Studio Potter 2015 Volume 43 Number 2 Summer/Fall 2015 | Page 22

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Studio Potter

In this case, the everlasting art-versus-craft
debate is absolutely an oxymoron; the former
is the result of an intellectual endeavor, whereas
the latter has to do explicitly with the making
of an object. Art deals with the abstract, craft
with the corporeal. With Picasso, the vessel
becomes an abstraction of itself without losing
its specificity. He is erecting three-dimensional
images, not wares. (To be fair, I have to acknowledge that he also decorated a few dishes
for the Madoura Pottery; these were not his
major output and surely not his outstanding
contribution to ceramics).
What differentiates the one-of-a-kind ceramics
of Picasso from his other pottery forms (there
are also edited series) is, on the one hand, the
emphasis on the intellectual content of the
ceramic image and, on the other hand, the
brash creative use of the deconstruction strategy to engender innovative artistic solutions to
image-making in the field.
This inventive, dynamic program has of
course obvious compositional affinities with
Cubism, which also deals essentially with the
deconstruction of volumetric models such as
houses, bottles, and heads, usually resulting
in two-dimensional pictures. To pretend that
Cubism invented the notion of the volumetric
space as the immanent component of an
image, is to ignore many millions of years of
pottery making. Picasso acknowledged and
employed the physicality and potential artistic
resource of the constitutive void within the
form – the existential characteristic of pottery
– as conceptual and formal elements of the
new image he was making, and converted the
negative space, both inside and outside, to a
tangible pictorial entity, as is manifest in his
1952 Cruche Provençale dite bourrache.1 In this

masterpiece from the collection of the Musée
d’Art Moderne de Saint-Étienne Métropole,
the confined exterior negative space (the void
created by the long neck of the pitcher and
its pulled handle) was used to suggest the full
head or skull of the figure; this handle thus
becomes her ponytail, figuratively.
Volumetric Ceramic Oddities
After his initial visit to the Madoura Pottery
in Vallauris in the early summer of 1946,
Picasso returned to the studio the next year
with a sketchbook filled with drawings for
architectonic sculptures composed of purely
volumetric shapes.2 A number of these linear,
two-dimensional diagrams are obviously
studies for his eventual stylized and outlandish
constructions made up of engorged geometric
forms.3 Some studies are raw scribbles, many
probably appropriated prototypes from the
Corpus Vasorum Antiquorum,4 a compendium
of antique Greek ceramic artifacts published
under the auspices of the Union Académique
Internationale. Others are more elaborate and
clear-flowing syntheses resulting from these
diagrammatic, formal explorations. They are
so artistic that they are exhibited on their own
merit as independent artistic drawings.5
In this group of early sculptural ceramics that
Picasso made after the drawings, an odd cluster
are architectonically erected with predesigned,
thrown, closed forms in a manner reminiscent
of toy-block constructions, stacked in precarious balance; the rest are simple or complex
inflated substructures typified by free-flowing
linear markings – straightforward brush strokes.6
Most of these were ultimately converted into
imaginative animal or Venus forms. This
method constitutes an unc ۝