Introduction | Section 1 | Section 2 | Section 3 | Section 4 | Section 5 | Section 6

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Pablo Picasso, Vase Femme, 1954 © Succession Picasso/DACS 2004 Courtesy Collection Museum for Contemporary Art 's-Hertogenbosch /NL

For many artists working with clay, the transition from clay to ceramic in the moment of firing allowed them freedom from any certainty about how their work would emerge. Pablo Picasso’s ceramics explore the way in which an object can seem to be on the point of becoming something else. He manipulated thrown pots while they were still soft, bending the tall neck of a bottle over to make a face, squeezing a jar to indicate a woman’s body. Transformation took place at different levels of seriousness, humour and complexity. The border of a meat dish can act as the audience for a bullfight, the nest of a bird, a woman’s hair. Often Picasso will conflate the female body and the vessel, so the curves of the amphora become the curves of a woman.

For Joan Miró the excitement of using ceramics also lay in their unpredictability; the consigning of the work to the transformative process of firing, where clay and glaze change into mass and colour, as in his sculptures Multicoloured Head 1944-6 and Square Head 1955-6. Childlike in composition, the sculptures, like the scribbles on the surface of Round Plate 1977, made simply with a sharp stick, betray Miró’s interest in the primitive as a source of inspiration.

Joan Miró, Multicoloured Head, 1946 © Succession Miró, DACS, 2004. Photograph courtesy Museum for Contemporary Art ’s-Hertogenbosch, Netherlands

The childlike and the primitive were also characteristic of the work of the CoBrA artists, Karel Appel, Corneille, Constant, Lucebert, and Asger Jorn. Determinedly experimental, and mixing the violent and the naïve, the group believed in an approach to materials that was unhampered by anxieties about technique. In this they took their cue from an expressiveness found in the work of children, those with mental health problems, and in primitive societies. If playing with clay constituted a crime against the high ideals of modernism, then there was true radicalism in CoBrA’s involvement in ceramics at the ‘International Encounters in Ceramics’ workshop in Albisola: they decorated vases, plates and dishes with childlike scrawls, invited children to decorate plates, and even rode a moped over a bed of clay to make a large-scale ceramic mural.