Regarding the great exhibition of Spanish ceramics held in Cannes in the spring of 1957, the journalist from La Vanguardia José María López marveled at the fact that those pieces, which spanned a vast span of time, from medieval times to the middle of the 20th century, They had so many points in common with those that Picasso had been producing since, after the Second World War and after a decade marked by anguish, he left Paris and settled on the Côte d'Azur. The artist himself, who at that time was enjoying a renewed joie de vivre, was the first to be surprised when he toured the show as just another visitor: "But is it possible that they did this before me?" he exclaimed, as stated in the aforementioned chronicle.
Picasso fed on everything and everyone, and used his voracious eyes to look at the world again through what others had seen before. Ceramics was no exception. But Picasso's visit to the Palais Miramar would give much more than mere inspiration. Impressed by the pieces from the Museus d'Art de Barcelona, which remained hidden in a warehouse, he decided that he too wanted to be part of that tradition and invited the then curator of ceramics Lluís Maria Llubià to his workshop in Vallauris to choose 16 ceramics that he wanted to donate to the city. Not only was it his first great gift to Barcelona (in 1919 he had bequeathed the painting L'Arlequí), but thanks to him he ended up creating a monographic museum of ceramics.
“Llubià, who had been fighting for the existence of a ceramics museum for some time, saw the opportunity to put pressure on it and asked Picasso, through Sabartés, to write a letter to the mayor in which he conditioned the transfer to the fact that the works were exhibited together with a wide selection from the Barcelona collection”, says Isabel Cendoya, curator together with Isabel Fernández del Moral of Picasso's will. The ceramics that inspired the artist, an exhibition at the Museu del Disseny (until September 17) that reconstructs the history of the donation from a double perspective, documentary and artistic, through the works that traveled to the Cannes exhibition.
Picasso wrote the letter and added a decisive paragraph: "I understand that if they have not been exhibited within six months, these works must be returned immediately." The date that headed the letter: April 26, 1957. Three months later, on July 30, the long-awaited exhibition opens at the Museu d'Art Modern de la Ciutadella, the germ of the future museum at the Palau de Pedralbes.
Cendoya and Fernández del Moral have been able to track down the last detail of the donation thanks to the correspondence and Llubià's newspaper, entitled Activitats del ceramòleg by himself, but above all they establish a series of luminous correspondences in which it is possible to appreciate how Picasso he drank from tradition at a formal or iconographic level, modifying it and giving it a new life, transforming something utilitarian like a pitcher into a mermaid, transferring his themes (the painter and the model, bullfighting, the circus...) and above all intervening in the pieces as if they were a canvas, as if the surface of the objects gave him the opportunity to do things in 3D”, concludes Cendoya.
