Envisioned to reach a height of 100 feet, the piece, titled “Bust of a Woman,” was approved to tower over the campus of the University of South Florida (USF), with its single cutout eye gazing blankly at its surroundings. The project — which also involved construction of a new art center — had an estimated cost of $10 million, however, and university officials ended up killing it due to lack of funding. Picasso passed away in 1973, and his angular, hard-edged figure never came to fruition. — hyperallergic.com
Originally designed for a museum in Sweden, Picasso's "Bust of a Woman" was donated to USF in 1971 and would have been the tallest concrete sculpture in the world at that time.
He agreed to donate the project, which would have been located next to Paul Rudolph's brutalist building on campus. Currently, researchers at the school’s Center for Virtualization and Applied Spatial Technologies are working to recreate the 100-foot-tall sculpture in virtual reality.
The completed VR program will enable users to digitally walk through the 1970's version of USF's campus and experience Picasso's monumental sculpture in context.
3 Comments
Serious Q: cement sculpture, or concrete sculpture?
Hyperallergic uses both - seeing as it was never built it could have been either, however I went with cement as it would have reportedly been the tallest cement sculpture at the time.
I regularly pass by two of his considerably smaller sculptures in the Netherlands, The Fish in the Vondelpark in Amsterdam and Sylvette close to the Architecture Institute in Rotterdam. Would love to see a 30m version like this one in reality.
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