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 González’s 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 Picasso’s 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 might expect smoothly inflected volumes. Yet all of these ferocious articulations appear to emanate from a solid core, as though the urgently worked head were fraying where mass meets air. The dully reflective surface of the bronze accentuates this double reading, heightening material presence by emphasizing evidence of the artist’s touch and dematerializing the sculpture through the play of light.

Recently, the National Gallery, Washington, D.C. acquired a bronze cast of Head of a Woman (Fernande)—a fine example, almost certainly made for Picasso’s legendary dealer, Vollard, before 1932. This past fall, to celebrate, the museum presented “Picasso: The