Acceptable gifts

Spectator, The, Sep 26, 1998 by Gayford, Martin

Picasso: Painter and Sculptor in Clay (Royal Academy, till 16 December)

A friend of mine once asked a distinguished artist to his wedding. The artist did not come, but sent word that he would be presenting a gift. Until that promised present arrived, the friend went around remarking, Please God, don't let it be one of the ceramics' (in fact, it was a splendid print). That was perhaps a little ungrateful, but the friend had a point. Very often the ceramics, of which many 20th-century artists have produced quite a lot, are the bottom end of the oeuvre. It is with this in mind that one approaches Picasso: Painter and Sculptor in Clay at the Royal Academy. Was Picasso, who defied so many generalisations, able to buck that trend too?

The answer is, by and large, yes. Up to now, these ceramics have been treated as a footnote, or addendum, to Picasso's major works (this is the first full-scale exhibition to be devoted to them). This remains a just assessment; there are no major masterpieces here, no 'Guernica', no Night Fishing At Antibes'. But their lack of majorness is part of their charm, these are not so much footnotes as hors d'oeuvres to the huge banquet of Picasso's art.

As good hors d'oeuvres should be, they are characterised by joie de vivre and lightness of spirit. There are no dark or tragic notes here, as there are so often in the paintings. You get the feeling that Picasso was having fun when he made his pots (or, more strictly, decorated them; turning clay on the wheel was an art he never mas-. tered). And part of the fun, doubtless, was the scope that the limited range of pottery forms - vase, plate, jug, for example, gave to his protean inventiveness.

How many metamorphic identities can be found for, say, a water-jug? He transforms it into a bird, with spout for neck, a bull, a head, a fish, Priapus (with another function for the spout). Just as many variations are constantly rung on the style of the decoration - neoclassical, Goyaesque, archaic Greek, schematic, cubist, all the diverse Picasso modes. So this array of crockery becomes another medium for making one of his basic points: that the same image can be made not just in one way, but in innumerable different fashions (this is one of the reasons why Picasso is modern).

Some of the appeal of pottery for Picasso, one suspects, lay in its unassuming, humble nature. He turned to it at a point, in the late Forties, when his art was in transition. Many of the works in the exhibition come from the very early Fifties, when he was not only between styles - it is one of the flattest periods of his whole career as far as painting is concerned - but also between women. The epoch of FranCoise Gilot was ending, that of Jacqueline, who became his second wife, had yet to begin. Here was a wonderful way to keep the imagination spry, a sort of creative fivefinger exercise.

Pottery also represented a return to his Mediterranean roots. `It's strange,' he remarked in Antibes in 1946, `in Paris I never draw fauns, centaurs or heroes from mythology, it's as though they live here.' Neither, during his years in Paris, had he produced any pottery (with one or two exceptions). But, after his move to the south of France in the late Forties, he started to produce it in tremendous quantity, and carried on, less prolifically, until the end of his life. Quite often, the two came together - the fauns, nymphs, shepherds and centaurs appearing on the pots.

Of course, Provence is classical soil, just as is Picasso's childhood home of Andalucia. In his pottery, Picasso quite naturally, in fact, playfully, takes on the whole Mediterranean past (something, one imagines, that no one will ever be able to do again). There are figurines that suggest bare-breasted Cretan goddesses of the second millennium BC, and others that put one in mind of the spare Cycladic sculptures made in the Aegean a thousand years later. There are pieces that resemble Athenian black-figure and red-figure ware; there is a long series of bull-fight scenes on plates with curly-scalloped edges that have a strong 18th-century feel. But none of this comes across as pastiche, more a private Picassoian game with his own past and identity.

On many pots there are fish - a food of huge symbolic and gastronomic importance to Mediterranean peoples - often they are in relief on plates in the manner of the 16th-century French ceramicist Bernard Palissy. An amusing sequence of photographs in the catalogue shows Picasso neatly eating a fish for lunch so as to keep its skeleton intact, then impressing these bones into a slab of clay.

The drawback of this exhibition is the presentation. The grand galleries of the Royal Academy are all wrong for these artefacts which are not only light in spirit, but also domestic in scale and intimate in feel. One's first reaction, on seeing rank upon rank of small plates and vases in these large formal, otherwise empty spaces, is to feel thoroughly daunted. It is only when the ceramics are inspected at closequarters that it becomes apparent how jolly and vivacious they are.