Pablo Picasso

Born in Málaga and trained in Barcelona, Picasso is the central figure of twentieth-century art. Over seven decades he moved through Blue and Rose periods, invented Cubism alongside Braque, and reworked classical and African sources into a language entirely his own.

From 1947 he settled into a sustained relationship with ceramics at the Madoura workshop in Vallauris, producing several thousand pieces in editions. Plates, jugs, vessels and tiles carry the same vocabulary as his paintings — bulls, owls, faces, the Mediterranean sun — but returned to the domestic scale of objects meant to be handled. He died in Mougins in 1973.