Heart of fire

Is painting of more intrinsic value than a vase? GILBERT WONG on questions raised in a new exhibition.


For Pablo Picasso the discovery of clay and the tactile joy of moulding and firing ceramics in the French Riviera town of Vallauris in 1946 liberated his thinking and creativity.

As he has noted: "With a painting, you yourself have to create the environment in which you place an object; with sculpture, it is simply present. In ceramics the problem of the third dimension is gone; you just step out of the flat surface of the painting. That's probably why one sees painters who produce sculpture, but hardly ever sculptors who produce paintings."

Picasso, ever prolific, acknowledged how ceramics helped to maintain his fecundity: "Ceramics has a certain playful element which allows you to shape an idea quickly, something that isn't possible in a painting due to a certain caution."

There are no clear figures for how many ceramic works Picasso produced, but it is certainly more than 4000.

The purchase of Picasso's 1954 work Vase Femme set the Netherlands Museum Het Kruthuis on a path that led to the creation of one of the world's largest collections of artists' ceramics. A careful selection of 78 of these thousands of works is on show in The Unexpected at the Dowse Art Museum in Lower Hutt.

They include work from artists who have a firm place in the canon of 20th-century art. Apart from Picasso there are examples from Jean Cocteau, Joan Miro, Raoul Dufy, Fernand Leger and Marc Chagall.

When the curators opened the crates last week, Dowse director Tim Walker was there to enjoy works that he had previously seen only as images.

"With ceramics, you can't tell what they feel like from images," he says. "Suddenly they were there as objects in three dimensions with their own reflections and heft."

For Walker, who previously worked at the National Gallery and Te Papa, the ceramics possessed a novelty that paintings — even great paintings — cannot always provide.

"When you finally see a Picasso you can be disappointed. Often the images have been reproduced so many times that they suffer. But to see these works, the effect is of seeing the work fresh, as if they were just finished."

So The Unexpected is aptly named, providing a thematic walk through the rediscovery of ceramics by influential 20th-century art movements.

The works fall into three groups: the classical modernists Picasso, Chagall and their contemporaries who, Walker says, worked in clay as either a way to refresh creativity or who saw the work as an important part of their exploration of the traditions of classicism.

The second group comes from the European collective Cobra, which from 1948 to 1951 produced works in response to the cataclysm of the Second World War. The name is an anagram of the cities Copenhagen, Brussels and Amsterdam where collective members lived, most notably Karel Appel, Jean Raine, Mickey Alechinsky and Shinichi Tajiri.

Their venture into ceramics, mostly utilitarian objects, came about as part of their wider desire for anti-specialisation. By experimenting with media in which they had no training, they believed they could avoid academic preconceptions and achieve a childlike directness in their creativity.

The outlook was shaped by folk art rather than classical art traditions. So painters wrote poetry, poets painted, art was made from rubbish and — as a collective — they produced murals and larger works.

The final group of ceramics comes from contemporary artists like Italy's Mimmo Palladino, Germany's A.R. Penck and Britain's Bruce McLean, who have resorted to ceramics for much the same reasons as their predecessors in the 40s — as a technique to redefine and refresh their painting.

Walker says that though multiple threads run through the exhibition, at heart is the allure that comes when ceramics are fired. "Through a novel medium artists could unlock a new series of ideas, and then return to painting or sculpture charged with an inventive spirit."

There were other byproducts. The act of firing ceramics introduces chance to the work, where variations in the temperature and the structure of the clay and the glazes can produce unforeseen results.

"I am sure that painters who turn to ceramics find an excitement in this potential chaos," Walker says.

The reverse is also true. Because painters may not have been trained to work with the same restraints that ceramicists have come to accept in their medium, painters may not be bound by the same limitations.

"Picasso and Dufy were not trying to produce a particular object, but were just experimenting to see what they could do," Walker says.

This raises the issue of why ceramics as artworks enjoy less critical and monetary acknowledgment of their worth than do paintings.

"I think it is true that in New Zealand the work of a mid-career ceramic artist will have a monetary value that is much less than a comparable sculptor," Walker says. "Craft is associated with the utilitarian and that makes it mundane. And certainly in this country there is a sense that if an object is utilitarian or decorative it is of less value than an object created for a purely esoteric reason."

It was never the National Gallery's purpose to acquire decorative works, Walker says. But that approach implied that such works were of less value than paintings in terms of understanding our soul or sense of place.

"I'm not saying that is wrong or right, it is just the paradigm for galleries and museums. There is separation — photography from painting, ceramics from photography."

But Walker thinks that will change.

"One of the great things that will become more true this century is that the relationship between an artist and the objects they create will become more interesting than the separation of those things."

And there is no doubt that when Picasso regarded his ceramics along with his painting he made no distinction between them for their value. They were all his and his all.


• The Unexpected, Dowse Art Museum, Lower Hutt, until March 26.