Georges Jouve
Finished in dark enamel, femme offers a striking silhouette with its enclosed spaces and circular motif. In title, the work evokes the body of a woman; in image, however, it remains purely abstract, feminine in only its curving sensuality and otherwise suffuse with the material masculinity of much modern sculpture. There is to its dark form a certain hardness, its structure more architectural than evocative of flesh. Smoothed to a polish, and with metallic glaze, the work appears made from tarnished bronze. Yet for all its apparent solidity, its medium has nothing of metal’s permanence, ceramics being brittle and breakable. To the viewer, the form’s fragility goes unseen beneath varnish, its mud-coloured truth hidden by a bronze façade. Tapping the enamelled surface, however, one hears the ringing not of metal but of baked earth.
b.1910, Fontenay-sous-Bois; d.1964, Les Marronniers
Georges Jouve was a ceramicist of rare eclecticism, his formal concerns in turn provincial and modernist. Indeed, all his work taken together appears to have been made by two men of vastly different preoccupations. Jouve did not care for distinctions between the useful and the decorative, nor, apparently, between the tasteful and the kitsch. He was just as given to shaping fussy figurines as he was to creating large, abstracted sculptures in clay. There was the Jouve of the trinket and the Jouve of high design. While the first may be disregarded as twee, the second is remembered as a significant twentieth-century ceramicist. In sculpture, Jouve found a distinct visual language akin to that of Henry Moore and Constantin Brancusi, yet without their allusions to the human figure. His ceramic objects are abstract, sensual forms, commanding in their presence and confident in line. That Jouve raised so humble a medium to such modernist heights brought him lasting fame. That he also produced hand-painted cherubs and vases made to look like busty women, only made his sculptures all the more remarkable for their aesthetic restraint.