Visage no. 197

Visage no. 197 is a Picasso ceramic plate, catalogued A.R. 494 in Alain Ramié's reference on the edited ceramics, conceived in 1963.0. It comes from the numbered edition of 500 produced at the Madoura pottery in Vallauris. It measures 10.15" diameter.

Authentic Madoura editions bear the impressed 'Madoura Plein Feu' (full-fire) and 'Edition Picasso' pottery stamps on the underside, and were produced in fixed numbered editions. Working in earthenware and faience, Picasso reimagined utilitarian forms — pitchers, plates, vases — as canvases for the faces, animals and mythological subjects that fill his painting and printmaking.

In Visage no. 197 Picasso takes up the human face — a motif Picasso returned to obsessively across every medium. Like all of the Madoura editions, the piece translates a subject from his painting and drawing into three dimensions, where the ceramic surface and the thrown form become part of the composition. Picasso's ceramics remain among the most accessible points of entry into his late work, prized for uniting a major twentieth-century hand with the everyday language of the potter.