso's sustained shifts among drawing, painting, printmaking, collage, and sculpture rather than in a simplified single-style narrative. Its museum object number and rights statement allow the gallery to provide reliable scholarship without presenting an unlicensed reproduction as if it were freely reusable. The site will retain the official collection link as the authoritative factual reference and use a rights-aware fallback for the image display.

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