Pablo Picasso

Vase-femme avec un bras-anse, c. 1948

Painted and incised white terracotta

Height: 34.3 cm (13½ in.)

58743

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Executed in Vallauris circa 1948, this work is unique. The authenticity of this work has been confirmed by Claude Picasso. Pablo Picasso began to work seriously with ceramics in 1946...

Executed in Vallauris circa 1948, this work is unique. The authenticity of this work has been confirmed by Claude Picasso. Pablo Picasso began to work seriously with ceramics in 1946 after he visited a Madoura pottery workshop in Vallauris on a trip to the Côte d'Azur. The owners of the workshop, Suzanne and Georges Ramié, invited Picasso to practice in their workshop. While visiting Vallauris, Picasso developed his pottery skills and painted pots and vases thrown by local craftsmen. From the late 1940s through 1970s, Picasso produced an abundant array of ceramics–jugs, bowls, plates, glazed tiles–featuring nudes, clowns, musicians, animals, and mythical creatures like fauns and centaurs. Picasso masterfully fused painting and sculpture in his ceramics, working with the organic shape of the vessel and creating a novel iconography within his oeuvre.

Vase-femme avec un bras-anse, a hand-painted example, depicts a curvaceous female nude with two flanking blue leaves that emphasize her silhouette. Picasso uses the painted body to carve the vase like a sculpture. The handle of the vase is the woman’s arm and the spout her neck – long curly hair falls from the opening of the vessel, morphing the utilitarian structure with the figure’s body. There is a distinct playfulness to Picasso’s ceramic oeuvre. As critic Roberta Smith wrote in a New York Times review of the 1999 Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition of the artists’ ceramic work, “Picasso certainly seems to have enjoyed carving this particular notch in his cane of art conquests. That he did so during one of the happiest periods of his life may partly account for the unclouded lightness of these charming figures, wittily decorated plates, casseroles, pitchers, masks and glazed-tile paintings.”

Provenance

Estate of the artist
Marina Picasso (the artist's granddaughter, acquired from the above; sale: Sotheby's New York, May 18, 2017, lot 53)
Private Collection (acquired at the above sale)

Exhibitions

Cannes, Centre d'art La Malmaison, Le nu en liberté: Collection Marina Picasso, 2013 (mentioned p. 12)

Literature

E. Mallen, ed., Online Picasso Project, Sam Houston State University, 1997-2020, no. 48-464 (accessed October 19, 2020)

Pablo Picasso

Provenance

Exhibitions

Literature

SÉLAVY

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