‘The form of his ceramic pitch with its long neck and double handles was a shape commonly produced by hand at the Madoura ceramics factory. The thrown white earthenware pitcher has been incised and painted with slips yielding the visible blue, green, and black tones. Respecting the object’s given shape, Picasso used the piece’s neck, belly, and foot as the basis for his design. Through the use of painted slips, the extended neck of the pitcher has easily been converted into the woman’s two-tiered coiffure. The rounded belly and base of the object also logically transform themselves into the woman’s face and neck. The artist has respected the three unit-forms of the ceramic vase, allowing each part of the object to correspond to a different part of the painted woman’s physiognomy. Although this unusually shaped, two-handled piece is a standard Madoura shape, it is also an exaggerated version of a zoomorphic pot that Picasso designed in the late 1940s and often used for the depiction of birds or large birdlike faces; the Museum has one such example (Owl with the Head of a Faun). The transformation of these unusually shaped ceramics into familiar human or animal shapes elevates their functional morphology into visual poetry’.
Text: GIMÉNEZ, Carmen (ed). Collection Museo Picasso Málaga. Malaga: Museo Picasso Málaga, 2003, pp. 382-383.
