[fr]Centenaire Valentine Schlegel avec Élisabeth Lebovici[en]Valentine Schlegel centenary with Élisabeth Lebovici

Valentine Schlegel was a ceramic artist who was born in Sète in 1925 and died in Paris in 2021. In 2019, an exhibition of her works at the Crac offered an opportunity to dive back into the life and work of this artist who maintained a deep connection to her native city.
The association Les Ami.e.s de Valentine Schlegel is marking the centenary of her birth with a series of events, exhibitions, and the inauguration of a small square named after her, in the very place where she grew up. In this context, the Crac welcomes art critic and historian Élisabeth Lebovici for a new lecture that offers a joyfully depatriarchal reinterpretation of Valentine Schlegel’s work.

« Sometimes you call it your modesty. You do not impose your own conception of happiness. You limit yourself to introducing people into the happy realm of their own bodies. »
This is how the critic and curator Marie-Odile Briot characterised Valentine Schlegel’s art in 1975. It articulates an ethical position contributing to an art based on the corporeality of forms and the fluidity of functions. Beyond the fact that it is located as far as possible from the discourse of conquest and triumph often found in a patriarchal art history, where the Pygmalion myth reigns supreme, this position, in my view, offers ways of “doing art” that I would like to explore in this lecture.

Élisabeth Lebovici.

Picture : Portrait of Elisabeth Lebovici - photo : Henry Roy.