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Vallauris: The Pitcher

From humble domestic object, the pitcher acquired a new status as a decorative object for the home and inspired varied experiments by studio potters working as 'artists'.

Thus, this humble, but extremely elegant, pitcher Aegitna, from the studio of Saltalamacchia, hand-turned and decorated with a traditional green glaze on an earthenware body, provided a challenge for artistic expression, inducing artists to create pitchers that could command attention as 'objets d'art' for the living room; alongside vases, fruit bowls, candle holders, ash-trays, and pictures:


Today, this humble pitcher has recovered a new capacity to function aesthetically: as an expression of a rural aesthetic.

By contrast Robert Picault reinvented the pitcher — and all other kitchen ware —  enabling them to function both as pitcher and as decorative object; fulfilling William Morris ideal. 

Alongside domestically functional objects, artists like Alexandre Kostanda produced purely decorative versions of domestic objects, deliberately depriving them of (undermining) their functionality. This is particularly noticeable in these deliberately truncated pitchers (c.1953), that can only function as 'representations'.
 

 
Likewise this heavy, luscious pitcher by Odette Gourju et Lyuba Naumovich, at Le Grand Chêne, was intended to be used solely as  a ceramic canvas for a luscious painted linear composition: 
 

Likewise, this elongated 'deconstruction' of the pitcher, by Annette Roux at nearby Golfe Juan, hybridises the object as a vase:
 

These two pitchers, by Alexander Kostanda, made during the first half of the 50s, in Vallauris, show the variety of forms that these studios produced; achieving the highest quality of form and skills deliberately departing from the conventions of 'good taste':
 

       

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