DURRIO, PACO (FRANCISCO DURRIEU DE MADRON)
(Valladolid, 1868-París, 1940)
Francisco Durrieu de Madron Granier, better known as Paco, is perhaps the most paradigmatic Basque artist of the turn of the 20th century. A sculptor, ceramist and goldsmith, at the age of twenty-one he settled in Paris, where he soon found an active place in the city’s art scene. In the French capital he established numerous ties with leading members of the different movements of art renewal and the avant-garde, such as Émile Bernard, Maurice Denis, Alphonse Mucha and, above all, Paul Gauguin, with whom he would even share a workshop. He also served as an intermediary for other compatriots, mainly Catalans and Basques, who passed through Paris. Durrio’s production – which is difficult to catalogue, due to the widely scattered locations of his works – was not overabundant. It attracted the attention of artists, dealers and critics and was praised, among others, by writers like Stéphane Mallarmé, Guillaume Apollinaire and Charles Morice, all of whom were close to Symbolism.
Although originally from Valladolid, Durrio soon moved to the Basque Country with his family. In Bilbao he trained in the studio of the painter Antonio María Lecuona and – in 1881 – enrolled at the School of Arts and Crafts. Following the family’s removal to Madrid in the early 1880s, he continued his training in the Spanish capital, first in the workshop of Justo Gandarias, then at the School of Arts and Crafts and the Prado Museum and, finally, in the Sculpture section of the Special School of Painting, Sculpture and Engraving. In Madrid, he would share adventures with his colleague Pablo Uranga, with whom he met the ceramist Daniel Zuloaga, who initiated him into the art of ceramics, its technique and its possibilities.
In 1888 he returned to Bilbao, from where he subsequently travelled to Paris with the financial aid of the Echevarrieta family. After settling in Paris for good, in the popular and bohemian district of Montmartre, Durrio began making a name for himself, especially as a goldsmith and ceramist, with ties to Modernism and the primitive and synthetic aesthetic of painter Paul Gauguin, to the technique of ceramist Ernest Chaplet and to the creative principles of Symbolist writer Charles Morice. The latter was, in fact, the first to praise Durrio’s synthetist production in 1896, following the exhibition of some of the artist’s vases at the Art Nouveau gallery of dealer Siegfried Bing, one of the greatest promoters of Modernism and new trends in ceramics, who sought to create a novel style of decoration by merging French tradition with the Japanese imagination.
Of all the artistic activities Durrio engaged in, ceramics was his favourite, documented at least since the aforementioned exhibition of 1896, and crowned with the 1927 show at the Manufacture de Sèvres Museum, in which more than thirty of the artist’s ceramic pieces were exhibited.
