Picasso’s ceramics at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art

After dedicating several exhibitions to Picasso’s works over the years, providing a window on special periods or themes in his oeuvre, this year the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebæk, just outside Copenhagen, hosts a major exhibition of the artist’s lesser-known pottery artworks. Appropriately titled “Picasso: Ceramics”, the show has been organized in collaboration with the Musée national Picasso-Paris and features more than ​160 of the artist’s original, playful creations, focusing primarily on ceramic artworks from the period 1947-1964. Picasso approached ceramic work in the summer of 1946, at the age of sixty-six years old. Excited at the prospect of exploring the technical potential of the various ceramic materials, oxides, and glazes, he started acquiring the traditional techniques under the tutelage of Suzanne and Georges Ramié and the craftspeople at their Madoura studio in Vallauris, in the South of France. 

Despite his great age, the prolific painter would go on to make some four thousand clay pieces over the next two and a half decades, including plates painted with bullfight motifs or embellished with three-dimensional ceramic food and cutlery, anthropomorphic jugs and vases put together as female figures, and a collection of owls, doves, goats, and other creatures.