She-Goat

Pablo Picasso, 1950

Technical Details

About This Work

She-Goat began as an assemblage of discarded materials gathered near Picasso’s Vallauris studio. MoMA identifies a wicker basket as the goat’s rib cage, two ceramic jugs as its udders, flat palm fronds as its spine and snout, and metal scraps as structural elements. Picasso built up this skeletal framework with plaster before it was cast in bronze. The resulting 117.7 × 143.1 × 71.4 cm sculpture preserves the friction between improvised components and the alert, recognizable presence of an animal.

MoMA dates the work to Vallauris in 1950, with the bronze cast made in 1952. The sculpture belongs to Picasso’s late-period exploration of found materials, when a basket, jugs, fronds, and scraps could be redirected from their practical functions into an invented body. Its meaning lies less in a fixed animal symbol than in this act of transformation: the structure remains legible as an accumulation of things, yet coheres as a goat. MoMA presents the cast in its Sculpture Garden collection.

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