Located in Ciudad Autónoma Buenos Aires, C
Pair of ceramics
Sign:
Ceramic with enamel : Catherine Barjansky
Made in Belgica Boch
Ceramic White:
Sign: BFK made in Belgium
The Boch manufacture was established in Belgian La Louvière by Jean-François Boch, one of main owners of another known company, Villeroy & Boch. The direction of Boch Freres SNC was in 1844 taken by Victor Boch. Production could be started immediately thanks to other Boch family ceramic businesses that sold Victor ready-to-use copperplates.
This faience manufacture developed very fast. In 1847 the company won a gold medal at the exhibition of the Belgian industry. In 1855 they already employeed 300 workers in La Louvière (Keramis) and 100 in Tournai (Boch Freres) factory. Around 1860 the production of polychrome pieces was started. In 1904 the first in Europe tunnel kiln was launched.
Problems started in 1970s. The company went bankrupt in 1985 and was reactivated as Novoboch and MRL Boch. In 2015 was started Keramis Center, just two rooms showing Royal Boch history.
One of the most important designers for Boch Frères Keramis was Charles Catteau. He was French but in 1906 moved to La Louvière. Patterns designed by Catteau were created in following years:
The Boch Frères Kéramis factory (Belgium, province of Hainaut, La Louvière) is now well known thanks to the work of the very dynamic Charles Catteau. That of the sculptor Catherine Barjansky is much less so, even if her career is international: Rome, Berlin, New York, Vienna, Paris, Brussels...
Catherine is from Odessa, a Ukrainian city located in the Soviet Empire. At the age of twenty, she studied sculpture in Monaco where she met her husband, Alexandre Barjansky, the famous violinist whose name is now inseparable from a Stradivarius! Thanks to her husband's job, she travels a lot.
Witnesses to his exchanges with the intellectual milieu of the time, his portraits of personalities dominate his work: a bust of Einstein, kept at the Solvay Institute in Brussels; a bust of Freud; or even Colette, author who prefaced her first exhibition in Brussels. She made a bust of Queen Elisabeth of Belgium...
Category
1930s Art Deco Vintage Belgian Serveware, Ceramics, Silver and Glass