Sixty-three original prints and limited-edition ceramics made by Pablo Picasso are now on view at the Bowers Museum in Santa Ana, pulled from a private Florida collection that took more than 50 years to assemble. The exhibition, titled Picasso Ceramics from the Rosenbaum Collection, opened Saturday and runs through February 28, 2027.
The works come from the collection of Marvin Rosenbaum of Boca Raton, Florida, who gathered Picasso ceramics for over 50 years, building a trove that now includes more than 600 pieces, according to Bowers Museum. The show is organized by Landau Traveling Exhibitions of Los Angeles, with contributions from Bowers and guest curator Dr. Salvador Haro González, the museum notes.
A Collector's Decades-Long Devotion
The Rosenbaum exhibition is not new to the road. Per Landau Traveling Exhibitions, the show has been touring internationally since 2013, carrying Rosenbaum's holdings to audiences well beyond Florida. Bowers lists the Santa Ana run as spanning October 24, 2026, through February 28, 2027, though Landau's own site describes a Bowers presentation arriving in October 2027 — a discrepancy between the two sources that remains unresolved.
Picasso's path into ceramics began in the summer of 1946, when he attended an exhibition of local handcrafts in Vallauris, France, and met Georges and Suzanne Ramie, owners of the Madoura Pottery, according to the exhibition record on emuseum.org. The Ramie family and Madoura staff gave Picasso advice and assistance with colors, glazing and firing as he began producing ceramic pieces at the workshop, the same record states.
Nearly 4,000 Works in a Quarter-Century
Over the next 25 years, Picasso created nearly 4,000 ceramic works, according to the Bowers Museum. The Santa Ana exhibition zeroes in on his editioned ceramics made between 1947 and 1971, a production method that, as the Dallas Morning News has reported in connection with a separate Picasso ceramics show, made his ceramic output much more accessible than his paintings. Picasso and the Ramies also developed a series of stamps applied to the underside of works to identify authorized, numbered or signed examples, per emuseum.org.
Bowers Museum describes this facet of Picasso's career as a fascinating and often overlooked chapter in his output, distinct from the Cubist movement he co-founded and the paintings for which he is best known. According to the Los Angeles Times, Picasso began visiting the Madoura pottery workshops in Vallauris in 1947, the year his editioned ceramics production formally commenced.
Curators Frame Clay as a Window Into Picasso
Guest curator Salvador Haro González said Picasso created complex and innovative ceramic works, and added that ceramics are familiar to ordinary people in a way that helps them understand the artist's viewpoint, according to the Times. Bowers Museum chief executive Seán O'Harrow said the exhibition offers a unique opportunity to explore dimensions of Picasso's creativity, per the same report.
O'Harrow also said he hopes the show inspires visitors to see Picasso in a new light, and that great artists continue experimenting and reimagining the world, the Times reported. Those remarks frame the Bowers presentation as an attempt to widen the public's picture of an artist whose name is most often tied to canvas rather than clay.
Other Museums Have Mined Picasso's Clay Period
Bowers is not alone this year in revisiting Picasso's ceramic work. The Meadows Museum at Southern Methodist University in Dallas opened Picasso Beyond the Canvas on August 23, 2026, an exhibit that the Dallas Morning News reported includes 18 ceramic pieces, 11 prints and one ink wash, running through January 24, 2027.
Other institutions have built entire collections and exhibitions around Picasso's ceramics over the decades. The Picasso Museum Barcelona has organized Picasso ceramics. Jacqueline's gift to Barcelona, built around the donation Jacqueline Picasso made to the city of 41 original ceramic pieces in 1982, according to the museum. In England, York Art Gallery displayed Picasso ceramics from the Attenborough collection from July 28 to November 5, 2017, alongside the gallery's British studio ceramics holdings — a collection Lord and Lady Attenborough began in 1954 after meeting Picasso on a family holiday in the south of France, per York Museums Trust.
