The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Picasso: Painter and Sculptor in Clay by Marilyn McCully

Marilyn McCully’s Picasso: Painter and Sculptor in Clay performs the double service every good exhibition catalogue must: it documents a body of work that has long been underrated in mainstream Picasso scholarship, and it supplies interpretive apparatus sufficient to make that body of work matter anew. The volume — produced to accompany the Royal Academy and Metropolitan Museum exhibitions in 1998–99 — gathers richly photographed plates, archival images of Picasso at the wheel, and a set of texts that move between biography, technical description, and close visual analysis. Its basic claim is simple and persuasive: Picasso’s ceramics are not a marginal hobby but a decisive laboratory for the gestures, motifs, and material experiments that circulate throughout his career. 

The catalogue’s strongest contribution is its insistence on ceramics as an arena of invention rather than illustration. Where earlier accounts often treated pottery as a quaint appendix to Picasso’s grander painting and sculpture, McCully’s introduction and the curatorial materials foreground the ways in which the clay works compress painting, drawing, and sculptural relief into a single, tactile object. The book makes visible the iterative process — the alchemy of slip, glaze, and firing — that allowed Picasso to move at once toward the primitive and the modern, the intimate and the monumental. Photographic sequences and technical notes in the volume anchor this argument, showing how a drawn motif on paper was translated into incised lines and impastoed glazes with surprising spontaneity. 

Historically anchored chapters recount Picasso’s arrival in Vallauris in the late 1940s and his collaboration with the Madoura pottery workshop — the social and material context that made these thousands of ceramic experiments possible. The catalogue emphasizes chronology: after his first serious engagement with pottery around 1947, Picasso produced an extraordinary profusion of forms — plates, bottles, pitchers, sculptural vases — that collectively number in the thousands. Reading these pages, one recognizes how Vallauris functioned as both studio and stage, a place where play, commerce, and mastery intersected. 

The book is also careful about provenance and production. It includes catalogue-style entries and references to the Alain Ramie catalogue raisonné that collectors and scholars use to identify editions and unique pieces (Madoura stamps, edition numbers, and the like make frequent appearances in the plates and captions). These practical details are more than archival fastidiousness: they underline a central paradox of Picasso’s ceramics, which alternately embrace repetition (editioned runs) and the singularity of the hand-made object. The catalogue handles this tension with clarity, giving readers the tools to see how an ostensibly reproducible plate remains indexed to Picasso’s corporeal gesture. 

Contributors, including personal voices from the Picasso family and essays by Bernard Ruiz-Picasso and Claude Picasso, add intimacy and testimony to the technical analysis. These pieces illuminate Picasso’s own delight in the medium and the convivial, collaborative environment of Vallauris — the catalogue therefore functions partly as a social history of a postwar workshop as much as an object-based study. Such firsthand perspectives are valuable because they counterbalance the curatorial distance of other essays: we encounter both laboratory and kitchen, art-historical erudition and family memory. 

No single volume can do everything. The book’s ambition is curatorial and descriptive more than theoretical: readers looking for sustained engagement with questions of material culture, postwar politics, or critical theory of craft may find the interpretive frame a little conservative. In particular, the catalogue touches only lightly on how Picasso’s ceramics intersect with broader debates about craft, gendered labour in potteries, and the politics of studio production in the immediate postwar years. A more expansive comparative apparatus — positioning Picasso alongside contemporaneous studio-potters or against shifting tastes in mid-century France — would have deepened the book’s contextual claims without diminishing its primary strength as an object catalogue. This is a modest reservation; the catalogue’s focus on objects and process remains its most productive stance. (Interpretive readers, however, will wish for additional essays that link the ceramics to the artist’s public persona and to mid-century market forces.)

Stylistically, McCully’s editing privileges clarity. The sequencing of plates allows the catalogue to approximate the experience of the exhibition: motifs recur (bulls, fish, faces), and the reader quickly learns to read Picasso’s signatures — not just the marks on the verso but the recurring formal gestures on the recto — as a visual lexicon. The reproduction quality is generally excellent (colour plates, detail shots, and process photographs are well balanced), which matters enormously for a book whose primary evidence is visual. The scholarly notes and bibliography are serviceable, and the inclusion of technical captions and cataloguing references make the volume a useful reference for curators and collectors as well as for scholars. 

Picasso: Painter and Sculptor in Clay is both corrective and exemplary. It corrects a lacuna — the long neglect of Picasso’s ceramic work in canonical studies — while exemplifying how a well-produced exhibition catalogue can make a persuasive scholarly argument through objects, images, and close, materially attentive writing. For readers who have known Picasso chiefly through his paintings, McCully’s volume is a welcome reorientation: it insists that the clay works are not detours but parallel experiments with line, form, and narrative. For specialists, it is a compact, richly illustrated resource; for general readers it opens a tactile door into an artist whose restlessness found one of its most democratic outlets in the humble plate. 

Recommended for museum-goers, ceramic scholars, and any reader who wants to see how an artist of towering ambition can find new freedoms in the most domestic of materials.