Chicago Picasso

When the fifty foot sculpture in the plaza ahead was unveiled in nineteen sixty seven, nobody in the crowd actually knew what they were looking at, and Pablo Picasso had not told anyone. People guessed it was a bird. Others thought it looked like an aardvark, or a baboon, or the jackal headed Egyptian god Anubis. The guessing went on for years. Picasso eventually confirmed that the entire abstract, angular face was modeled on his own Afghan hound, a dog named Kabul, whose long elegant nose and graceful proportions he said he simply loved watching move.

The sculpture carries no title at all, officially just called Untitled, though everyone in the city has only ever called it the Picasso, full stop. Built from the same weathering steel used in bridges and left to rust into a uniform brown that never needs painting or sealing, it was controversial from the moment the tarp came off in front of a crowd of city officials and reporters, with critics and ordinary Chicagoans alike loudly wondering why their new city landmark looked nothing like a person or an animal anyone recognized. The city had offered Picasso a hundred thousand dollars for the work. He turned the money down flatly and gave the sculpture to Chicago outright as an outright gift, with no fee and no royalty attached, making it one of the first truly monumental pieces of public abstract art placed in the middle of any American city, arriving years before anything remotely like it stood in New York or Los Angeles.