Francine Del Pierre | 1913 - 1968

Francine Del Pierre was born in Paris in 1913. Artistically inclined since her youth and gifted with a talent for writing, she becomes a journalist and begins frequenting Paris’ cultural circles, cultivating friendships with some of the most prominent artists of the time, including the composer Maurice Ravel, the actor and director Charles Dullin, and the painter Albert Diato. It is Diato, in fact, who introduces Del Pierre to the bohemian community of Montparnasse and Saint-Germain-des-Prés, and to Gilbert Portanier, then an architecture student at the École des Beaux-Arts.

In December 1946, at the house of a musician friend, Del Pierre makes her first encounter with clay, and, in her own words, decides ‘in a few hours to upturn [her] life and become a potter’. In those days, the small potters’ village of Vallauris is turning into a thriving artistic community: Pablo Picasso has just established himself at the Madoura Atelier, and numerous admirers of his work have flocked to the village to follow in the master’s footsteps. Thus Del Pierre, accompanied by Albert Diato and Gilbert Portanier, decided to move to the ‘city of one hundred potters’ to embark on an apprenticeship, in the hope to recapture ‘the joy [she] had experienced in feeling the clay respond to pressure and take shape’.

During the Vallauris years, Del Pierre establishes a small workshop, ‘Le Triptyque’, with Diato and Portanier, and together they begin exhibiting work, taking part in the yearly exhibitions of the Nerolium from 1949 to 1952 as well as similar shows in Brussels (1949), Cannes and Saint-Étienne (1950). She also exhibits alone with Diato in 1950 in Paris at the Galerie du Siècle. But it is not long before she realises the limitations of Vallauris, and in 1951, she is ready to leave and return to Paris with Diato. She eventually settles in a studio at 74 rue Albert, a rather run down space, but which allows her to welcome students and begin teaching.

While in Paris, she begins exhibiting at the Galerie MAI (1951, 1953, 1954, 1956). Here she meets Henry Rothschild, the founder of London’s Primavera Gallery. Impressed with her work and her technique, he offers her to exhibit her work in London, and to avoid the high prices required to import her pots, he installs her for a few months at Lucie Rie’s studio. In London, she becomes close to Lucie Rie and Hans Coper, and she also meets Bernard Leach, whose writing, particularly A Potter’s Book, had been pivotal in her early meditations over her practice. The master immediately recognises her talent, and a lifelong friendship, based on profound respect and admiration, is born. The two will exhibit together with Shoji Hamada — less appreciative of her work — at the Museum of Fine Arts in Caracas, Venezuela (1966),  at the Museo Guillermo Valencia in Popayán, Colombia (1966), and at the Museum of Arts and Crafts in Hamburg, Germany (1967).

In 1957, she meets the American potter Fance Franck and the two immediately find a connection which will last a lifetime: Del Pierre invites Franck to join her in the studio and the two will work together until Del Pierre’s death. Afterwards, Franck will be instrumental in ensuring that her legacy is not only recognised but celebrated. It is Franck who suggests a bigger and more central studio, and together, in 1959, they purchase a studio in rue Bonaparte. The new location brings in women who become new friends and clients, and collectors start showing at the door, finding work which is in tune with the current taste of the Parisian bourgeoisie. One of these women is Fina Gomez, who will go on to acquire Del Pierre’s best pieces.

What Del Pierre is doing is in fact unique in the landscape of French ceramics: far removed from commercial compromises but also from the debate between art and craft fashionable in the intellectual circles of the time, she infuses a sense of modernity and a ‘spiritual force’, in the words of Pierre Staudenmeyer, into her work. She works mostly with earthenware, except for the last two years of her life, during which, having purchased a stoneware kiln, she experiments with stoneware and porcelain. As Pierre Staudenmeyer reflects, her pots are as expressive as they are technical, her lines powerful and her technique rigorous; ‘her work reflects nature, ever-present and yet invisible’.

 According to Franck, Del Pierre’s focus on decorative elements was born of a fear of the boring and the banal, and yet her pots are never ostentatious. While the oriental taste is evident in her work, with clear references to Chinese, Japanese and Korean pottery, her work has been defined as ‘spiritually European’, the two poles in dynamic conversation.

In only nineteen years, Del Pierre created a body of work which succeeded in breaking all the rules of contemporary ceramics, as Leach often observed, constantly searching for new forms — some are never repeated throughout her career — albeit within strict aesthetic boundaries. A true ‘studio potter’ at heart, she creates work of extreme subtlety, ‘quiet, calm and reserved’ - Bernard Leach. Perhaps more celebrated abroad than in her own country, and rather late in her career, she chose to reject to conform to how French ceramic artists were leading their careers, either exhibiting in Salons, or through private intermediaries or setting up their own galleries or shops, in favour of a more intimate culture of close friendships. Of these friendships, the one with Frank will be crucial both during her life and after her death in 1968. In 1976, supported by the members of the future Association of the friends of Del Pierre — which acts informally starting in 1975 to maintain her legacy alive —, Franck organises the first retrospective of her work at the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Caen. Her legacy within the landscape of French ceramics was sealed by the Minister of Culture, André Malraux, who intervened to ensure Del Pierre was the first ceramicist whose work was honoured by a retrospective at the Museum of Sèvres, just after her death. Several museums acquired her work, including the V&A, the Mingeikan in Tokyo, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the Museo Internazionale delle Ceramiche in Faenza, and the Museum of Fine Arts of Caracas. Only posthumously did she enter the National Museum of Ceramics in Sèvres.

Eva Haghighi