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Close Friend: Picasso's ceramic art is inextricably linked with Vallauris, that little village in Provence. It was in 1936 that he visited it for the first time, together with his friend the poet Paul Eluard, on a car tour. It is situated near Cannes, and ever since Roman times there has been a lot of pottery there. By the 1930s, however, a great number of workshops had had to close down, because their traditional craft had ceased to attract customers.
Westward Movement.—In 1803, Napoleon I ratified the treaty ceding Louisiana to the United States, thus opening the West to American settlers. Six weeks later Meriwether Lewis,.a young Virginian who was a close friend of President Thomas Jefferson, left Washington, D.C., to be co-leader with William Clark of an expedition that was to pave the way for American expansion to the Pacific.
The picture was painted on the same day that he received news of the death of his old friend Julio Gonzalez, a fellow sculptor who used to join him in many of his experiments in Boisgeloup. There are two ways in which suffering appears to be taken for granted in this painting: his grief over his friend's death and his despair of the times unite in a cheerless memento mori that could not have been formulated more desperately by any of the Christians of the Middle Ages.
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