In 2000, Konstantin Grcic was approached by Eugenio Perazza, the CEO and founder of Magis, a publishing company located about 30 km north of Venice. The company specialises in the production of plastic furniture. At the beginning of the new millennium, however, this material is less attractive, because of its association with poor design and the growing environmentalist movement in this field. Perrazza asked Konstantin Grcic to think about creating a range of cast aluminium furniture. The designer had never worked with this material before, but the challenge suited him...

This decorative vase realised in Bordeaux, by the manufacture Jules Vieillard & Cie is extraordinary rich in his eclectic decors of the ceramic company's favorites designs and the différents techniques developed between  1878 and 1895. The elements represented testify of influences that characterize the ceramic production of the last century across France...

Commissioned in China by French aristocrats who emigrated after 1793, this pair of porcelain urns is based on a model from the Swedish factory in Marieberg. Neoclassical in form, they feature a central medallion with a grisaille decoration of a funeral urn. It is a seditious image in memory of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette guillotined in 1793...

This unstamped reading table is attributed to Pierre IV Migeon (1696-1758), a famous representative of a great dynasty of Parisian cabinetmakers. Indeed, its shape, called "kidney" because it evokes the silhouette of a kidney, the work of the veneer in curling, and especially the pattern of the gilded bronze falls that protect the edges of the legs are characteristic of the production of the latter...

The object of the month of October is the famous sculpture representing Charles-Louis de Secondat baron de la Brède and Montesquieu by Jean-Baptiste Lemoyne, sculptor to the king, dated 1767. Commissioned after the death of the author of De l'esprit des lois (1748) by the Académie des Sciences, Belles-Lettres et Arts de Bordeaux, the sculpture was part of a prosperous period for the city, enriched by both trade and the intellectual exchanges of the Enlightenment. Montesquieu was a member and then director of the Academy, and his death was followed by a veritable cult on the part of the academics and the city. Hence the creation, until the 20th century, of effigies of the great man, all made from this marble, in plaster or porcelain, intended to adorn the various cultural sites of the city.

This presentation takes place at a time when the Académie des Sciences, Belles-Lettres et Arts de Bordeaux is celebrating its tercentenary on 3, 4 and 5 October 2012 and is publishing Un passé qui éclaire l'avenir, 1712-2012, Bordeaux, 2012

November's "Object of the Month" is devoted to the restoration of an earthenware gourd from Nevers, an important production centre in Northern France in the 17th and 18th centuries. This earthenware is characterised by its so-called "grand feu" decorations (a single high-temperature firing to fix the glaze and the colours at the same time), which are first treated in cameos of blues, then in polychromy (blue, yellow, yellow-orange and brown).
A restoration campaign of the gourd, launched in 2007, allowed to recover the characteristics of this production by eliminating the traces of a previous repairing intervention which prevented a good reading of the piece...

For December, the object of the month is doubled with the presentation of the portraits of Mr. and Mrs. Jules Vieillard, the director of the famous Bordeaux ceramics factory of the same name and his wife. These two works, recently donated to the museum, complete the presentation of 19th century ceramics. Although the museum already had a sculpted portrait of Jules Vieillard, his painted representations are rare. The two portraits depict a middle-class couple in their home: it is an opportunity to examine the personalities of this great entrepreneur and his wife...

An integral part of Bordeaux's industrial and artistic heritage, the C.A.B Céramique d'Art de Bordeaux ceramics workshop was founded after the First World War. This factory was founded on the initiative of Jean Mérillon, a descendant of the Bordeaux earthenware maker Boyer who created an earthenware factory in 1765. C.A.B was located in Caudéran, then a separate commune from Bordeaux...