Kathy Forer on mon 5 mar 07
> Apart from being a collagist of forms, I'm certain Picasso worked
> clay himself, but I'll have to do some research for that.
Helen and Marta gave some terrific links to Picasso ceramics on the
web. Though there actually aren't that many pictures online when it
comes down to it. Certainly nothing like looking through the William
Rubin 1980 MoMA Retrospective catalog. Or the Metropolitan Museum
catalog of Picasso Ceramics (which I don't have here). Or any book
actually. Much as the Internet has a wealth of information, a bound
book is often a far better medium for communicating an overview.
Even something as thorough as the Catalogue Raisonne at Texas A&M
University Year=1950&CurrentItem=1&ViewStyle=gallery> gives detail at the
expense of white space, text and juxtaposition. The web format is
just too restrictive unless used for that purpose from creative
inception, i.e. something like the long-gone previous incarnation of
jodi.org, but that's way off-subject.
I was rushing off when I wrote earlier. Of course Picasso mucked with
clay! But I hadn't known that he sat at a wheel. That makes me smile,
thinking of him watching and being as one with the wheel as it turn
round and round again, stubbing his handsome short toes on the stone
kick wheel.
Most of Picasso's early bronze sculptures started with clay, Woman
Combing Her Hair, Head of a Woman, Bather, Man with Sheep. Working in
his small Vallauris near Madoura, he made more clay, Owl, Plate with
Fish, Lady in Mantilla, Priapus, etc. etc. Madoura's ability to turn
out clay as if they were prints seemed to free him to use forms more
modally, She-Goat, Baboon, Girl Jumping Rope and many more.
Though there had been assemblage of dimensional sculpture --
including Jose de Creeft's prescient 1925 Le Picador, made of stove
pipe and scrap metal -- before the late 40s and early 50s when
Picasso was active at Vallauris, his use of ceramics in assemblage
was probably new. It was what earned those who followed in his
footsteps the opprobrium "Picassoettes" from Bernard Leach in
reference to a 1958 exhibit at Goldsmith's College, University of
London, called 'From Pre-history to Picasso' where William Newland,
Margaret Hine, and Nicholas Vergette, three members of the Bayswater
workshop, "were all liberated by Picasso into exploring a
Mediterranean rather than an oriental tradition."
Perhaps most resonant, a quote from Picasso's lifelong friend [Jaime
Sabartes] who "wrote of the artist's amazement in 1946 at the
technical vocabulary he was learning in this very studio -- 'flamme
libre . . . email cuit . . . couvettes sur silicate . . .
sulfura . . . caissons souffles . . . fondants . . . englobes . . .
plein feu' -- and so many other words, all new and full of magical-
poetical overtones."
Translation anyone? the spelling is correct as copied from "Forever
Picasso" by Robert Otero, Abrams. Englobes? Email cuit -- qu'est-ce
que c'est ca?
Kathy Forer
raw email
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