ÉLISABETH JOULIA (1925-2003) - FORMER YVONNE BRUNHAMMER COLL - Lot 66

ÉLISABETH JOULIA (1925-2003) - FORMER YVONNE BRUNHAMMER COLLECTION Hatching Vase with soliflore mouth. Stoneware proof. Signed JOULIA towards the base. Height: 26cm Provenance: Former Former Yvonne Brunhammer Collection. Acquired directly from the latter, who inherited it directly from the artist. Exhibitions: - Joulia - Céramiques/sculptures 1950 / 1983 - Musée de Saint-Amand-les-Eaux, from October 8 to November 27, 1983. Our work exhibited at this event. - Pierre Staudenmeyer, la passion céramique - Sotheby's France, Paris, February 5 - 15, 2014. Our work exhibited at this event. - N6-N7 - Les Nationales de la Céramique -Ecomusée de la Bresse bourguignonne, Château de Pierre-de-Bresse, from April 4 to December 20, 2015. Our work exhibited at this event. - Traits d'union - 70 ans d'expression céramique française (1947-2017) - Hospice de Malrigou, Saint-Jean-d'Estissac, June 1 to 3, July 21 to 29 and August 19 to 26, 2018. Our work exhibited during this event. - Les Trente Glorieuses - Collection Pascal Marziano1950-1980. Un timbré de céramique -Musée de la Poterie Méditerranéenne, Saint-Quentin-la-Poterie, April 5 to October 25, 2020. Our work exhibited at this event. Bibliography: - Joulia - Céramiques/sculptures 1950/1983 - Catalogue de l'exposition organisée au Musée de Saint-Amand-les-Eaux (8 octobre - 27 novembre 1983), Éditions Musée de Saint-Amand-les-Eaux, Saint-Amand-les-Eaux, 1983. Our work reproduced on page 22. - Yvonne Brunhammer, "Surely Valentine" in The World of Interiors - October 2012 issue. Our work can be seen in a photograph reproduced on page 302, in an article devoted to the house in the Montparnasse district that Valentine Schlegel shared with Yvonne Brunhammer. - Philippe Chambost, Pascal Marziano and Arnaud Serpollet - 1947-2017, 70 ans d'expression céramique française - Éditions Les livres de l'îlot, Neuvic, 2020. Our work reproduced on pages 6 and 206. - Les Trente Glorieuses - Collection Pascal Marziano - Catalogue of the exhibition organized at the Musée de la Poterie Méditerranéenne, Saint-Quentin-la-Poterie (April 5 - October 25, 2020), Éditions Musée de la Poterie Méditerranéenne, Saint-Quentin-la-Poterie, 2020. Our work reproduced on page 33. Bibliography and related works: Joseph Rossetto - Joulia - Faites entrer l'infini - Éditions Centre céramique Contemporaine, La Borne, 2019. A variant reproduced on page 76. Initially trained in fresco at the Écoles des Beaux-Arts in Clermont-Ferrand and Paris, it was in Bourges, with ceramist Jean Lerat (1913-1992) that Élisabeth Joulia discovered her deep passion for clay, which would never leave her. In 1949, she moved to La Borne, a Cher village with a rich pottery past, known since the 13th century for its stoneware production, where Jean Lerat and his wife Jacqueline, née Bouvet (1920-2009), were based. A hotbed of traditional ceramics, La Borne enjoyed a new lease of life in the 1940s thanks to the arrival of a generation of artists who helped transform it into a hotbed of contemporary creation - Joulia, alongside the Lerats, was one of the pioneering figures in this return to the earth. Rejecting formal conventions and forms inherited from tradition, Élisabeth Joulia quickly developed a free, instinctive practice, combining turning, colombin modeling and deformation. She deliberately distances herself from symmetry and aesthetic standards, to make way for a more organic, visceral expression. Each piece bears the trace of her fingers: she shapes, compresses, jostles the material to reveal its truth; [she needs no other tools than her hands]. Joulia herself collects her engobes from nature - her main source of inspiration - and claims a direct and sincere approach to clay, without artifice. Our important vase, made in 1958, bears witness to her early interest in abstract forms; not radical abstraction, but one that resonates with nature and the human body, seen - as with the Lerats - as the primary measure of our relationship to the world. Here, she works on a vase with a rough, disproportionate shape, softened by round, organic contours. Earth asserts itself, inhabiting the space. Destructured, asymmetrical, sensitive - it sums up her plastic ambition and her universe, still in its infancy. Élisabeth Joulia's work is characterized by this organic abstraction, traversed by the forms of nature and the body, often female. Following on from the Chestnut and Hatching series, which included Roses, she initiated her