Art: At the Village Fair

Last week's most important art show was held not in a museum or gallery but at a county fair. In the French Riviera village of Vallauris, prize examples of the town's two industries, perfume and pottery, were on exhibition, and among the pottery makers, between Pernin and Picault in the catalogue, stood the name of a newcomer—Pablo Picasso.

Picasso himself stayed away from the fair's opening—he spent the day turning out more pots and vases in a friend's tiny factory—but his worshipers flocked from far away to see what the master was up to now. Vallauris' Communist mayor sized up the well-heeled throng with a joyful eye, and announced his intention of making Picasso an honorary citizen of the town ("My friend the mayor of Antibes and his gang of De Gaullists are going to die of envy").

From the day he dropped in at the Vallauris fair last summer, Picasso had lost all interest in the huge paintings he was doing for the Castle Grimaldi museum at Antibes (TIME, Oct. 6). He had settled down at Vallauris with his one-year-old son and the baby's beautiful young mother, Franchise Gillot, and turned out well over a thousand pieces of pottery.

His modest booth at the fair held 29 of Picasso's proudest plates, painted with abstract and neo-classical motifs. Franchise's face—happy, sad or angry—his baby's smile, a bullfighter, a skeletal fish, were repeated often in his designs. There were also ten deep jugs and thin-necked jars designed as a sort of hollow painted sculpture. One of the liveliest was half-pot and half-owl. Picasso's pottery owed a great deal to archaic Mediterranean sculpture and ceramics, which represented beasts and gods in a similar bulging shorthand, but it also had a 20th Century wit and a deliberate lack of refinement that marked it as his own.

The Duchess of Windsor, resplendent in blue at the fair's opening, was heard to remark that she found Picasso's new things "beautiful, but I wonder what use one could make of them." Whatever their possible use, Picasso had obviously enjoyed making them. When night fell on the fair's opening day, Picasso turned smiling to an assistant in his factory workroom and said, "You know, Jules, I am happy here. I think I'll never leave,"