From the April 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.
In 1938, Suzanne Ramié, née Douly, and her husband, Georges, stumbled upon Vallauris – a small town between Cannes and Antibes that had been a centre for ceramic production since Gallo-Roman times. The economic depression of the 1930s had hit business hard. Undaunted, the Ramiés founded a new studio, named Madoura (Maison Douly-Ramié). Here Suzanne, who had trained in art and textiles, made her own experimental sculptures, while employing local potters to work with artists keen to experiment with the medium. In 1946 Madoura contributed to the first post-war exhibition of ceramics at Vallauris. Picasso visited, was charmed and by 1948 had his own space in the Madoura studio, where he created whole series of original and editioned works with Ramié and her assistants. Other artists contributing to this collaborative endeavour, producing bold forms with playful motifs, included Henri Matisse, Victor Brauner, Jean Deval, Marc Chagall and Guidette Carbonell. Paris-born François Raty was also drawn to Vallauris in the 1950s, producing highly stylised clay sculptures of animals, with engravings and enamels, now rare and highly sought after. Other associated ateliers included Les 2 Potiers (Michelle and Jacques Serre), Gilbert Valentin’s Les Archanges and Les Argonautes, founded by Isabelle Ferlay and Frédérique Bourguet in 1953.
The allure of ceramics for the post-war generation stretched far beyond Provence. Georges Jouve set up a studio in Paris in 1944, having discovered clay while living in the potters’ village of Dieulefit, near Montélimar, after escaping German imprisonment early in the war. His sensuous ceramics were sometimes exuberantly figurative, sometimes restrainedly geometric, with vivid red, lemon-yellow and lime-green glazes, as well as a sophisticated matt black and white. Other important Parisian ceramicists included Mado Jolain, Colette Gueden and Valentine Schlegel, as well as husband and wife Jacques and Dani Ruelland, who set up a ceramics studio together in 1953. The meeting in Vienna of Hungarian refugees Pierre and Vera Székely and Frenchman André Borderie led to a decade-long collaboration in avant-garde ceramics, based south-west of Paris.
A third centre of gravity was La Borne in central France. The village, located amid woodlands, built upon layers of fine black anthracite clay, had fostered a pottery industry since the 13th century. In 1941 the artists Jean and Jacqueline Lerat arrived to study traditional ceramic techniques. Over 40 years they took wood-fired earthenware and stoneware into the domain of art. Among others associated with this distinctive school – formally experimental, raw textured, rooted in material – were Élisabeth Joulia, André Rozay and the Bulgarian Vassil Ivanoff, who came to La Borne in 1946 to dedicate himself to stoneware.
Hen lamp (c. 1949), Guidette Carbonell. Lebreton Gallery, Monaco (price on application). Courtesy Lebreton Gallery
Together these artists transformed ceramics from a functional medium into an expressive sculptural discipline. However, apart from Jouve, whose wife Jacqueline promoted his work after his early death, and big names such as Picasso, the market for these wares declined dramatically in the 1980s. Many attribute the revival of interest among collectors to the publication La Céramique française des années 50: French pottery of the 50s (2001) by Pierre Staudenmeyer, co-founder of the pioneering contemporary design gallery Galerie Neotu. Claire Gallois de Bagneux, head of sale and specialist in the Modern Decorative Art & Design department at Bonhams Paris, says: ‘Before that it was difficult to have access to information. Artists had mostly not signed their work.’ Since then, though, specialist dealerships including Thomas Fritsch and Lebreton have nurtured the market. Fritsch, who focuses on French ceramics made between 1945 and 1970 through exhibitions, art fairs and publications, says: ‘Until the 1970s, in France, pottery was considered artisanal. Now I have many clients with important collections of fine art who also have post-war ceramics.’ Other dealerships have increasingly incorporated French post-war ceramics into their design programmes. Julie Blum, of the Paris gallery Anne-Sophie Duval, recalls that when she took over the business from her mother in 2008, she discovered in her mother’s collection ‘a selection of beautiful post-war ceramics, very different from the 1920s ceramics she used to display in the gallery. Pieces by Valentine Schlegel, Pierre and Vera Székely, Suzanne Ramié, Jeanne Gatard, which had mostly come from Pierre Staudenmeyer’s gallery.’ She began to exhibit these and other ceramicists – including Ivanoff whose work she showed at TEFAF Maastricht year – encouraged by growing public interest generally in hand-crafted homeware, and the interest of young contemporary artists in clay.
Public museums have also supported scholarship. But while there have been regional exhibitions – in Vallauris, Bourges, Roubaix, La Borne and Toulouse – and a retrospective of Carbonell at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris in 2007, it was only in 2021 that the exhibition ‘The Flames: The Age of Ceramics’ at the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris really brought the material to a much broader French public.
Meanwhile, auction prices have surged over the last ten years. Picasso has his own market – in 2012, his Big Vase with Veiled Women (1950) set a record for Picasso ceramics at auction, fetching £735,650 (estimate £70,000–£100,000) at Christie’s London. Among the rest, Jouve holds the top slot. At Bonhams London in 2024, an impressive pair of caryatids in a deep green glaze, nearly two metres high, designed by Jouve in c. 1946, achieved £127,400. The record for Jouve is held by a sensuous ceramic table on oak legs from 1950, which sold at Christie’s Paris for €1.1m in May 2022 (estimate €500,000– €700,000). Flavien Gaillard, Christie’s head of design in Europe, notes that while prices for his 1950s monochrome abstract pieces remain strong, there is growing interest in his figurative pieces.
Monumental ‘Champignon’ sculpture, (1970), Élisabeth Joulia. Bonhams Cornette de Saint Cyr, $25,600. Courtesy Bonhams Cornette de Saint Cyr
But even works by lesser-known names are rising in value. In the sale in 2023 of ceramics from the collection of Fina Gomez at Bonhams Cornette de Saint Cyr in Paris, a monumental ‘Champignon’ sculpture from 1970 by Élisabeth Joulia sold for a record €25,600. This work, bought by Gomez from the artist the year it was made, had scale and provenance on its side. In general, Gallois de Bagneux explains, works from the 1950s, reflecting ‘a kind of liberation of creativity at that moment’, are the most prized. Gaillard reports high prices for 1950s pieces by Borderie, Székely and Valentine Schlegel (a dramatic vase from 1954 fetched $30,240 against a $12,000–$18,000 estimate at Christie’s New York last December). He notes, too, strong recent interest in artists from La Borne and the Ruellands: in Paris in December, among many well-performing lots, one single vessel, in a delicate pink glaze, created by the couple between 1970 and 1980, fetched €40,320 against a €12,000–€18,000 estimate.
Karim Mehanna of Lebreton remarks: ‘Ten years ago, collectors were mainly interested in a very small number of artists and iconic names […] Today we are witnessing a shift in the choice and selection of works, with more and more collectors primarily interested in the work for its quality of execution, its rarity and the fact that it is a one-of-a-kind piece.’ In May the gallery will take to TEFAF New York a glazed ceramic and wrought-iron lamp from 1949 by Guidette Carbonell. The United States has long been a major market. Hugues Magen, who opened his gallery Magen H in New York in 2003, has consistently championed postwar French ceramics there: ‘There has been a broader recognition of ceramics as an essential component of modern and contemporary design, and key post-war French ceramicists have gained newfound appreciation for their radical approaches to form and surface.’
From the April 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.