Baboon and Young

Pablo Picasso, 1951

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About This Work

Baboon and Young is a bronze cast of an assemblage in which Picasso transformed familiar objects into an animal and its infant. MoMA identifies two toy cars borrowed from his son Claude as the elements that form the baboon’s face, one upright and one upside down; cup handles become ears, an automobile spring becomes the tail, and a large jug forms the round belly. The small scale intensifies the surprise of this construction, which remains visibly made from things even as it coheres as an attentive mother and child.

MoMA dates the original assemblage to Vallauris in October 1951 and its bronze cast to 1955. The sculpture extends Picasso’s late-period practice of treating discarded or domestic objects as formal prompts rather than hiding their prior identity. The pairing of an animal with its young gives those transformed parts an emotional charge, but the work’s force also comes from the viewer recognizing the toy cars, handles, spring, and jug within a newly invented body. MoMA holds this cast in its Painting and Sculpture collection.

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