Ceramics and pottery

In the Pyrénées-Orientales, ceramics are made with local clay, and you can still go from one workshop to the next to watch a piece being thrown or decorated. The language preserves the memory of this craft: in the Catalan-speaking lands, the terrissaire belonged to separate guilds according to what he made: the gerrers for jugs, the ollers for cooking pots, the escudellers for tableware and the rajolers for tiles. The cassola, a wide, shallow earthenware dish, has given its name to the stews cooked in it.

The best-known place in the département is Sant Vicens, south of Perpignan. In the late 1930s, the decorator Firmin Bauby bought a wine-growing farmstead on the edge of the city in order to set up a ceramics centre. The war delayed the project, which came to fruition with the support of Aristide Maillol, Raoul Dufy and Albert Bausil: the workshop opened in 1942, and the first kiln was lit on 3 January 1943.

The workshop subsequently drew artists. The former wine store houses a collection of tapestries and ceramics by Jean Lurçat, Jean Picart Le Doux and Gumersind Gomila. Picasso came here in 1953, 1954 and 1955, and Salvador Dalí, a childhood friend of Firmin Bauby, stopped here in 1965. Earthenware is still decorated by hand here, and the house offers visits of the wine store and the workshop, with its kilns, enamels and blocks of clay.

Céret gives this heritage another face. The museum of modern art was born in 1948 from a project by the painters Frank Burty Haviland and Pierre Brune; Picasso gave it fifty-three works, and since 1995 the Centre Pompidou has lent it painted dishes from 1959 on the theme of bullfighting. In summer, Céret and then Banyuls-sur-Mer host potters’ markets.