STONEWARE BY JEAN LERAT

A lidded stoneware jar by Jean Lerat, made at his studio in La Borne. The small village in the Berry province of central France became, under the Lerats' influence, the epicenter of a movement that revolutionized studio ceramics in post-war Europe. Jean and Jacqueline Lerat arrived in La Borne in 1941 to study its centuries-old stoneware tradition, and in doing so took the earthenware into the forum of free artistic expression fusing the mineral directness of the local clay with a painterly, gestural sensibility shaped in part by their personal encounters with Bernard Leach and Shoji Hamada. The surface of this jar bears all of that lineage: broad brushstrokes of iron oxide swept over a speckled cream ground, loose and confident, applied at the leather-hard stage before firing. The bulbous body narrows to a wide open mouth; the conical lid is topped with a turned knob, the whole piece unified by a raw palette of deep rust, warm tan, and scattered cobalt specks, the glaze pooling and thinning exactly as intended. Signed J. Lerat on the base. A rare signed example from one of the defining figures of 20th century French ceramics.

JEAN LERAT
FRANCE, 1970'S
7" x 9½"