CANNES.- One hundred years after the birth of Gilbert Portanier, Cannes and Vallauris are celebrating an artist who spent much of his life dissolving the boundary between painting and ceramics. Across September, the two French Riviera towns are bringing his work back into focus through exhibitions, the opening of his longtime studio, a public conversation and the publication of a new biography.
Portanier, who was born in Cannes on September 28, 1926, and died in Golfe-Juan in 2023, arrived in Vallauris in 1948, at a moment when the town was becoming an international center for artists working in ceramics. He had trained as a painter, and that background would shape everything that followed: rather than treating clay simply as a material for pottery, he approached it as another surface for color, line and image.
That idea is at the heart of “Gilbert Portanier, les cramiques en libert 1926-2023,” now on view at Espace Miramar in Cannes through September 27. Organized by the City of Cannes, the exhibition brings together around 30 ceramics and prints and offers a compact survey of an artist whose work is represented in institutions including the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Muse national de Cramique in Svres and the Muse des Arts dcoratifs in Paris.
The story, however, stretches well beyond the objects themselves.
Portanier had wanted to be a painter since his teenage years. He moved to Paris in 1945 and enrolled at the Beaux-Arts, although the cafs, studios and artistic circles of Saint-Germain-des-Prs seem to have exerted a stronger pull. A later stay in Brussels brought him into contact with figures including Pierre Alechinsky, Ren Magritte and Marcel Lecomte at the moment the CoBrA movement was emerging. Ceramics was not yet part of the plan.
That changed in the summer of 1948, when his childhood friend Albert Diato brought him to Vallauris. Picasso had already been working with ceramics there for two years, and Portanier and Diato met him during their visit. Portanier decided to remain in the town, eventually founding the studio Le Triptyque with Diato and Francine Delpierre. Their beginnings were modest: they worked in a ruined building without a kiln and had to carry pieces several kilometers to Golfe-Juan to have them fired.
For Portanier, that change of material was not an abandonment of painting. It was an expansion of it. “I am profoundly a painter,” he once said, even though most of his life’s painting was done on ceramics. Self-taught in ceramic technique, he also devised many of his own tools, building a highly personal vocabulary of surfaces, marks and forms.
He was part of a postwar generation in Vallauris that wanted ceramics to stand on its own as art rather than remain tied to utilitarian objects. Alongside artists including Roger Capron, Jean Derval, Franois Raty and Albert Thiry, Portanier participated in the 1961 exhibition Pices uniques, a statement of intent by ceramicists seeking greater artistic freedom. The group’s ambitions did not immediately translate into institutional recognition in France, and Portanier’s major retrospective at the Muse national de Cramique in Svres did not arrive until 1998.
His international career, meanwhile, developed much earlier. In 1954, a curator from Hamburg’s Museum fr Kunst und Gewerbe encountered Portanier’s work while visiting Vallauris to select pieces by Picasso and Fernand Lger. An invitation followed, placing Portanier’s name alongside theirs. Later, with the encouragement of the Dutch painter Bob Gesinus, Portanier began a relationship with Rosenthal that would last from 1966 until 2009. His designs entered the company’s Studio-Line program alongside figures such as Salvador Dal, Friedensreich Hundertwasser, Raymond Loewy and Tapio Wirkkala.
Perhaps the most personal part of the centenary is taking place in Vallauris itself.
The Atelier-Galerie Gilbert Portanier, at 82 rue Gilbert Portanier, is open to the public through September 27. Portanier began working there in 1954, in a former nineteenth-century pottery, and remained for more than seven decades. The street was renamed in his honor in 2024. Inside, the studio has been preserved much as he left it: banding wheels remain in place, brushes sit in their pots, plaster molds line the shelves and handmade tools are still scattered through the space. Outside, ceramic totems rise among the trees of the garden he planted himself.
The centenary also brings a new book, When Ceramics Embrace Color, written by Martine Denis-Linton and published this month by arnoldsche Art Publishers in both French and English. Denis-Linton first encountered Portanier’s work in 1967, when she acquired one of his pieces, and remained close to the artist for decades. The 117-page volume includes 106 illustrations, with documentary research by archivist Fabienne Coquard.
On September 27 at 4 p.m., Espace Miramar will host the public talk “Gilbert Portanier, le centenaire,” bringing together Cline Graziani, director of the Muse Magnelli in Vallauris, and Denis-Linton.
For Annette Portanier, the artist’s wife and longtime collaborator, the centenary is also the beginning of a broader effort to preserve and transmit his legacy. A catalogue raisonn is expected to begin taking shape in partnership with Artcento, extending the project beyond this month’s exhibitions and events.
Portanier spent much of his career insisting that ceramics could carry the same expressive ambition as painting or sculpture. A century after his birth, the celebrations in Cannes and Vallauris make that argument not through theory, but through the objects, colors, tools and working spaces he left behind.
