CONTEMPORARY FLORAL PRINTS

Pablo Picasso.
Dying Bull.

"Picasso is the most documented artist of our time," commented William S. Lieberman, the Jacques and Natasha Gelman Chairman of the Metropolitan's Department of 20th Century Art. "Surprisingly, however, his prolific production as a sculptor and painter in clay has not been significantly surveyed in exhibition or publication. This presentation brilliantly demonstrates how Picasso vitalized the medium with characteristic enthusiasm and originality."
Showing the different ways in which Picasso worked in clay, pieces in the exhibition range from pre-existing forms or found objects to inventive shapes created by local potters according to Picasso's designs and pieces modeled by the artist himself. Most works come from private collections, from the Picasso museums in Paris, Antibes, and Barcelona, and from the Museum Ludwig in Cologne and the Museo de Ceramica in Barcelona.
Picasso began to work in the ceramic medium in 1946 after visiting the Madoura pottery workshop in Vallauris, where the mineral-rich soil of this region of southern France had supported a ceramics industry since Roman times.
He had first experimented with clay in 1905, when he modeled a small group of heads, some of which were later cast in bronze. Vase with Bathers, of 1929, included in the exhibition, is an early effort that is remarkable for the ways in which the relationship of imagery and technique to the pottery form anticipate Picasso's approach to his later ceramics.
In the earliest stage of his work in ceramics, he focused on mastering the craft aspect of decorating fired clay objects, working on more than a thousand pieces at the Madoura pottery workshop in Vallauris during the first year alone. Quickly acquiring knowledge of the technical aspects of working with clay, he then set about reinventing them to suit his fertile imagination; the unorthodox manners in which he mixed glazes, slips, and oxides transformed the pieces in the kiln and became part of the creative process.
Early in his work at the Madoura workshop Picasso also took standard, press-molded plates before they were dry and, in a number of instances, gouged or incised the surfaces with still lifes, trompe l'oeil arrangements of food, or other objects, to create versions of the popular Spanish platos de engano ('plates to fool the eye'). Other times, he used the surface of the plates as settings for mythological scenes involving fauns, goats, centaurs, and other Picassoesque creatures.
Picasso soon began to draw sketches of three-dimensional objects made up of familiar pottery forms such as vases, jugs, and bowls. These pieces were thrown by Jules Agard — a local potter who was a friend of Madoura owners Georges and Suzanne Ramie — according to specification and then were assembled and decorated by Picasso. Ordinary thrown vessels were thus metamorphosed into purely sculptural shapes, rearrangements of traditional ceramic elements that robbed them of their original functions and turned them into art.
Among the most remarkable pots that the artist himself designed are the zoomorphic shapes he first conceived in the fall of 1947. By reassembling component parts of standard ceramic shapes Picasso created the bulls, goats, birds of his imagination, such as Bird of 1947-48. He continued to develop ideas along this theme by converting existing Madoura shapes into animal forms principally by means of painting. Man Riding a Horse (1950-51) and the related Mounted Cavalier (1950-51) make use of his own earlier bird form, but the neck and the handles of the vessel are turned into a rider whose horse is painted on the belly of the pot.
On other occasions Picasso simply altered traditional forms by hand, as in his tanagras, which usually were made by reshaping thrown bottles or vases and were so called because of their reference to Hellenistic terracotta figurines.
Picasso's enthusiasm for the bullfight was rekindled on a return visit to the Mediterranean, and the imagery of the corridas appears throughout Picasso's work in clay, with heads of matadors, picadors, and bulls often depicted on plates or bowls. In 1951, he turned a series of oval platters from Madoura's stock pattern into lively, colorful impressions of the bullfight, with the border full of spectators and the flat part of the dish becoming the sandy arena where the drama of the actual fight takes place. Included in this exhibition are three dazzling bowls from the 29-bowl Ceret series — named for a village in the foothills of the Pyrenees revisited by Picasso in 1953 — that show various scenes of the bullfight, and two platters created in 1957 that, like aquatints, were done simply in black on white.
Picasso also often transformed vases into still-lifes, creating a three-dimensional representation of the object painted on the vessel's surface. In Still Life with Yellow Tulips (1953), painted flowers and leaves occupy the top part of a jug, while the lower part is painted

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