Valentine Schlegel (1925-2021) was not one to seek the spotlight. Which might seem surprising now, given the somewhat uncontrollable popularity and aura that surrounds her mystifying oeuvre. In many ways, Schlegel was her art and led a life of constant artistic exploration, travelling back and forth between Paris and her native Sète, a small fisherman’s town in the South of France. One could say that she wore many hats — ceramist, mason, interior architect, costume and set designer, woodworker, craftsman, and even an artistic director for Agnès Varda, a childhood friend that she will keep for life. “I never tried to create an oeuvre,” she once declared. “I had to live and survive with what I had—a solid body. Work that pertained to the body and the utilitarian. I love the exceptional day-to-day. Everything begins with the movement.”

Through recent seminal exhibitions and publications, and following her passing in May 2021, the public has rediscovered her extensive body of work, much of which was commission-based and is now held in private collections. That includes her celebrated series of fireplaces made of staff — a type of plaster— for which she is best known. For decades, Schlegel designed and built approximately one hundred of them for the residential homes of friends and close clients.

This extraordinary endeavor, somewhat unusual for an artist who had thus far devoted her talents to the creation of more conventional ceramic forms, started in 1959 after she had completed a ceramic vase for friends who simply could not get it to fit anywhere in their home. The solution that Schlegel came up with was both innovative and extravagant: the creation of a monumental, custom-made plaster fireplace that functioned both as physical support for the vase and as the artistic frame surrounding it.

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