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11 One-off Pieces

Although Picasso created his first terracotta works in Montmartre in 1906, in the studio of his compatriot Paco Durrio, who taught him about firing clay, it was in Vallauris, where he settled in 1948, that he embarked on an intense period of producing ceramics. The thousands of original works that emerged up to 1954 from the Madoura workshop, reflect the skill, curiosity, and inventiveness of a man who relished crafting, modelling, incising, and painting clay in its multiple aspects. In addition to plates, dishes, pitchers, ases, and lamps, shards, bricks, tiles, ★pignates★ (cooking pots), and ★gazelles★ (clay pipes used to separate racks in the kiln) were decorated with depictions of musical fauns, dancers, animals, and bullfighting scenes that evoked the painter’s new environment. These rich years of mentoring place Picasso’s practice as a ceramicist at the heart of artistic and social considerations.