These Never-Before-Seen Ceramics Show How Picasso Mastered New Art Forms
The artist’s ceramic pieces combined practicality with aesthetics. Now, seven of his hand-painted dishes are heading to the auction block
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Seven never-before-seen ceramic dishes created and painted by Pablo Picasso are coming to auction this week. Adorned with distinctive depictions of fish, pigeons, a bearded man, a goat and more, the humble dishes are reminders of the artist’s peerless ability to master new art forms, even in later periods of his career.
The selection on sale at Piguet, an auction house in Geneva, Switzerland, comes from a private collection that was bequeathed to a close friend of Picasso following his death in 1973. That unnamed friend kept the dishes in his private collection until his own death, and his heirs decided to sell the ceramics in seven separate lots.
Picasso created all seven pieces at the Madoura Pottery Workshop in Vallauris, a seaside town in southern France. Between 1947 and 1971, Picasso created more than 630 pieces at the workshop with the guidance of its founders, Georges and Suzanne Ramié, including masterpieces like Grand Vase Aux Femmes Voilées, a vase that sold for more than $800,000 at auction this spring.
The pieces going on sale this week come with more modest estimates. The two most expensive—Pigeon (1949) and Brooding Pigeon (1947)—are each expected to fetch roughly $36,000 to $61,000. The least expensive—Bull (1957) and Bird (1963)—could each go for as little as $18,000.
“If you step back from Picasso’s work and his drawings, which are becoming practically unaffordable today, you have here original works by Picasso that command a reasonable estimate,” Bernard Piguet, director of the auction house, tells Agence France-Presse (AFP).
Pricey or not, all seven pieces are markedly the works of Picasso, capturing an established artist as he translated his skills to a new medium. Three Fish (circa 1952) is a long plate with a gentle rim that depicts a blue fish, an orange fish and a red fish in the deceptively simple style that Picasso often toyed with. Goat, from around two years earlier, is a more realistic depiction of a white goat in profile. It bears a stamp on the back noting that it’s an “Original Picasso print.”
By the time Picasso took up ceramics in 1947, he was “already an internationally renowned artist,” Adeline Bisch Balerna, head of paintings and sculptures at Piguet, tells AFP. “He had already opened up a huge number of avenues for all artists; the great, well-known works had been created, and he was seeking new means of expression for his art.”
Ceramics represented a different kind of craft for the artist, one that combined practicality with aesthetics. He wanted these works to be used as real table settings. As he once explained to the French culture minister and novelist André Malraux, “I made plates, you can eat on them.”
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Ceramics have long held both purposes simultaneously, from ancient times to the modern era. Picasso was captivated by the possibilities of the medium.
“Ceramics wasn’t only a field of limitless exploration that opened up each time, but a field where Picasso saw himself as an apprentice, where he was forced to forget everything that he knew,” Picasso’s friend and biographer Pierre Daix wrote, according to Tribune de Genève’s Florence Millioud.
With Head of a Bearded Man (1956), Picasso seemed to revel in the materiality of the ceramics, painting scraggles of black hair and white and orange pastel highlights on a brick platter, all covered in engobe. Just as he had done in his blue and rose periods and in his innovations in Cubism, Picasso was opening the door for new artists to explore timeless images and ancient methods anew.
“Ceramics weren’t the same after Picasso. He transformed the codes,” Josephine Matamoros, an art historian who curated a 2014 exhibition of Picasso’s ceramics at the French National Ceramics Museum in Sèvres, says in a documentary. “Ceramics were still ceramics but they were just as much painting, sculptures, engravings—and we find all of that in each piece, which is exceptional.”
