Monumental, powerful, mysterious, a statue sits on this scruffy traffic island between two ordinary apartment buildings on a cold Spring day in April.
It broods silently above the lone man who passes it. It radiates a somber personality in the air around it so strong that everything around it, the buildings, the trees, the man himself, become anonymous beside it.
There’s no excuse for it. It has no practical purpose. It doesn’t represent anyone in particular, or point to any historic event or any noble cause. It only proclaims is its own existence and nothing else. And no one who sees it, even once, will forget it.
The statue is an original work by Pablo Picasso, located in a seldom visited area of New York City. It was commissioned by the people who built the buildings behind it, sometime in the late 1960’s. One day, after those buildings were finished, it mysteriously appeared there without fanfare or ceremony, and remains there to this day.
I was living in New York at that time, and I saw the buildings going up. They didn’t seem like anything special, just more cold concrete apartments, not ugly, but not particularly attractive either. I can’t remember what was there before. The whole area was just someplace on my way to somewhere else. But one winter afternoon I happened by and saw the statue.
It changed the buildings, it changed the whole feeling of the neighborhood, it changed me. Ever since, as long as I lived in New York, I would go out of my way to pass it. And even now, whenever I visit the city, I take time to look at it again, as I did last April, when I took this picture.
It’s not on the normal tourist maps; even many New Yorker’s don’t know it’s there. It was probably commissioned by the builders for “prestige”- Picasso was the Big Name. Maybe they didn’t know what they would get from him, and didn’t much care.
What they got was a monumental work of art on the level of Michelangelo Praxiteles, or Rodin. It’s not a cheerful work. It doesn’t brighten your day to look at it. It does something else, as Emily Dickinson said of ” A certain slant of light”:
Heavenly hurt it gives us
We can find no scar
But internal difference
Where the meanings are
