Suzanne RAMIE (French, 1905-1974)
Suzanne Ramie was one of the key figures of the potters city of Vallauris.
In 1938 Suzanne and her husband Georges Ramie moved to Vallauris and created the studio Madoura.
By 1948, Ramie set aside space in their studio for Picasso to produce his works.
For over 25 years Picasso produced more than 3,500 original ceramics at the Madoura atelier.
Her personal works revealed a sculptural perception of ceramics. Ramie conceived her sculptural innovations as an extension of her research on drawing and painting.
Her ceramics were given pure lines and were highlighted by colorful glazed enamel.
Her background as a draftsman brought her to conceive fantasist forms that broke the traditional figures and techniques that were still dominant in Vallauris at the time.
François RATY (French, 1928-1982)
Born in Paris in from a family of great industrialists, in 1946 François Raty studied drawing and painting for two years at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière.
His first exhibition in 1946 took place in the Parisian gallery Le Peau de Porc.
In 1951, he moved to the famous city of potters, Vallauris, and met many artists including René Maurel (1910-1986), who taught him ceramics.
Very quickly François Raty created unique pieces, outengraved patterns and enhanced with brown enamels.
Like Picasso and the surrealists he was inspired by the animal world, birds, monkeys, fennecs, bulls, horses, gorillas and even insects.
Raty's emblematic work, 'The man with fish' (kept at the Sèvres museum) was noticed in 1961 during the exhibition 'L'enterrement de la Pièce Unique'.
The sculptures of Raty are rare and held by major collectors worldwide.
Gilbert PORTANIER (French, born 1926)
Around the age of 17, he felt a taste for the arts born in him. In 1945, he left for Paris to study architecture at the ENSBA.
He quickly turned to painting and drawing which he would soon study as an autodidact. In 1948, after a stay in Brussels, he returned to the French Riviera where, during a visit to Vallauris, he discovered the world of ceramics and met Picasso.
In 1949, he created, with his friends Albert Diato and Francine Del Pierre, a small workshop, which they called "Le Triptyque", where they began to learn self-taught ceramics together.
In 1954, he moved into a traditional pottery where he had large workshops, found a mythical place of ceramics where all the possibilities of a still virgin art were available to him. He learns the multiple techniques that are attached to it and creates his own figurative, abstract, suggestive language, materialized by versatile graphics of great freedom. Its color palette betrays the painter's sensitivity through its richness and intensity.
For Portanier, ceramics are a way of translating feelings, emotions, and the pleasures of life. He is a colourist and enamel connoisseur, just like a drawing virtuoso.
In 2018, creation of the Gilbert Portanier Foundation located at 8 Chemin des Potiers in Vallauris.
Jacques POUCHAIN (French, 1925 - 2015)
Born in 1925 the young Jacques Pouchain left Paris and set up a studio in Dieulefit in the Drome region of Southern France.
He produced utilitarian work as well as decorative items, particularly animals shapes Vases and sculptures.
He developed into larger abstract pieces and later moved towards painting.
His work has been exhibited in the Musée d'Art Moderne in Paris. Pouchain lived in Dieulefit (in French it means "God created it"), a town inhabited by many other artists and writers.