10/10/2025 General, Prints & Multiples
NEW YORK, NY -- Ceramics by Pablo Picasso provide a wonderful opportunity for collectors to purchase works of art by one of the most innovative, prolific and celebrated artists of the 20th century – for a fraction of the price of his paintings. Indeed, Picasso welcomed the idea of making multiples from his unique ceramics, generally in editions of 50 to 500, pleased that they would be affordable to a wide audience.
While residing in the south of France in 1946 Picasso attended the first annual pottery exhibition in Vallauris. Though the village had a long history of pottery making dating back to Roman times, the craft there had been in decline. One of the exhibitors was the Madoura works owned by Georges and Suzanne Ramie. In 1936 they had purchased a complex of old buildings and a wood-fired kiln from a closed facility in Vallauris, where they produced plates and art pottery. Picasso became entranced by the Ramies’ pottery at the show, prompting a trip to their studio.
On his first visit to Madoura, he made three small objects: two bulls and the head of a faun. This experience made a strong impression on the artist, and he returned the following year with numerous drawings illustrating ideas he wanted to realize in ceramic form. The Ramies were delighted to welcome Picasso back and provided him with an area in which to work. Though the artist had first worked in clay forty years earlier, it was not until he came to Madoura that the medium truly captured his imagination. Over the next 24 years, he created approximately 3,500 unique ceramic objects and authorized the Ramies to produce more than 633 numbered editions of his work.
Picasso embraced pottery-making with the same zeal he had for painting, drawing and printmaking, resulting in a prodigious creative output, characteristically pushing through preexisting boundaries. Many of the same themes he explored on canvas and paper he experimented with in clay, often playfully incorporating the three-dimensional nature of the medium into the design. For example, utilitarian pieces such as pitchers depicting faces are transformed into sculptural objects, the entire body of the pitcher metamorphosing into the face, with the handle becoming part of the hair (lot 99).
The face was one of Picasso’s most popular subjects in all artistic media, as illustrated by the lithograph, Tete de Jeune Femme (lot 70); and a variety of ceramics, including vases, pitchers, plates and bowls (lots 79, 92, 94, 99-107). In some of the plaques, such as the monumental Grande Tete de Femme au Chapeau Orne, and Visage (lots 105, 107), he belied the three-dimensionality of the medium, painting a flattened image of a face head on, on a square or rectangular surface, suggesting a portrait on canvas or paper, and these works are often framed as such. Picasso explored this interplay earlier with Bouquet a la Pomme (lot 89), in which he depicts a traditional painting subject, the still life, on a dish. He created the image as he would an etching or drypoint, using a tool to carve the lines, but instead of an etching needle on metal, he used unconventional items such as a kitchen knife to cut into a plaster mold, which was taken from an existing piece of pottery. Impressions could thus be taken from the plaster matrix to create editions, referred to as Empreintes originales, and bearing the Empreinte Originale de Picasso Madoura pottery stamp.
Another favorite subject of the artist is the bullfight. As a child in Spain, Picasso regularly attended bullfights with his father, and the experience had a lasting effect. Fascinated with the ritual of valor and danger, and perhaps nostalgic for his childhood, he enjoyed attending bullfights again in the South of France. His works frequently depict images of bulls and picadors, such as the powerful color linocut Les Banderilles (lot 71) and numerous ceramic pieces--plates (lots 80, 95), bowls (lot 83) and vases (lot 97)--whose round forms evoke the ring of the arena.
In later years Picasso became increasingly interested in classical imagery, and thus the adoption in the 1940s of an injured owl, an animal associated with wisdom and a symbol of the Greek goddess Athena, stimulated his interest. The owl became a frequent subject of his ceramic vases and pitchers, such as Chouetton (lot 75). The goat, another animal subject from antiquity, was also a popular motif, wonderfully represented in his Tete de Chevre de Profil plates (lots 73 and 76).
Created by Picasso late in his career, these extraordinary ceramic objects provide us with yet another glimpse into the artistic vision of one of the greatest artists of the 20th century.
Auction Thursday, October 23, 2025 at 11am
Exhibition October 18 - 20
Lots 72 – 107