Josep Llorens Artigas Biography

Josep Llorens Artigas

(Barcelona, 1892-Gallifa, 1980) Spanish ceramist.He studied at the School of Fine Arts in Barcelona.Its ceramics, especially those made of stoneware, stand out for the purity and simplicity of form and for the decoration resulting from high-temperature firing.He collaborated with Picasso and Miró (Unesco headquarters in Paris, Harvard University and Barcelona airport) and played a notable innovative role in the field of European ceramics.

After receiving his cultural and artistic training in Barcelona, Josep Llorens Artigas began his work as an art critic in the Barcelona newspaper La Veu de Catalunya in 1917 and traveled for the first time to Paris with a scholarship granted by the Commonwealth of Catalonia.In Paris he joined the avant-garde of the moment: collaborating with other artists, he founded the Courbet group, of which he was its theorist and main animator; He also participated in joint works with Raoul Dufy, Albert Marquet and Georges Braque.

He also became friends with Picasso, but he was above all a friend, companion and collaborator of Joan Miró.He met him in Paris, when the future great teacher, young, lonely and poor, had just arrived at the world center of art.United by a long and deep friendship, together they worked to discover stylistic purity, each one in its own special way.Their mutual collaboration was fruitful and continued.

Detail of the Wall of the Moon (1955), by Miró and Artigas

Llorens Artigas achieved full mastery of the ceramic technique very soon; he investigated in obtaining new pastes and enamels, but the forms were always of a very precise simplicity and stylization, without false decorations.Purity and elegance were its characteristics.Together with the utilitarian objects, Llorens Artigas created, on the basis of paintings by Miró, the ceramic panels entitled the Wall of the Sun and the Wall of the Moon for the façade of Unesco headquarters in Paris (1955).His collaboration is also responsible for the murals for Harvard University (1960), for Barcelona airport (1971) and for the Guggenheim Museum in New York.

In 1941 he began his activity as a ceramics teacher at the Escuela Massana in Barcelona, which allowed him to extend his influence on young potters.In 1981 an important retrospective exhibition of his work was held in various Spanish locations.His written works include Ceramic Pastes and Blue Glazes of Ancient Egypt (1922), a doctoral thesis that he presented at the Sorbonne in Paris; Form and ceramic practices (1947); Enamels and colors on glass, porcelain and metal (1950), and, in collaboration with C.Matheos and F.Català Roca, Popular ceramic (1970).

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