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Puiforcat, Jean (Elisée)
(b Paris, 5 Aug 1897; d Paris, 20 Oct 1945). French silversmith, designer and sculptor. After service in World War I, he joined the family firm of silversmiths, working as an apprentice and designer. Concurrently he studied sculpture with Louis-Aimé Lejeune (1884–1969). Puiforcat exhibited continuously from 1920 to 1937 and worked independently from 1922. He designed silver objects in the Art Deco style as simple volumes with smooth profiles and surfaces and proportions based on geometric ratios (e.g. soup tureen, c. 1925; Grenoble, Mus. Grenoble). The austerity of these forms was tempered by areas of gilding, decoration in other materials (e.g. rosewood, ivory, onyx, lapis lazuli) or by decorative bands of ribbing or reeding. About 1927 he left Paris to live in Saint-Jean-de-Luz where he continued to design silver and to work as a sculptor. In 1929 he was a founder-member of the UNION DES ARTISTES MODERNES. His designs were mostly for tableware, but in 1934 he exhibited liturgical silver for the first time, and the Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne (1937), Paris, included his stone sculpture of René Descartes (The Hague, Maison France). At the onset of World War II he left France, eventually settling in Mexico (1941). He opened a studio in 1942 and exported his silver mostly to the USA. He returned to Paris in 1945 but died immediately after his arrival.
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