Playing in the Sand with Picasso: Relief Sculpture as Game in the Summer of 1930

Abstract

The essay discusses an often overlooked group of works made by Pablo Picasso over the span of two weeks in the summer of 1930. These "sand reliefs," as they are called, engaged with the medium of relief sculpture and used its parameters as rules of a game Picasso played. Across the eight works that make up this set, Picasso toyed with questions of two- and three-dimensional imaging. In particular, the essay focuses on the role of shadow as a central component of relief sculpture and on Picasso's allegorization of it through the introduction of the silhouette in the early reliefs. By discussing the importance of the silhouette for Picasso in these years, I show how an undirected process of play around it and in the framework provided by relief sculpture generated new ways of thinking about sculpture. Throughout, I attend to the open-endedness of Picasso's play and the back-and-forth testing of rules in the sand reliefs in order to demonstrate how the perspective of Game Studies can bring to light new ways of considering artworks and artistic process.

Keywords: Games Studies, Modernism, Sculpture, Relief Sculpture, Pablo Picasso, Ludology, Rules