Playing with burnt clay

Updated: 2014-09-04 05:58

By Chitralekha Basu in Hong Kong(HK Edition)

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Playing with burnt clay

Among the exhibits at the Picasso Ceramics show - on show at Hong Kong University's Museum and Art Gallery (UMAG) until November 2 - is a pastiche of Edouard Manet's much-celebrated, and equally-notorious, painting Luncheon on the Grass (1862-63). Manet had shocked the art world by putting nude women in the same frame with fully-formally attired men, at a time when Victorian morality ruled in Europe. A hundred years later, it was the absurdity of the scenario that Picasso chose to play up. The drawings, etched in red terracotta, showing from underneath the dark matte surface, reflect naivet and playfulness - traits common to much of Picasso's work in ceramics.

Picasso had turned potter at 65. He moved in with potters Georges and Suzanne Ramie to work at their studio at Madoura, in south of France in 1946. This was the beginning of one of his most prolific phases, during which he would turn plates, ewers, flower pots and pitchers into works of art. Several hundreds of these purely utilitarian objects of everyday use would be painted on, or given a fresh texture by adding layers of engobe (liquid clay slips). Picasso also created a range of original pieces, like plates in very fine white clay with funny faces on them -anticipating the smiley icons of the electronic era, it seems - which he would later re-cast in silver.

"Picasso did not want to see these artworks as museum pieces," says Florian Knothe, director of UMAG. "He would rather have people buy them to use as a domestic tool." It was a somewhat unrealistic wish. Who indeed would have the gumption to use a watering jar in the garden if it was painted on by one of the masters of 20th-century modern art? Most of these artworks are now part of the London-based Nina Miller Collection, and have been loaned for public viewing for the very first time to UMAG.

Images of the owl, painted on plates, vases and pitchers, dominate the show. It's the birds one sees first, rather than the vessels - a result of clever tweaking of these shapes through the application of paint and layering with engobe. Evidently, these were the handiwork of an artist with an extraordinary imagination, to have been able to see forms - of birds, animals and human beings - in the most unlikely objects of everyday use, as Knothe points out.

The Goat's Head (1952), laid out on an oblong white ceramic dish, with fruit-shapes arranged around the rim, is, in fact a throwback to the Italian Renaissance tradition of painting plates with victuals on them to resemble an offering.

Picasso, who once had a pet goat among other animals, couldn't have loved the idea of a severed goat head presented on a platter. This was probably his way of getting back at the idea of Bacchanalian feasting.

basu@chinadailyhk.com

Playing with burnt clay

(HK Edition 09/04/2014 page7)