Pierre Devie

Pierre Devie is one of the quiet masters of French studio ceramics of the second half of the twentieth century. Trained in Barcelona in the circle of Josep Llorens Artigas, and working for some thirty-five years in the solitude of the Corbières and the Pyrenees, he created porcelain and stoneware of rare restraint and poise, their forms pared back and their glazes of great subtlety. Appreciated in his time chiefly by connoisseurs, and made in small numbers, his pieces are held today in the collection of the Musée national de Céramique at Sèvres and are increasingly sought after by collectors.

Pierre Devie was born in 1938 into a privileged family with a deep appreciation of art, and developed an early love of Asian ceramics. To reassure his family, he completed three years at the École des Hautes Études Commerciales in Paris, but chose not to pursue a commercial career. He turned instead to a manual craft better suited to his character, one in which ethics held an important place, and after his military service he decided to become a potter.

Thanks to a letter of recommendation from a relative to the Catalan ceramicist Josep Llorens Artigas, he joined the Escola Massana in Barcelona, where he spent two years, in 1963 and 1964. There he learned to throw and to fire a wood kiln, while teaching himself the science of glazes through specialist literature, much of it American.

In 1965 he set up his first studio in a former sheepfold in the Corbières, at Les Cabanes-de-Lapalme in the Aude. The wild, remote setting suited this solitary man perfectly. He equipped it with a small wood-fired kiln and began to produce small porcelains, notably globular and cylindrical vases, together with larger pieces in glazed stoneware, such as bottle vases, bowls and boxes, every bit as delicate, and renowned today for their great aesthetic quality. Their spare, understated character appealed at the time only to connoisseurs, and his output remained accordingly small.

In 1970 his solitude was broken by the arrival of Agnès Josse, a ceramicist who came to him as an apprentice and became his wife. In 1974, motorway construction forced him to leave his little paradise, and he moved to Prats-de-Mollo-la-Preste, in the Pyrénées-Orientales, where he continued to work until 2000. From this later period, the Musée national de Céramique at Sèvres acquired directly from the artist, in 1983, a rectangular stoneware vase of 1982, its deep blue glaze streaked with green runs that evoke an abstract landscape.