Picasso Ceramics. Jacqueline's Gift to Barcelona

This exhibition commemorates the thirtieth anniversary of the donation that Jacqueline Picasso made to the city of Barcelona of forty-one unique ceramic works, the dishes, jars and bowls that Picasso had given to his wife over the course of the two decades during which they lived together.

In 1947 Picasso began to frequent the Madoura ceramic workshop in Vallauris, invited by its founders Suzanne and Georges Ramié. He particularly liked the challenge of working with three-dimensional objects and the possibilities these offered: a hand-painted engraved dish could become a head; a group of women or ballerinas could surround the body of a jar ad infinitum; the concave interior of a bowl could create the illusion of volume in the figure it depicted. Such works reveal Picasso's taste for the popular forms and decorative techniques he used in his experiments to transform everyday objects into art works.

Jacqueline Roque and Picasso met in 1952, shortly after she started working in the gift shop at the Madoura studio. Jacqueline soon became his muse, his wife and companion, and the couple lived together until Picasso's death in 1973. At the opening of a great exhibition of Picasso's ceramics held in Barcelona in 1982, for which Jacqueline had loaned forty-one unique pieces from her collection, she made the surprising announcement that she intended to donate the works in question to the city.