The exceptional daily life of Valentine Schlegel
About the exhibition "Valentine Schlegel, l'art pour le quotidien", on view until 17 September at the Musée Fabre in Montpellier.
She was a friend of Agnès Varda, and her brother-in-law was Jean Vilar... Born in Sète in 1925, Valentine Schleger grew up in a family full of fantasy, where anything was possible through joy and DIY. For her, art and the art of living were one and the same. "I love the exceptional everyday", she used to say. Valentine Schlegel, a sculptor and ceramist who triumphed in the 1960s and 1970s with her warm yet ascetic landscape fireplaces, and who played a part in the revival of ceramics, died in Paris in 2021. The Musée Fabre pays tribute to her in Montpellier from 12 May until 17 September 2023. Montpellier is where she graduated from the Beaux-Arts.
The exhibition about the designer Valentine Schlegel can be seen in the Hôtel de Cabrières-Sabatier d'Espeyran, the museum's decorative arts department. In the salons on the second floor, visitors will discover the major milestones in the career of this artist, a ceramist and sculptor in turn, a solitary figure who was surrounded by others, combining her talents and her taste for freedom to create a true art of living.
The exhibition is based around a selection of remarkable objects, ceramics and models of the fireplaces that made her a success, showing the diversity of her work and putting it into perspective with her poetic relationship with everyday life, as well as the photographs taken by her friend, the film-maker Agnès Varda, and by her sisters, showing her at work.
Valentine Schlegel knew her art history inside out. As Elisabeth Védrenne recalls in her article for Connaissance des arts magazine, "she regularly evoked Braque, Picasso, Arp... to her pupils at the workshop for children under fifteen at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs. Today, we can add Barbara Hepworth, as the British artist's marble sculptures breathe the same air as her clay vases. After all, "the ceramist takes on board the ambient biomorphism, the new mystique of a culture of nature, and models in clay objects that seem to have been delivered as they are by the elements! It brings to mind the stones and bones that Henry Moore collected on the beaches and stored in his library of natural forms, a cabinet of curiosities from which he drew his repertoire of shapes reduced to the essential.
Even if Valentine Schlegel accumulates drawings, the shapes seem to be born directly under her fingers, as if they had just been found. She doesn't copy, she reinvents. Her works of art for sale have appeared at public auction 152 times, mostly in the Sculpture-Volume category. The oldest auction is undoubtedly the work of art Graine, sold in 2005 at Christie's in the Ceramics category, and the most recent appears to be Jardin aux quatre arbres/Aloe veras/Two trees/Aloe veras on an orange background/Tree in a garden, sold in 2023 in the Drawing-Watercolour category. Ranked 1849th in the top 5000 of the world's best-selling artists at auction on the contemporary art market in 2022, her works of art for sale are mainly auctioned in France.
The artist regularly collaborated with Andrée Schlegel-Vilar (1916-2009), her sister. Primarily a ceramist, Andrée Vilar was also an illustrator, poet and painter. An erudite woman, she worked alongside her husband Jean Vilar (creator of the Festival d'Avignon) with the best artists of her time, including Alexander Calder, who became a great friend of the couple. Her poetic works, with their refined tones, offer an interplay of organic materials, inspired by wet rocks, coral and rolled pebbles. His pieces, all unique, combine soft shapes, surrealism-infused design and the roughness of the material. Her original work has attracted the attention of the famous art gallery La demeure, which has represented her on several occasions in exhibitions in collaboration with Valentine Schlegel.
There is never a straight line in Valentine Schlegel's work, which is all sensuality and ease of movement. Always asymmetrical silhouettes. A bit like Isamu Noguchi," notes the Connaissance des arts journalist. This Japanese-American artist and designer has just had his first major retrospective in France at LaM. A veritable link between East and West, transcending borders and artistic categories, Isamu Noguchi (1904-1988) embodies an open, decompartmentalised vision of art that continues to influence contemporary creation today. Featuring more than 250 works (sculptures, drawings, design objects, set design objects and photographs), the exhibition in Villeneuve d'Ascq, which closed on 2 July, was exceptional in terms of both its scope and the issues it highlighted, inviting visitors to discover the kaleidoscopic work of an artist who is little known in Europe, yet who left a lasting mark on history.
As Elisabeth Védrenne points out, Valentine Schlegel explodes the artist/craftsman segregation with her forms, which are as powerful as they are ambiguous. "One glimpses a bone harmoniously embedded in a giant tear, giving rise to a tension, an impulse, a very strong feeling of life, of germination. One imagines a flint with sharp edges slightly softened, fitted to a sort of plump tulip onion. The highly vegetal world is exacerbated here, not by any violence, but on the contrary by an astonishing calm. A magnificent contrast between the fullness of large seeds and unknown bulbs, coexisting with the prickle of a few giant thorns or rhizomes. Arborescence of algae lazily erecting their short tentacles towards the light. Fingers proliferating like Digitalis purpurea, the flowers also known as shepherd's gloves. Mouths everywhere, hemmed in like the gullets of fledglings. It's easy to guess that it wouldn't take much for these soothing forms to tip over into the frightening.
The journalist also admires the "fascinating" technical perfection of Valentine Schlegel's pot necks. The beauty of the enamels is "remarkable". The palette is "refined", with browns and greys enhanced by blacks, blues and olive greens. "And its often thick slip is diluted with milky whites. The artist wanted his vases and pots to be functional, to hold flowers and fruit. But the way we look at them today sees them more as works of art for sale that stand on their own. "Why did she abandon the production of these splendid chamotte earthenwares at one point in her life?" asks Elisabeth Védrenne. "She had just had a very successful exhibition at the La Demeure art gallery in 1957. She replied that she couldn't earn enough from them. A mystery. In any case, it was at the same time as she discovered plaster and its possibilities. In the 1960s, she embarked on her architectural environments.
Among the hundred or so staff fireplaces that Valentine Schlegel designed over a period of forty years, until 2000, and signed with her faithful assistant Frédéric Sichel-Dulong, all are unique, white and fluid.
Caption: Valentine Schlegel with an earthenware vase, chamotte earthenware, enamel, circa 1955, Photograph by Agnès Varda ©Succession Agnès Varda - Fonds Agnès Varda déposé à l'institut pour la photographie, Courtesy Galerie Nathalie Obadia ©ADAGP, Paris, 2023