Can working in the art world be a treasure hunt ?
From the late ‘40s onwards, Pablo Picasso explores the ceramic as a new medium to expand his creative field with new techniques. A colorful, dreamlike production, filled with different shapes and subjects, that would allow him to marvel over more than a decade. Created in 1956, “Claude Picasso enfant”, a unique piece, belongs to the same period of Vallauris, but in this composition, the painter treats ceramics like a blank canvas. An aspect reinforced by the addition of black dots on the edges of the ceramic to reproduce the effect of a canvas stretched on its stretcher.
In addition to a new creative trend for Picasso, the late ‘40s were also marked by the birth of his son Claude on May 15, 1947. Although he had been a father before, this period of his life enabled him to include the powerful experiences of parenthood into his art. At the age of 9, Claude is represented here through a simplification technique that also evokes a childlike approach to form. The child's similarity is perfectly echoed in a photograph taken by Lucien Clergue the same year, in which he poses alongside his father and sister Paloma. The simplifying characteristics of the presented work can also be seen in the last series of painting of Claude and Paloma, which Picasso produced during a visit to Françoise Gilot and the children in Vallauris in April and May 1954. As Müller describes it : In an unequalled symbiosis of subject and form, Picasso depicted the motifs of the child's world in a seemingly infantile, additively descriptive style. The autonomy of artistic creation, in which such parameters as space, color and proportions are selected by the artist with their own picture-immanent logic, corresponds to the insularity of the child's sphere of existence... For the first time, Picasso has now found the way to a formal language that is decidedly tailored to the modes of expression of a child" (op. cit., p. 13).
“Claude Picasso enfant” is a magnificent, on-of-a-kind piece that perfectly represents Pablo Picasso's influence at the time, while offering us an intimate look at his son who is now the legal administrator of the Picasso estate and highly committed to defending his father's work.