Ben Plumbly on Picasso

Picasso

Featured in Minimal Opulence: The Gary Langsford and Vicki Vuleta Collection

An unbridled joy in experimentation and creativity were always central to Pablo Picasso’s interests as an artist. As one of the most significant artists in history, Picasso created many of the 20th Century’s most enduring and poignant images. Throughout the long course of his career he created more than 20,000 paintings, drawings, sculptures and ceramics, as well as numerous costume and theatre designs.

In 1946, while holidaying in the south of France, Picasso first discovered the artistic potential of ceramics whilst visiting the Madoura pottery studios in Vallauris. Over the following two decades he would experiment widely with clay, producing a diverse range of objects including vases, plates, platters, ewers and sculpture. Fascinated by the materiality of the medium he would carve and incise into the clay as well as exploring the effects of different glazes and paints in depth. His sustained investigation into the ceramics medium, eventually led to an interest into the opulence of the gold and silver dishes of the Renaissance period and the ‘repoussé’ technique of hammering a motif into low relief from the underside of the silver.

Visage Géométriques aux Traits was produced in 1956, just four years after he met Jacqueline Roque, the artist’s great muse and second wife. The playful and inventive design of his silver plates reflects the great happiness and stability he felt at this time, a marked shift after the dark and uncertain years of the war.

Despite his prolificacy, the artist produced just twenty- four designs in silver. Each is marked by a joy and whimsical nature, inspired by everything from owls and goats, Greek mythology and bull fighting, and, of course, his much loved wife, Jacqueline. The public remained largely unaware of the existence of Picasso’s silver work until the ground-breaking solo exhibition, ‘Picasso – 19 plats en argent par François et Pierre Hugo’ at London’s Lever Galleries and Paris’s Galerie Matignon in 1977. A complete set of the twenty four plates was sold at Sotheby’s in October 2021 for 1.46 million pounds.

Ben Plumbly