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Jean-Claude de Crousaz (1931-2012) is one of the best-known Swiss ceramists of the post-war period. He trained in graphic design and decorative painting at the Geneva School of Decorative Arts from 1948 to 1951 (with Marcel Noverraz as his teacher), then at the Chavanne-Renens School of Ceramics. His meeting in Geneva with the ceramist Yseut Chevallier (who would become his wife in 1955) would definitively direct the young artist towards ceramics. The couple settled in 1955 in a studio called "Arpot" in Bernex (hence the Arpot signature under most of the everyday pieces created). After having made a little decorated earthenware, it was under the influence of Philippe Lambercy that the young potter began to take an interest in firing stoneware at high temperatures (up to 1300 degrees), a stoneware that he would soon make his material of choice. Between 1961 and 2004, the couple owned their own shop in Geneva, in the Old Town (rue de l’Hôtel-de-Ville), which enjoyed considerable commercial success. Jean-Claude de Crousaz also taught ceramic decoration at the Geneva School of Decorative Arts and at the Vevey School from 1980 to 1996. During this fruitful career, he received numerous international scholarships, awards and prizes: very early on, in 1960, a prize for young Swiss ceramists in Solothurn, a gold medal at the international exhibitions in Prague and Buenos Aires, another at the international competition in Faenza in 1965, then at the Vallauris Biennale in 1978; a Prize for Applied Arts and then a Federal Scholarship in Geneva, the Westerwald-Preis in Germany in 1979, the Prize of the City of Winterthur in 1983… The famous German porcelain maker Rosenthal commissioned shapes and decorations from him, which were widely distributed during the 80s and 90s. The influence of French-speaking Swiss ceramics was significantly increased by the international recognition of this stylistic “signature”.
"I make usable, functional ceramics" Jean-Claude de Crousaz liked to say, placing himself in a very German tradition of Gefässkeramik, a ceramic fully integrated into domestic life, essentially oriented towards the recipient. Throughout these years of activity, decorated pottery would constitute his preferred repertoire, which he would explore with as much skill as sensitivity, without ever fearing to be "too decorative". His chromatic palette, deliberately quite limited, was deployed on the side of oranges, ochres, greens, iron reds and cobalt blues. Around 1973, he painted chickens, pigeons or turkeys on large dishes with wax in reserve. The animal figures in the round came later, in the middle of the 80s: sheep and goats, pigeons, guinea fowl, even rhinoceroses and hippopotamuses modeled in the 1990s and 2000s. His meticulous observation owes much to a great friendship with the painter, engraver and animal sculptor Robert Hainard (1906-1999), who lived near his studio, in Bernex. Hainard was a writer and naturalist, a fervent promoter and pioneer of animal protection. It was he who taught Jean-Claude de Crousaz to make sketches from nature, to observe animal fauna directly in their living spaces. The wildest ones are observed during long walks at Basel Zoo, the most everyday ones are sketched on the spot in the poultry farms in the surrounding area. The attitudes and proportions are thus very real, but the ceramist allows himself extravagances in the pictorial translation of their plumage or their fur, adding fanciful commas, feather patterns or spots quickly traced on a scattering of dots or crossed wefts, in a freedom of inspiration which will make his reputation.
Jean-Claude de Crousaz has many artistic references, but most of them come from the Far East. He was particularly fascinated by the art of the most famous Japanese potter of the Edo period (17th century), Nonomura Ninseï (1600-1670): active in Kyoto, the latter was appreciated for the delicacy of his plant motifs applied with a brush on porcelain. He also liked the one who was undoubtedly Ninseï's most brilliant "student", the painter and potter Ogata Kensan (1663-1743), whose Oribe style was more spontaneous and vigorous, with intersecting decorations schematizing natural elements on often square stoneware formats, which will undoubtedly have inspired our artist's contemporary pottery. De Crousaz was cultured and curious about everything: he appreciated the spatial originality and sophisticated asymmetrical compositions of Japanese Imari porcelain, with blue and orange decorations, designed for export; He was interested in Islamic ceramics, was familiar with 18th-century decorated French earthenware; he was enthusiastic about Baroque architecture and sculpture, enchanted by their spirals, volutes, loops and arabesques, their diagonal compositions, their accumulation of ornaments. He loved the Baroque movement as much for its formal complexity as for its bold combinations of colours, everything that danced, occupied space with lightness… He appreciated ruptures and counterpoints even in the musical art of the fugue. Everything about him was just a question of rhythm and cadence.
Today, we can only admire the incredible technical mastery of Jean-Claude de Crousaz, the sensitivity of his brush decorations, an art that he was able to carry out with a freedom that was only possible thanks to a great discipline of exercises. Throughout his activity as an "ornamentalist" painter - as he fully claimed - he imposed on himself a flawless control of his gesture, a very precise study of the posture of the whole body - certainly learned from the Japanese. Rigor of the line and joy of the motif were his watchwords, in the service of a jubilant truth of the painted decoration. We can also say of his ceramics that it is atmospheric, that his work is open and generous... Thanks to this direct and dynamic writing, it develops an authentically personal language. A true popular pottery in short, in the noble sense of the term, which can be described as "high-flying" - and therefore eminently collectible - because it is virtuoso and still adapts very well to our time. Although his register is more clearly "decorative", we can place Jean-Claude de Crousaz at the same level as his two great French-speaking predecessors Edouard Chapallaz (1921-2016) and Philippe Lambercy (1919-2006)
