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Picasso in the House
One local art collector comes home to a dazzling collection of 18 ceramic pieces by Picasso.
On one wall, eight plates feature eight one-of-a-kind faces painted effortlessly by the man many consider to be the most important artist of the last century.
Picasso created ceramics in the Madura pottery workshop in Vallauris, France, beginning in 1947, when he was already 66. The collector’s pieces all originated there.
“Madura [pottery workshop] would make pitchers, plates and cups produced in fairly large quantities,” the collector explains. “They were identical blank pieces. While the clay was still soft, Picasso would play with the pieces and change them— one pitcher into a woman, one into an owl. Everything he touched was completely different from everything else he did. He was like Mozart in a sense, who never wrote the same phrase twice. This is unimaginable by any other artist.”
In 1963, he bought a Picasso jug at the Picasso store in New York for only 75 dollars. “They are worth more now, not a fortune,” he says. “I don’t care what they’re worth. They are fantastic pieces, and I’m never going to get rid of them.”
He purchased the jug as a gift for his parents’ 25th wedding anniversary. “It’s a long vase that flares at the top, with a long handle along the back,” he says. “The top is pinched so you can pour; the beauty of it is that the spout is the nose of the girl and the handle is her ponytail. The lower part is the skirt. It’s tremendously imaginative.”
He also adores his hoot owl jug. “Picasso must have stuck a piece of clay onto the jug,” he says. “He turned it into an owl with a very funny face. Almost everything he did was representational.”
Another stunning ceramic Picasso in the collection is a jug depicting an entire riveting scene. “Picasso turned that into a reverse bull ring,” the collector explains “If you turn it around, you see an entire Spanish bullring with bullfighters and all.”
This collector has a wide range of art, from antiquities to modern and contemporary art, some inherited, some collected. “My father, who was an artist, knew Alexander Calder and painted his portrait once,” he adds. “He bought mobiles from Calder for a couple hundreds bucks apiece.”