Jean Besnard: Tactility as Modernism

Founded by Mason Vincent and Jack Redpath, Darling is a furniture studio dedicated to curating an ever-changing selection of rare objects and collectible design pieces. From bases in Sydney and New York, the pair have developed a studio that sources, restores, and recontextualises collectible furniture and objects from across Europe, while championing a new generation of designers who share their respect for material and craft. In their new series for Something Curated, the founders turn their attention to the figures who continue to shape contemporary design thinking. The first profile looks to French ceramist Jean Besnard, whose tactile surfaces and luminous glazes bridge the worlds of art, craft, and modern design.

In the interwar Paris of machine polish and mirrored lacquer, Jean Besnard took another route. Where Art Deco often celebrated finish, Besnard ran with texture. He pitted, crisped, incised clay so that ceramic became an instrument for catching and regulating light. The result reads less like ornament and more like a mini version of architecture.

Born into an artistic household, his father Albert a painter, his mother Charlotte Dubray a sculptor, Besnard took the long road to clay. Trained with the potter Étienne Avenard, he refined a vocabulary of rounded forms and rigorously worked skins. By the mid-1920s he was a regular in the Paris salons, and at the 1925 Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs he was awarded a silver medal, confirmation that his tactile surfaces had entered into the conversation of taste.

The breakthrough was his émail crispé, a white granular glaze that resembled shagreen. Achieved by thickened slips, impressed textiles, and controlled shrinkage, the surface refracted and punctuated light rather than reflecting it. More recent archival accounts credited him with pioneering this glaze and collapsing craft and luminosity into a single skin.

Color was still important too. Muted greys, ochres, soft blues all with really restrained gilding really allowed that crisped surface to dominate. Writing from that period described his palette as “simple, elegant, substantial and light.” 

Form followed the same logic. Besnard favored ovoids and softened cylinders, often incised with bands or discreet geometric patterns. The lamps became his most telling works. Their ceramic bodies, thick with crisped enamel, didn’t just emit light but re-shaped it. The scale gave them weight in a room, more a sort of sculpture than fixture, monuments to the idea that surface alone could govern space.

The evidence survives in catalogues and collections: grands pieds de lampe from the 1930s, signed, enamelled, sometimes gilded to the point of crackle. Museums still chase them. When a bilingual monograph appeared in 2021, it finally fixed Besnard in the centre of modern ceramics rather than in the footnotes of decorative art.

He showed at the Salon des Artistes Décorateurs, the Salon d’Automne, and the Salon des Tuileries, moving in the same progressive circles as Jacques Adnet. These interesting incised friezes, sometimes likened to Africanist or basketry motifs, gave some rhythm to his volumes. Late in his career, he even adopted the pseudonym R. Bluet to explore bolder motifs and colors without compromising the Besnard name. Proof of an artist carefully managing reputation while continuing to test boundaries.

Looking back, the message was obvious. Besnard’s irregularity was not anti-modern but modernism by other means. Rather than resisting it, he reframed it, showing that the hand could be as precise as the machine. The generosity of his ceramics lies in that incredible tactility: objects that catch the light and allow space to breathe.

References

• Hardy & Wilson — Jean Besnard, Potier moderne / A Modern Potter, Éditions des Robaresses, 2021
• Galerie Gutknecht — Artist page: biography, early career, émail crispé innovations
• Galerie Chastel Maréchal — Artist summary: salons, silver medal, Jacques Adnet connection
• Galerie Paola Lumbroso — Notes on palette, period press (Art et Industrie, 1939)
• Sotheby’s — Grand pied de lampe, c. 1930: signed example, auction record
• Bonhams — Importante lampe, c. 1930: crackled gilding, major signed work
• Christie’s — Ceramic lamp, c. 1931: provenance and signed details

Feature image: Jean Besnard assorted works in the book Jean Besnard, A Modern Potter by Alain-René Hardy & Patrick Wilson