Picasso en Vallauris
Picasso Ceramics
“After World War II my father explored the full potential of working in pottery, including the different techniques of painting with slips and glazes. Over a period of some twenty years, he modeled, shaped, designed, decorated, engraved and carved over 3,500 fired clay objects. The great invention and originality of this large body of work has established his importance in the development of 20th-century art pottery” — Claude Picasso
Between 1946 and 1973 in his workshop at Madoura, Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) created an extraordinary and prolific collection of original ceramic works. As imaginative as they are beguiling, in each of these creations, one can see multiple facets of the artist’s personality: humour, inventiveness, fearlessness, and his unsurpassed ability to capture the essential form and features of a subject through minimal means, or “physiognomic abbreviation,” as it has sometimes been described. In 1946 Picasso visited the small coastal town of Vallauris (with his then mistress Françoise Gilot, mother of Claude and Paloma), which had been known for the manufacture of pottery since the Gallo-Roman times. The artist had previously expressed an interest in ceramics, and admired the work of Francisco “Paco” Durrio (1868-1940), the acclaimed sculptor from Bilbao, Spain, and post-Impressionist Paul Gauguin (1848-1903), both of whom produced pivotal works in ceramics in the 1880s and 1890s. Under their influence Picasso produced sketches for vases and produced his first ceramic works in 1906. According to Sir John Richardson, in his Life of Picasso, vol. 1 (1991): “Then as now Gauguin’s ceramics were underrated; Durrio was virtually alone in recognizing their importance and exploring similar techniques … The extent to which Durrio’s techniques helped Picasso revolutionize the craft of ceramics in Vallauris 40 years later has yet to be taken into account.”
Picasso became quickly enamoured with the ceramics being produced by L'atelier Madoura and asked to be introduced to Georges and Suzanne Ramié, the owners of the pottery studio. Suzanne Ramié had played a pivotal role in the revival of traditional pottery from the South of France, and made a name for herself with innovative designs based on her reinterpretations of their traditional forms and glazes. The Ramié’s invited Picasso to their Madoura Pottery workshop, where they introduced him to various techniques and Picasso created three small sculptures in clay (a faun’s head and two bulls) which he left to dry and bake. According to Georges Ramié, when he and his wife returned to see the works and continue their visit, Picasso had vanished without a trace. Twelve months later, the artist returned, unexpectedly and completely unannounced, to see how the pieces had turned out. He was shown the sculptures, and delighted, he immediately asked when he could “get back to work.” The Ramié’s agreed to set aside an area of the workshop where he would begin producing his own ceramics, ushering in one of the most prolific periods of his career; in just over two decades, Picasso would create over 3,500 works in clay. It is of note that after his death, every object in his estate was photographed, other than his ceramics, of which there were many; due to the second-class status traditionally accorded to the art of pottery they were for a long time a source of derision and embarrassment for much of the art world.
Visage Aux Nex Noir, terre de faïence pitcher (1969) by Pablo Picasso ©Succession Picasso/DACS
Chouette, terre de faïence vase (1969) by Pablo Picasso ©Succession Picasso/DACS
Picasso began producing ceramics during the post-war years, when modernists like Jean Prouvé (1901-1984), Pierre Jeanneret (1896-1967) and Charlotte Perriand (1902-1999) were championing the idea that art should be enjoyed as part of daily life. “Living means moving forward” Perriand said. “You have to give voice to your era”. One of the reasons Picasso turned to ceramics was the notion that in a time of austerity, where already, his paintings and sculptures were commanding large sums, his pottery and ceramics could potentially be owned by everyday people — thus representing a more democratic way to serve each end of the market. Also, whilst one might not immediately think of Picasso as an exponent of the modernist notion of “form follows function”, in a clear echo of the functionalist trend that reigned through much of the 20th century, the artist liked the idea of his ceramic works being both aesthetically pleasing and, at the same time, utilitarian in nature. As such, he created some works in editions of 500 or more, and made them available for purchase directly from the Madoura workshop. In fact, the plates, pitchers, and bowls he designed were used in his own home, and frequently gifted to friends and family members.
“Picasso entered the workshop like a humble villager. Subsequently he penetrated our daily life, our family life and our friendship. However, all this feeling grew gently, without complications, as if this unforeseeable, warm and so precious reality was completely natural; all aspects of his presence became as essential, familiar and necessary as a sweet, daily habit” — Georges Ramié
Despite these lofty and noble ambitions, above all, Picasso was eager to test the creative potential of what was, essentially, a new medium for the artist to play with. “My father never considered himself a potter,” said Claude Picasso. “But approached the medium of clay as he would any other in order to find out what the materials and techniques of the potter’s studio could offer him and what he could discover by probing their inherent qualities or possibilities.” Georges Ramié expressed similar sentiments about Picasso’s fierce curiosity, “Whenever Picasso decides to tackle new materials, in order to satisfy his insatiable desire to discover the particular features of each medium, he feels that he is liberated from any kind of gravity that might impede his flight. He seems to develop a new acuteness in his pursuit of hazardous encounters with noxious interferences that tease him in the shadows. And this immediately fills him with an incredible ingenuity of a practical order.” As Claude points out, Picasso was not a trained potter, but he would thoroughly embrace the medium, making with the characteristic zeal he had for painting, drawing and printmaking, and learning the exacting artistry of ceramics often by trial and error, resulting in a prodigious creative output, and characteristically pushing through pre-existing boundaries.
Corrida Vert, terre de faïence dish (1949) by Pablo Picasso ©Succession Picasso/DACS
Picasso set up a sculpture studio in an old perfume factory close to Madoura, where he would sketch out ideas for wittily decorated plates, casseroles, pitchers, masks and glazed-tile paintings. When he arrived at the pottery, he would immediately immerse himself in the realities of bringing his designs to fruition. The ceramic processes and techniques were difficult to control, and the artist would often encounter structural problems, such as how best to incorporate three dimensional elements into the flat surface of his plates. The various glazes and oxides Picasso used, which often, were applied with abandon to the surface of his pottery, would initially appear dull, almost transparent, only to have their colours vividly, sometimes unpredictably, come to life in the heat of the Madoura kilns. It was only through experience that Picasso could anticipate how such colours would appear, thus presenting him with an interesting new challenge.
Many of the same themes and motifs he explored on canvas and paper can be seen recurring in Picasso’s ceramics, often playfully incorporating the three-dimensional nature of the medium into the design. For example, Picasso’s lifelong engagement with the iconography of bullfighting; bulls, matadors, banderilleros, and the bull-ring are rendered with strong contrast and lyrical figurative elements. As a child in Spain, Picasso regularly attended bullfights with his father, and the experience had a lasting effect on him. Fascinated by the ritual performance enacted within the arena, and perhaps nostalgic for his childhood, he enjoyed attending bullfights again in the South of France. On one occasions while Picasso and his biographer John Richardson were watching the moment old horses were dragged out for the bulls (a cruel sacrifice that was often a terrible, bloody sight), Picasso remarked: “Those horses, they’re the women in my life.” The artist often evokes the shape of the bullfighting arena in his longer, elliptical plates, in the centre of which Picasso places the bull and a fallen picador, and so the viewer takes on the role of an overhead spectator. Animals like bulls are common in Picasso’s clay works and as Georges Ramié noted, the artist excelled at bringing to life “anthropomorphic or zoomorphic forms.”
In later years Picasso became increasingly interested in classical imagery, and thus a chance encounter with an injured owl in Antibes, an animal associated with wisdom and a symbol of the Greek goddess Athena, would send ripples through his visual language. In her autobiography, Gilot famously records that: “one of his claws had been injured. We bandaged it and it gradually healed. We bought a cage for him and when we returned to Paris we brought him back with us and put him in the kitchen … He smelled awful and ate nothing but mice.” The owl became a frequent subject of his ceramic vases and pitchers, as seen in his Gros oiseau visage noir (1951) and Chouette (1969). In addition, we see a wide selection of birds, such as pigeons, doves, and birds of prey. For example, various vases are sculpted to resemble bird faces, and utilitarian objects such as water pitchers are transfigured; the entire form metamorphosing into the face and body of a bird. Picasso’s playfulness shines through on these avian works, in particular, with his more sculpted designs bringing a wealth of personality to his pitchers and vases. The goat, another animal subject from antiquity, was also a popular motif, along with fauns and satyrs. The mythical Minotaur, half-man, half-bull, is another of the artist’s repeated motifs. Picasso once said, “If all the ways I have been along were marked on a map and joined up with a line, it might represent a Minotaur.”
Visage Barbu, terre de faïence plate (1958) by Pablo Picasso ©Succession Picasso/DACS
The face of a feminine muse was one of Picasso’s most popular subjects in all artistic media and can be seen on a variety of ceramics, including pitchers, plates, bowls and tiles. In some of the tiles, he belied the three-dimensionality of the medium, painting the flattened image of a face head on, thus giving the impression of a portrait on canvas or paper. It was at Madoura in 1953 that Picasso met Jacqueline Roque, a saleswoman working in the Ramié’s workshop. Though 44 years his junior, the couple would marry in Vallauris in 1961 and remained together until Picasso’s death in 1973. She was the inspiration behind several hundred works by the artist; the designs on his plate Jacqueline au Chevalet (“Jacqueline at the Easel”) (1956) capture Roque standing in the artist’s workplace, showing how integral Picasso regarded her to his work at the time.
Captivated by her doe-eyes, classical profile and long elegant neck, Picasso created more works of art based on Roque than any of his other lovers; she was his principal subject during the last two decades of his life, a period referred to by Richardson as “L’Epoque Jacqueline”. Despite his obvious devotion to Roque, his second wife and muse, she was not the only one Picasso would depict in clay: for he would immortalize his dachshund, Lump, in a portrait painted on a plate, the day the dog was given to him by his friend, the veteran photojournalist David Douglas Duncan (1916-2018). (Later, in a suite of forty-five paintings reinterpreting Velasquez’s masterpiece Las Meninas (1656), Picasso replaced the impassive hound in the foreground with jaunty renderings of Lump.)
According to Claude Picasso, his father’s involvement with his ceramics was “so profound and personal… that, until recently, it went unrecognized as a significant part of his oeuvre.” Today, collectors appreciate the consequence of this phase in Picasso’s career, which is reflective of the artist’s mandate to place his own timeless stamp on an art form that has existed since the beginnings of human history. One of the twentieth century’s most influential artists, Picasso is responsible for some of the most enduring and poignant images in artistic practice. In stark contrast, his ceramics afforded him the opportunity to experiment, and as a result, they’re often fun, playful, light-hearted, almost whimsical in nature — be that a pitcher in the shape of a fish, decorated with a huge grin and cartoonish eyes, or a vase transformed into an owl with a mischievous expression. These works were made during the post-war years, which it has been noted were a happier and more optimistic time in the artist’s life. Georges Bloch stated of Picasso's ceramic works, “…in approach, material and technique is as novel as it is interesting. Pottery, gleaming white discs with relief designs, monochrome or brightly coloured ovals, dishes and even jugs and vases here serve as bearers of compositions whose themes express the joyous, life-loving side of Picasso's work.”