This exhibition explores Pablo Picasso’s renaissance in Vallauris from the end of the Second World War to the 1970s, when the environments around the Côte d’Azur became the epicentre of the artist’s late-career experimentation. Working daily between the Madoura pottery workshop and the printmaking studio of Hidalgo Arnéra, Picasso transformed ceramics, linoleum blocks and related graphic surfaces into new arenas of modernist invention. The presentation looks closely at these Vallauris-born bodies of work with selected prints and designs from earlier periods, such as the Suite Vollard, and the tapestry composition Femme sur L’Echelle (La Femme aux pigeons; La Fermière)” to reveal the extraordinary continuity of his subjects and technical collaborations across three decades.
Having spent a lifetime observing and depicting the world around him, Picasso devoted his final decades to securing his enduring place in art history. Much like the ancient emperors who commissioned vast life-size armies in terracotta, Picasso masterfully directed the creation of his own ceramic and linocut works through industrious, tireless collaboration, producing thousands of innovative pieces in clay and on paper that would his legacy as a boundless innovator.
