Pablo Picasso (Spanish 1881-1973)

Pablo Picasso (Spanish 1881-1973)
Visage et hibou [Ramié 407]
1958
white earthenware ceramic turned vase, decorated with englobes and knife engraving with partial glaze
numbered 140/200 and inscribed Edition Picasso, Madoura with incision to underside
with Madoura pressed mark to underside
25cm high
ARR

Provenance: Christies, London, Picasso Ceramics, Lot 5, 18 June 2013, where purchased by the present owner.
Literature: Alain Ramié 407
Note: In 1946, during a visit to a friend’s home in Golfe-Juan, Pablo Picasso and his companion, Louis Fort, attended the annual potters’ exhibition in nearby Vallauris. There, Picasso was captivated by the work of the Madoura pottery studio and introduced to its founders, Suzanne and Georges Ramié. A year later, he returned to Vallauris and began an extraordinarily prolific collaboration with the Ramiés. Between 1947 and 1971, Picasso produced thousands of ceramic pieces, drawn to the medium’s tactile immediacy and its potential for reproducibility an aspect that mirrored his enduring fascination with printmaking.

Visage et Hibou is a particularly evocative work, as both abstracted faces and owls became recurring motifs within Picasso’s visual lexicon. The artist’s interest in owls began in 1946, when he encountered an injured owl within the Musée d’Antibes, which at the time served as his studio. Together with his muse Françoise Gilot and the photographer Michel Sima, Picasso discovered that the bird had a wounded claw. The trio cared for the owl, bandaging its injury, purchasing a cage, feeding it dead mice, and eventually bringing it to Paris to complete it's recovery. Gilot later recounted Picasso’s fiery relationship with the animal, describing how he would scold the owl after it bit his fingers, perhaps an ironic similarity between the wild bird and Picasso's own nature.

Owls, often symbolic of wisdom, have long been associated with the Greek goddess Athena. In channelling this mythic creature through the medium of pottery, Picasso subtly alludes to archaic Greek ceramics- particularly the vases and amphorae that so profoundly inspired him. His fascination with classical Greek antiquity significantly shaped his decision to work in ceramics, allowing him to merge modernist abstraction with the aesthetic traditions of the ancient world.

In Visage et Hibou, the viewer encounters a delicately perched owl rendered with wide, gentle eyes and to the reverse a softly abstracted human face. Created twelve years after the artist’s initial and deeply personal encounter with the owl in Antibes, the piece attests to Picasso’s enduring engagement with the symbolic and expressive potential of this enigmatic bird.