Vase à huit pieds, Taureau

Claude Ruiz Picasso has confirmed the authenticity of this work.


The patterns of Picasso’s life on the Cote d’Azur are often reflected in his work in all media, including his friends, food, lovers, leisure pursuits – and most famously of these, the bullfight. Picasso never ceased to look upon the bullfight with a passionate eye. Although he had not returned to his native Spain for decades by the time that he created this vivid image of a charging bull, his sense of nationality had not left him, and he had loved discovering the corrida alive and well in the South of France, where he made his home in the years following the Second World War. While the bullfight had long appeared in his works in one guise or another, including paintings from the turn of the century, it was during this period in particular, in Vallauris in the 1950s, that he created some of his most atmospheric pictures and ceramics on this theme.

The central character of the corrida, the bull, strongly alludes to Picasso's personal imagery. "The bulls are in his very soul," Picasso's friend Hélène Parmelin has written. Perhaps the clearest indication of this is his use of the minotaur--half-man, half-bull--as his persona in countless works beginning in the late 1920s; this imagery is especially prevalent in the mid-1930s. To cite only some famous examples: Collage (1928; Zervos VII, 135), Minotaure (1933; Zervos VIII, 112), Scène Bacchique au minotaure (1933; Geiser 351), Minotaure aveugle guidé par Marie-Thérèse au pigeon dans une nuit étoilée (1934; Geiser 437), and Minotaure caressant une dormeuse (1933; Bloch 201; ill fig ??). Picasso once remarked, "If all the ways I have been along were marked on a map and joined up with a line, it might represent a minotaur" (quoted in D. Ashton, Picasso on Art, New York, p. 158).
Picasso viewed the bull as a symbol of the natural and mythic evil akin to fascism. In Guernica, for example, the left-most section of the painting is dominated by a massive bull who stands predatorily over a weeping woman with a dead baby. "The question is what the bull represents. Obviously, the bull is important to a Spaniard. Picasso, like many Spaniards and like his father before him, was addicted to the bullfight where the bull is both hero and victim... When asked at the end of the Second World War by an American private, Jerome Seckler, whether the bull might not represent fascism, Picasso answered, No, the bull is not fascism, but it is brutality and darkness'" (J.S. Boggs, exh. cat., Picasso and Things, Cleveland, 1992, p. 254).

The present work, executed in the summer of 1952, is an exceptionally rare, unique vase, the likes of which has not been seen at auction before, since most the best unique works have remained with the family of the artist (fig. ?). An uncommonly wide and sculptural object; its elements of body, arms and eight miniature feet are individually thrown and then assembled. Decorated with a complex layering of oxides, wax resist and white slip, the otherwise monochrome surface is scattered with tiny specks of brilliant blue. A crackle-glaze is applied last, endowing the vessel with a sense of antiquity.

The first owner of the vase, Francisco (Baby) Pignatari, was a Brazilian-Italian Industrialist, noted to be 'a playboy to rival the Aga Kahn'. But, he was no mere socialite, 'Baby' was proud to have made his own fortune running Brazil’s third-largest business, employing 10,000 workers, he flew his own plane, in fact it is told that he revered Picasso and his newly acquired vase so much, that he insisted, unusually, that it not be shipped to his mansion in Brazil with the rest of his luggage, but that he would hand carry it there himself on his plane.


The following two works bear the signs of Picasso’s intrepid creativity, when after the Second World War he turned to ceramics, transferring the whimsical world of his pictures and sculptures onto the shapes and vessels of Provençal pottery. Picasso had first visited the Madoura Pottery studio in Vallauris in 1946, invited by Georges and Suzanne Ramié.

Ceramics played a fundamental part in Picasso's career, from his first experiments in 1947 until his death almost thirty years later. He first visited the Madoura workshop in Vallauris on the invitation of Georges Ramié in 1946 and was immediately attracted by the flexibility of clay and the unusual combination of pictorial and sculptural possibilities that it offered. He was also moved by the ancient associations of the village of Vallauris which had been a ceramic centre since Roman times and particularly inspired by the atavism involved in emulating the primeval practice of fashioning vessels out of this ancient earth. The pottery-making history of Vallauris went back to the Roman times, when the area was an important centre of amphorae production; in the 18th Century, Vallauris revived its ancient fame with the production of kitchen earthenware. When Picasso arrived in the 1940s, however, the area was suffering a period of crisis, as mass-produced pottery had invaded the market. André Verdet’s artistic commentary to the documentary Terres et Flammes (1951, directed by Robert Mariaud) traces the history of Vallauris, presenting Picasso as a genius-saviour who gave new artistic impetus to a craft thought to have reached its end. ‘Picasso’s works’, Vedert affirmed in the film, ‘bring back to mind the vivid dignity of what humans have created with their very first artistic gestures’.

Appreciated by the artist as a creative medium in its own right, he explored the play offered by ceramic work between line and form - light and shadows - two dimensions and three dimensions. The many complex skills involved took some time for Picasso to learn, but, typically, as soon as he had mastered the techniques, he set about reinventing them in an unorthodox way and observing their transformation in the kiln. This is clear in the complex combination of glazing techniques, slips and oxides used in the present works, Grand vase aux femmes voilées and Taureau which are remarkable, early examples of Picasso's artistic research and development of this celebrated medium.

Bernard Picasso confirms the importance of the ceramic medium to his grandfather: ‘The sheer range of techniques and materials used or reinvented by Picasso makes his pottery into an art complete in itself….He at least always knew that his 25 years of creative work in pottery would one day be acknowledged as the keystone of a career devoted to constant self-renewal….He was able to sustain his own faith in the art of palette and brush, to which he returned at the end of his life; this was his first and last material and, above all, the chosen weapon of his mind.’ (Bernard Picasso, ‘Pottery: The Desire for Renewal’ in Picasso, Painter and Sculptor in Clay, London 1998, p. 23).