Pablo Picasso's Vase deux anses hautes (1953) belongs to his celebrated Madoura ceramics period, when he transformed everyday pottery forms into vessels for a new kind of sculptural portraiture. Picasso reshapes the vase itself into a stylized female figure, one of the anthropomorphic forms that became a signature of his ceramic output in Vallauris.

The tall neck becomes a face, painted with wide almond eyes, a straight nose, and a small pursed mouth beneath a crown of petal and rosette motifs. Two high loop handles curve outward like stylized arms, while the rounded body below reads as a torso, its shoulders marked by a pair of sunburst medallions in incised white line against the dark glazed surface. Chevron and diamond patterning cascades down the lower body like the folds of a skirt, echoed in the petal border encircling the footed base.

Produced at Madoura Pottery in Vallauris, where Georges and Suzanne Ramié gave Picasso the technical freedom to experiment across clay, glaze, and form, the vase belongs to an edition of 400, numbered among the more than 3,500 ceramic works he created there between 1947 and 1971. It reflects the postwar creative escape Vallauris offered Picasso — proof of an artist reinventing an ancient craft into a fully modern form of expression.