The Picasso in the grass

This concrete sculpture on the grass is a Picasso, and there is no fence around it. Figure Découpée is its name, a cut-out figure, and everyone sees something else in it. A fish, a bull, a bird.

A few steps to the side changes it completely, because it is cut from a single plane and shows something different from every angle.

It arrived in 1965, when the park turned a hundred and held an exhibition of modern sculpture. Picasso supplied the design and the Norwegian Carl Nesjar carried it out in concrete, a technique he had made his own and used for Picasso more than once. The exhibition passed, the sculpture stayed.

What has happened to it since would be unthinkable in a museum. Children climb on it, bicycles lean against it, and in a kickabout it serves as a goalpost. That is what a park does with art: it turns into furniture.

Head back north and take the path along the far bank of the water, until you are walking among old trees whose roots rise above the ground.