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Dedicated to Plates

(Picture: magazine.interencheres)

(10.11.2022) Plates are interesting, because they appear to be so banal. One can throw a plate, yes. One can make it to be a nostalgic object, because it reminds one of something (or throw it away, just because it reminds one of something). One can make a plate oneself (from clay), perhaps a soothing activity while one is thinking of something completely different. And of course one can also decorate a plate by using various techniques.
Picasso, as one would expect, did all of these things – throwing, remembering, making some himself. And we are exploring what a plate can be, here with Picasso.

(Picture: Amphion27)

One) Throwing (hurling, flinging)

The man who was capable to enrage Pablo Picasso to the degree of throwing a plate (not done by him, not painted by him, probably filled with Mediterranean food) into the Mediterranean Sea was Paul Cuttoli. It happened in one evening in Golfe-Juan, in the summer of 1947, and the story is related by Françoise Gilot.
Cuttoli must have been well-meaning, but obviously not very well aware of Picasso’s sensibilities. A photo by Man Ray shows the man – not in a white suit as in the summer of 1947 –, he was a lawyer and politician, based in (then French) Algeria, and what he did was to give Picasso some advice. ›Do a donation to the museum at Antibes‹, Cuttoli, suggested, but not only that; since he went on to suggest that Picasso a) could or should apply to become a French citizen, which would bring with it the advantage that he could divorce his wife Olga, and b) to marry Françoise Gilot (with whom he already had a child, as Cuttoli seems not to have been shy to add).
Gilot actually relates a longer and quite complex scene, with a number of explosions or outbursts (not one big explosion), and it would be wrong to sum up the scene as: Pablo Picasso, after having been insulted, did, as a proud Spaniard, throw a plate of sea food into the Mediterranean Sea, and left the scene. No, this would perhaps be inspiring as well (as to how to express pride, or pride having been hurt), but this is not what happened. Picasso did not leave the scene, according to Gilot, who, perhaps deliberately, relates something that could also be interpreted as even more humiliating to Picasso than just pride hurt: because, in the following, Picasso got apparently soothed like a child – by kisses. First he was kissed by Marie Cuttoli, the wife of Monsieur Paul, then by Françoise (and he seems to have kissed back). The dinner went on, yet not the discussion as to citizenship, divorce or donation. It is not known, how the restaurant reacted (Chez Marcel), perhaps a diver secured the plate afterwards, which is what certainly would have happened in the 1950s, but again, the plate was not something Picasso had painted on. It was – well – just a relic, just a simple, banal object that could be thrown (hurled, flung). By Picasso. Who, according to Gilot, was wearing shorts and his – more famous – marine sweater. And showed to be rather sensitive – but also cooperative.

Two) Creating Anew

One has estimated that 117.332 pieces of pottery by Picasso (or decorated by Picasso) are in circulation (unique pieces, as well as editions counted; see Fox I, 532). Plates are just one category (one does distinguish the plate, the plat espagnole, the Louis XV plate, on so on, as subcategories). And plates were among the first objects made from clay, that Picasso decorated, beginning in 1946/47, when he actually discovered pottery (or rediscovered it, after having encountered the world of ceramics earlier in his career): »Il commença par décorer des plats«, says Pierre Daix in his Picasso dictionary (p. 168), referring to the year of 1947, and from then went on to work, if he was interested in pottery, in the Madoura factory at Vallauris, until, in January 1956, he also had a small studio in his own villa set up. Françoise Gilot witnessed Picasso developing his own approaches, and also recounted the interesting story that she had discovered, with Picasso, a book on Chinese pottery in an antiquarian bookshop, a book with reproductions of Chinese prints, obviously, that she, not him, was to use in the context of her own art.

It might have become clear to this point, that plates in art may have something to do with domestic, well, themes, motifs, perhaps issues. And it is even worse: someone who uses plates in art may run into danger of being seen as, well, bourgeois, banal, at least not ›wild‹, or interesting. Or even worse (if we would use the word of ›mercantile‹).
When filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard was told, by an interviewer, that he, Godard, might be seen as the Picasso of cinema, Godard just replied dryly that he did not like that comparison, because: Picasso painted too many plates.
And if that may not be enough, we may now turn to the memoirs of journalist Georges Tabaraud, who described, how the city of Vallauris was affected, after Picasso had turned to the, well, applied arts, or to the art form of ceramics:

»Aujourd’hui, Vallauris est bien différent. En 1959 nous avions créé la biennale de la céramique, j’y ai participé de très près, afin de résister à tous les mercantilismes.
Certains débarquaient sans avoir touché un tour, ils ouvraient une boutique, ils prenaient de la »merdouille« fabriquée à droite ou à gauche pour leurs boutiques. Dès qu’ils disposaient d’un peu d’argent, ils achetaient les boutiques de la grand-rue. Puis ils installaient un four et fabriquaient eux-mêmes n’importe quoi avec le label Vallauris.
La cité a été vraiment envahie par cette médiocrité, ce qui n’empêchait pas et ce qui n’empêche toujours pas les touristes d’arriver par cars entiers. Des artisans se sont découragés, et se sont installés dans les villages, d’autres sont partis dans le Vaucluse. Une douzaine est restée, qui sont de bons céramistes mais ils n’ont jamais eu les moyens d’acheter les boutiques dans la grand-rue, ils sont un peu à l’écart et se font vieux. Le pire, c’est le trafic avec l’Extrême-Orient. Des modèles ont été envoyés là-bas et les pièces sont faites en Chine, à Hong Kong ou en Corée, et elles reviennent. On pose le cachet Vaullauris, hélas…« (Tabaraud, Mes années Picasso, p. 72)

Tabaraud, then a communist journalist, did belong to the circle of Picasso. His sociology of Vallauris is worth to be adapted by a Godard, or in the spirit of late Godard, and since, also here, the Far East is named, we may say that we come full circle, and we may just add, that Picasso, in the 1950s got as a gift from the potters of Vallauris – a Chinese potter’s wheel. Of course Picasso is not responsible alone for how the city of Vallauris developed economically, but the impulse given by Picasso, his fame, certainly contributed to this tale of globalized economy. And all this, one may add, may have begun by Picasso, more or less, innocently decorating some plates.

Three) Reworking or Negative Nostalgia

Not all of Picasso’s plates, however, might be seen as that innocent. After his wife Olga had died, in 1955 (Picasso biographers like to say that she had attempted to force Picasso into a bourgeois lifestyle…), he got sent items from her, once their household. Including a large set of dinner plates, which, in 1956, Picasso seems to have reused in his art. Also the name of Jacqueline Roque comes up in this respect – she seems to have wanted the dinner plates for the now new household at villa La Californie, but in the end, it seems that she – or better: the household – got little of them, since Picasso seems to have liked to rework this ceramic reminiscences – of something someone had once wanted to impose on him –, creating something new – with Jacqueline Roque – as one has to add here for political correctness. And we may conclude that plates may look innocent at first, and even too bourgeois, too mercantile, but it may be that stories, whole artist’s sentimental biographies, even whole sociologies and histories of mentalities and moralities (not to mention the whole history of globalization), lurk behind these innocent objects that, perhaps, are just innocently been decorated (perhaps with bullfight motivs; or dachshund motives like this plate here, dedicated by Picasso to the dachshund Lump that the photographer David Douglas Duncan found appropriate to bring into the household of Picasso). And again we may come full circle, since it seems also possible just to eat from something as banal as a plate.

Four) Better Than Doing Nothing: The ›Machinery‹

Also the history, the biography of political Picasso may lurk behind assorted plates. And here it is – litterally, and paradoxically – also about apathy and being disinterested. Since in the fall of 1956 Picasso was also shocked by what happened in Hungary (the Hungarian Uprising). One may endlessly discuss what exactly Picasso’s stance was, in this fall of 1956, and in view of what happened in Hungary, but the simple answer is that he did not really know what to do, and the little he did – signing a petition that asked the leadership of the Communist Party of France to address problems of conscience at a special convention, in view of what happened in Hungary – was rather a result of circumstances (I’ll come back to that in my book; and Georges Tabaraud has also a role in that particular story, too).
It is Jean Cocteau here, to whom Picasso said that he preferred to do some ceramics (Cocteau only saw him preparing bricks; Cocteau diary of 1956, p. 311: 6.11.1956), because he found that this activity, rather empty activity (as Picasso thus implied; Cocteau had suggested that one was working to forget, at the moment, rather than par amour) was better than to do nothing. And these days in the fall of 1956 were so full of tension that it is easy to imagine that actual artistic (or political) work was virtually impossible. Because, who would have been able to focus on painting, for example, if from the left and from the right, people attempted to press Picasso into doing what left or right wanted.
Doing something that is simply better than to do nothing, doing something that is just one step away from doing nothing, since it is so empty that little can be said about that acticity, is interesting in its own right. And we may be inspired to think of Eastern philosophies here, and to think of the Far East again: since, if mere existence, the extasy of mere existence, can be felt, if existing is actually emptied from all specific, obtuse, idle etc. being, one may say that also doing can be emptied from all too specific content, and this almost pure mere doing would be doing as such, and be without specific content. But what Picasso did, was probably, again one step away from that: since his acticity must have been filled with breeding, ruminating on what to do, in view of Hungary, and in view of the specific leadership of the Communist Party, of which he was a member, showing to be still, and to remain a Stalinist party leadership. It was also Cocteau, who once had compared the activity, the productivity of Picasso with a machine or machinery, and here – with ceramics, tiles and plates, often decorated with fauns, or faces with horns, we may speak finally of mere mechanic activity, which, however, and in view that it is about Picasso here, is interesting to put into a perspective of human existence and human being: as simple as that, and as simple and banal as plates are.

(Picture: Author unknown)

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