Picasso's Owls

The fact that Picasso liked to surround himself with animals is well known. One day in 1946, as Picasso was working at the Musée d'Antibes, his photographer friend Michel Sima, brought Picasso an injured owl he had found in the corner of the museum. This tiny bird will featrure heavily in both the paintings and the ceramics of the following years.

At the Madoura workshop in Vallauris, where Picasso first becomes initiated with ceramic-making in 1946, Picasso creates zoomorphic objects and sculptures. Amongst those, the owl is a subject of predilection. "Pablo loved to surround himself with birds and animals. In general they were exempt from the suspicion with which he regarded his other friends. While Pablo was still working at the Musée d’Antibes, [Michel] Sima had come to us one day with a little owl he had found in a corner of the museum." says Françoise Gilot in Life with Picasso. For Picasso the owl holds symbolic and mythological meanings - in the South of France, he was currently going back to the classical themes that had marked his childhood. The Hispano-Moorish style, as well as the Pre-Columbian ceramics, with their zoomorphic and anthropomorphic subjects, undoubtedly also inspired the artist. Picasso masters the traditional techniques of pottery-making. Nonetheless, the subject allows him to vary the forms and styles. The owl is infinitely varied, the motif of its fethers, its shape, its expression declined in different ways. Sometimes, the owl is humanized, its expression serious, and sometimes Picasso goes further, combining it with human features, such as in his "femmes hibou" (owl women). A famous self portrait as an owl, gifted to his friend, Duncan, represents the summit of the motif - Picasso's real, photographed eyes peering from cut-out eyes of an owl drawing.