Exhibition 'Picasso Ceramics: The Attenborough Collection' in New Walk Museum and Art Gallery
Following on from the highly successful 2007 exhibition, New Walk Museum & Art Gallery is delighted to present Picasso: The Attenborough Collection, a permanent gallery of selected key works from the collection of Lord and Lady Attenborough.
In 1954 Richard and Sheila Attenborough paid their first visit to the Madoura pottery in Vallauris, where Picasso had been working for several years with Georges and Suzanne Ramié. The Attenboroughs started with modest purchases, leading to a collection numbering some 150 pieces.
All of Picasso’s activity with ceramics centred around the Madoura pottery factory in Vallauris, France. Picasso made plates, jugs and tiles but he also designed new forms combining aspects of painting and sculpture in ceramics. The majority of the collection consists of Editions and Original Impressions; multiple works that Picasso insisted the pottery should produce and sell inexpensively, so that everyone could own a ‘Picasso’.
This intimate permanent exhibition shows a changing display of around forty works selected from the unique collection, curated by renowned Picasso expert, Dr Marilyn McCully.
In 2007, Lord and Lady Attenborough announced that their Picasso ceramics collection would be entrusted to the City of Leicester to commemorate the lives of their daughter, Jane Mary, and their granddaughter, Lucy Elizabeth, who perished together in the Asian Tsunami on 26th December 2004.
