THE FAIENCES OF APT
A COMPILATION OF THE ESSAY BY ANDRÉ KAUFFMANN:
JOSEPH BERNARD, THE COLORS OF THE EARTH, 2005
When you arrive in Provence for the first time, you’re struck by the colors before anything else: the blue sky, the distant grey of the Ventoux summit, the green of oak forests, the infinite variations of ochre cliffs and, if you’re there at the right time of year, mid-July, the deep mauve of the lavender whose heady perfume announces the harvest underway in the surrounding fields.
After a few days, you discover the subtle meeting of flavors at the dinners in Bernard’s cabanon: the tartness of Céleste’s giant tomatoes, the sharpness of Martin’s goat cheese, the sweetness of César’s honey on a slice of Berdine’s brioche, the melons are sometimes good, but often better candied than fresh.
The chirping of the cicadas grates on your ears and ends up saturating your senses, so you need a little more time – or luck – before you spot what’s been under your nose from the first meal: the gentle mixing of yellows and browns on the platter the apricots were served in, or the blue bowls filled with sparkling Japanese tea. And most of all the plate the savory omelet arrives rolled-up on, its yellow and somewhat faded pink clear signs of its age: it’s one of “grandpa’s plates,” meaning it was thrown or cast by Joseph Bernard back in the day before Bernard Faucon’s birth brought the two family names together!
Yes, the best kept secret in Bernard’s cooking (the recipes he shares freely) are the “homemade” dishes on which it is served – those solid-colored or marbled ceramics which we don’t spot at first glance!
Of the two families, it’s the Bernards – Mady’s side – whose history overlaps with the faience of Apt from the 18th century. Often signaled as ceramicists in official census records and family archives, the six generations that succeeded André Bernard (1751-1813) over two centuries worked first in industrial factories, and then, beginning in the 20th century as craftsmen.
André Bernard we know almost nothing about: only that he was born in 1751, and was working as a potter when César Moulin—a pioneer of the marbled faïence platter that borrowed its shape from silverware and its coloring from porphyry or other veined stones—opened his first workshop in 1768.
Until the decline of faience in the late 19th century, he would be succeeded by Joseph Bernard I (1793- ?) and Jean-André Bernard (1813-1898). To make ends meet, Joseph Bernard II (1840-1923) founded a cartonnage workshop around 1873 in the family home in the center of Apt. It was a business closely tied to one of the region’s major economic activities – candied fruit production. His son André Bernard II (1866-1934) became his business associate.
In the vast cartonnage workshop, cardboard was cut on long tables, fashioned and glued into boxes, then covered with white, pink or blue folded paper, decorated with fashionable chromolithographs and garnished with a ribbon before being delivered to the sweets factories. There was significant demand: highly successful, the candied fruits of Apt were shipped around the world. The Bernard cartonnage factory flourished until WWI… but nobody in the family forgot about the faience work.
In his journal, Joseph Bernard II (1903-1973), “the grandfather” of Bernard Faucon’s generation, wrote: “Who would have dreamt back then of the faience of Apt? All the workers switched to other disciplines except Sagy (the inventor of terre flammée) who went to work in Aubagne and Uzès where he brought “marbled clay” to Pichon. Was it out of nostalgia, or the hope of one day returning to their former profession of ceramicist, that my father and grandfather set up a wheel in a room adjacent to the house? On a shelf sat quite a large collection of molds, fettling knives, and a few tools… Was everything dormant? But nothing has stopped. Growing up, I would sometimes sit at the wheel, or gaze at the molds. I hadn’t yet felt the call of clay, and yet a little window facing the Chapelle of Notre Dame de Lagarde, couched in a pine forest, encouraged me to day dream…”
During the war, there was a slump in the cartonnage business and André Bernard turned once again to ceramics. Young Joseph witnessed the burst of enthusiasm of these great elders and saw his father’s ceramics once again come out of the kiln. Torn between cartonnage and ceramics, he felt more attracted by the creative work that clay offered. While the birth of the ceramics workshop saw the creation of works intended to make a lasting impression—like the column of dolphins now exhibited in the Apt museum—a good part of output came from the classical reparatory of the end of the previous century.
This regular back-and-forth between cartonnage and ceramics. During the 1920s, and until the father’s death in 1934, cartonnage and faience would function together, under the direction of André and his sons. Over the course of the same decade, still under his father’s kind and watchful eye, Joseph would assert his creative talents: after Sagy, he too discovered the terres flammées technique. He was invited to teach ceramics in Moustier. A builder of floats for the art parade held in Apt each year, he brought home several prizes, a token of the respect and consideration in Apt society.
There was a friendly rivalry between Léon Sagy and the Bernard father and son: while the latter openly professed their admiration for the “inventor of terre flammée” it came with more than a few affronts to their pride. When André congratulated him several times for his flammées, Sagy replied: “You know my secret, but you’ll never have my hands to execute it.”
The April 1927 publication of a glowing article about Léon Sagy in the “Petit Marseillais” that did not cite André and Joseph Bernard convinced them to develop their own terre flammée technique. “My father and I decided to do flammé. We met the next morning in the workshop. My father started working; but I found the trials too fastidious, too careful. It’s because he told you ‘you’ll never have my hands’ that you’re overthinking everything.” The father continued his trials alone all morning and left the place to his son for the afternoon. “I started my tests. And there gradually, I got closer to what I saw my father doing. He had missed the secret. Back at the wheel, the marbled effect – the flammée – appeared at my fingertips. I shouted with joy.”
I left with a little test to show my father. I had just given him one of his greatest joys: “Now you’ve proven yourself.” Back at the workshop my father threw a flamed vase. We made about fifty and soon after we would exhibit them in a shop window in Apt.” When a mutual friend asked the two rivals, Sagy answered: “It’s exactly the same technique, but I invented it.”
Bernard and Sagy both had a hard time making a living as artisan ceramicists at a time when ceramics activity was concentrated around big production centers like Aubagne and Vallauris in the Midi, or Sarreguemines in the north.
Marcel Provence (1892-1951), whose real name was Marcel Joannon, was one of the main advocates of the movement to bring back traditional Provençal values. He would organize folk events in Haute-Provence. After seeing faience in Moustiers-Sainte-Marie, he created a ceramics school there and invited renowned ceramicists to come teach. André and Joseph Bernard took up the call for a year. Joseph Bernard’s participation in the ceramics renaissance in Moustiers was a brief but lasting episode in his career.
But these moments of gratification were fleeting and the lean years continued. The faience didn’t feed the family. In the early 30s, they would have to turn to other activities, though also in ceramics. It was no easy task running a workshop with 20 employees and Joseph the artist didn’t have a head for business. To honor the orders of Marseille merchants for funeral objects, an activity that would last seven years, he borrowed money to expand the workshops. But by 1938, he was insolvent and had to sell everything to pay back his debts. Ruined, without a workshop, the defeated ceramicist supported his family by working at a dyeing factory in Sorgues and then, after leaving the army in July 1940, at an antique store as a furniture deliverer. But he always kept one idea in the back of his head: go back to ceramics. “I set up a wheel in our apartment in Avignon like my father and great grandfather did. The morning before going to work and in the evening afterwards, I started working in the hope of returning to Apt. Since the multicolored clay couldn’t be purchased in a bazaar or casino, I would go looking for it in the quarries of Apt and my wife would prepare it for me.”
In 1942, his friends Maurice Julien, future mayor of Apt, and Gaston Mathieu encouraged Joseph Bernard to return to his hometown. He set up his new workshop at the Madeleine roundabout, whose façade you can still see today. After Léon Sagy died in 1939, in the decades after the war, Bernard was the only ceramicist working in Apt.
In 1948, his only daughter Mady married Francis Faucon, from Forcalquier. Their three sons Jean, Pierre and Bernard would grow up in their grandfather’s workshop and were introduced to the profession of ceramicist from a very young age. Until 1960, the Faucon and Bernard families nevertheless had “a terrible time of it. It was only after 1965 that the situation started to get better, finally ending in the splendid Morocco period.”
Indeed, starting in the late 1950s, Joseph Bernard began to be more widely recognized: articles in the local and national press testified to this, and orders often arrived from wealthy families or celebrities. Sabran Pontevès placed several orders; in 1953, he and painter Henri Pertus exhibited in Toulon; Marc Chagall, who lived in Vence, spoke of his desire “to get the clay of Apt”; the city of Apt ordered a giant vase as a gift to General de Gaulle during a visit in 1962… The workshop also built up a clientele of American families residing in Provence or passing through the region, which contributed to the workshop’s international reputation.
Several Apt natives were living among the community of French expatriates in Morocco including Louis Vagina, who had arrived in the early 1930s with his family. After filling several low-level positions at the palace of Casablanca, in the service of Sultan Mohammed V, he gradually earned the latter’s trust and became the palace steward. He then invited several Apt families to go to Morocco to work for the Sultan. Ties between the two men grew so close that, when the Sultan was forced into exile by France from 1935 to 1955, Vagina would be at his side and continue to run his protector’s palace. When Mohammed V returned, he was named king and Vagina became one of his closest advisors.
It was in the context of this close-knit relationship between Apt and Morocco that, one day in 1967, Louis Vagina told Joseph Bernard: “I want you to make me a nice piece from Apt especially for King Hassan II. Since you don’t want to come to Morocco, I will offer him this piece of faience and he will see what an Aptian artisan is capable of.” So began a human and artistic adventure that would last five years. The piece in question was a soup tureen with a flower cover and display stand, in an 18th century style. A few days after having sent it, he received a letter from the palace inviting him to come to Morocco. During his first stay, in January 1968, Joseph Bernard met King Hassan II several times in Rabat, who ordered a complete set of several hundred pieces in nougatine green, the color of Islam.
At the behest of Hassan II, he would regularly return to Morocco to found and direct the Rabat Royal Ceramics Institute. His stays from 1968 and 1969 were devoted to the construction of a ceramics workshop inside the Rabat palace fitted with European equipment: workbenches, foot wheels, an electric kiln. Joseph Bernard’s mission was to help the Moroccan workshops improve the quality of their production by training young potters in new processes and bolstering the reputation of quality craftsmanship in the kingdom of Morocco. Until 1973, the year of Joseph Bernard’s death, the Institute would undergo a period of heightened production, and would continue to operate for the next fifteen years with three to five workers, under the direction of his wife Odette and with help from his grandson Jean Faucon, who had already been his grandfather’s assistant in Rabat for several years.
A little while later, in 1976, Jean Faucon would also take over the Apt workshop and ensure the continuity of fine ceramics production using mixed clay. While remaining loyal to the traditional shapes and colors of “Castellet style,” he created new faience lines like octagonal and square dishes and plates without pearled borders. He introduced large blue veins into the flammée process with a dominant of ochre and marron, and created marbled clay with a very tight weft. He adapted the blue cameos with white borders his grandfather used for decorative vases for use on dinner sets. For 25 years, he would run the workshop until his sudden death in 2001, leaving behind a prosperous ceramics workshop whose clientele he had largely revitalized.
Like his brothers, Pierre Faucon had spent a large part his youth in the family workshop. He took over after his brother’s passing. Assisted by four employees trained under his direction, he brought his share of innovations to color and form: marbled and flamed in white and grey, multicolored floral handles on traditional forms such as bowls, soup tureens, table sets, closed spheres in mixed clay, and small obelisks.
