Le beau est l’utile

“Beautiful is useful”

Over the centuries, decoration was added to the point of sometimes making the function disappear; man invented art. But at the beginning of the twentieth century a thought of beauty in utility and the refusal of decoration emerged which would give rise to the design revolution in the 1950s. From this period onwards, a young generation in love with the ideal undertook to design, both aesthetically and functionally, the world of the thirty glorious years which on many points is still ours today. At the same time, another group of the same generation revolutionized traditional utilitarian ceramics in the small village of La Borne and brought it to unequaled levels in France, probably reaching that of international sculpture. It is this parallel between French design from the 1950s and La Borne sandstone that the Pascal Cuisinier gallery intends to present in the first part of this exhibition “beautiful is useful”.