In 1971 the 90-year-old Pablo Picasso described a catalogue of his sculpture as the chronicle of "an unknown civilisation". The mystery was mostly of his own making. Trained as a painter, he turned to sculpture from an inner compulsion, using the medium to explore the deeper reaches of his psyche, but keeping the results largely hidden from public view. These works were usually improvisa-tional, radically experimental and endowed by their creator with an almost fetishistic power. Hence his refusal to lend any of his sculptures to "Picasso: a 75th Anniversary Exhibition" that the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New Yorkput on in 1957. He hated to part, even temporarily, with these totems of his own devising. As recently as 2000, a retrospective at the Centre Pompidou in Paris still maintained that Picasso's sculptures were the "best kept secret of the 20th century."
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