In 1946, Picasso and his muse Françoise Gilot took up residence in the Grimaldi Palace in Antibes. For six months, the artist lived and worked in the expansive chateau which sat atop the ruins of the ancient town of Antipolis. It was high upon the historic rafters where the photographer Michel Sima first spotted a small owl. As Gilot later recounted in her autobiography, “one of [the owl’s] claws had been injured. We bandaged it and it gradually healed. We bought a cage for him and when we returned to Paris we brought him back with us and put him in the kitchen with the canaries, the pigeons and the turtledoves. He smelled awful and ate nothing but mice” (Françoise Gilot, My Life with Picasso, New York, 1964, pp. 144-45; see fig. 1).
“How ravishing to see colors sing after internal fires have given them life. The owls managed a wink now. The bulls seemed ready to bellow. The pigeons, still warm from the electric kiln, sat proudly brooding over their warm eggs. I touched them. They were alive really. The faces smiled. You could hear the band at the bullfight.”
Like so many of his companions, the little owl—named Ubu after the dictatorial protagonist in Alfred Jarry’s play Ubu Roi—would come to inhabit Picasso's art as well as his life. The ensuing decade would witness a wealth of avian imagery across multiple media, from his drawings and still lifes to his sheet.mes tal sculptures and exquisite terracotta forms executed at the Madoura pottery studio in Vallauris.
For Picasso, who’d often found alter egos in fauna and fabled figures like the Minotaur, the arrival of the bird proved an uncanny reference to both the artist and the ancient city below Antibes. In Greek myth, Athena is represented by the figure of the owl, conveying her powers as the goddess of wisdom and war. Given the setting and its symbolism, it was only fitting that the following years would also be characterized by an intense focus on the creation of ceramics—one of the defining art forms of the Classical period (see fig. 2).
Picasso’s Unique Ceramic Owls at Auction
Executed in 1953, La Chouette is one of a small number of ceramic sculptures presenting the winged figure in its revelry. Picasso explored the subject matter of the owl in various forms, experimenting with different glazes and painterly effects in each individual iteration. The present work is arguably the finest examples of the subject, with its richly patterned plumage coming alive against a rich backdrop of umber ceramic. Layers of white, black and grey paint delineate the feathered form and present an expressive elegance unparalleled in his related works.
La Chouette exemplifies Picasso’s limitless innovation and creative scope. Alongside the horse and the bull, the owl was a subject the artist returned to frequently. The creatures appeared in series of paintings from 1946-47 (figs. 3-5), at least two lithographs and various ceramic forms. However, it was this terracotta model that was subject to the greatest attention. The maquette for the present work was created in plaster on Christmas Day 1949. A few years later Picasso returned to the model and created a small edition of terracotta casts, treating each work individually and painting them in a variety of patterns. His designs included a wealth of imagery from the dazzling monochromatic designs exemplified by the present work, to the addition of color and humanistic features.
A few examples of this model remained with the artist until his death (and later the collects ions of Jacqueline Roque and Marina Picasso), with examples now belonging to the collects ions of the Museum Ludwig in Cologne and the Musée Picasso in Paris. An edition of six bronzes was also cast from the same model in 1950. Exquisitely painted and a stand-out masterpiece in ceramic, La Chouette comes to the market for the first t.mes .