Pablo Picasso Madoura Biography
(Picasso) Madoura Manufactory After the liberation of Paris and the end of the Second World War, Picasso spent more and more time in the south of France. In 1946 he visited a ceramics exhibition in the municipality of Vallauris, a place where ceramics had been produced since Roman times. In Vallauris he met Suzanne and Georges Ramié, owners of the Madoura factory. He follows his invitation to model some small ceramics himself. A year later, in the autumn of 1947, he began working in the ceramic workshop. In 1947 Vallauris became his first home in the south. Here he established his studio for a few years and, together with the Ramiés and their modellers, created a vast body of work: exceptional one-of-a-kind pieces and a large number of ceramic editions. Picasso found himself in Madoura's workshop almost every day and, over a period of more than twenty years, produced an immense, unique ceramic work that complemented Picasso's oeuvre in a special way. After learning the basic techniques of a historically traditional craft, Picasso created variations and paraphrases of figures, anthropomorphic apparitions, sculptures of plates and vases, in ceramic. Excited by the malleability and versatility of clay as a material and by the magic of the firing process, he soon breaks the conventional rules of this craft and works with unglazed white body, using fragmented bricks whose final texture emerges only after firing. In the Madoura Manufacture, Pablo Picasso renewed his dialogue with ancient imagery. Mythical creatures, fauns and centaurs appear. Central motifs of his ceramics are owls, birds, fish, goats, horses and bulls, which he makes his protagonists in zoomorphic vases and sculptures.
