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Under the influence of the painter Pierre-Eugene VIBERT (1875-1937), Marcel NOVERRAZ gives up a commercial career and gets to know earthenwork in the potter's workshop KNECHT in Colovrex, before settling down in 1922 in the workshop of La Chapelle in Carouge.
His brother helps him until 1928. A dedicated worker, he achieves more than 6000 enamel essays and 300 cerslips. He soon acquires a perfect technical mastery and between 1925 and 1932 achieves superb pieces with geometrical patterns, shining with gold and silver, along with flower-decorated ceramics, simpler but very personal and of great quality. Unfortunately, owing to the economic problems in Geneva at the end of the 30s, his production gets more common, closer to everyday-life, composed of commemorative and utilitarian pieces; and he was then very successful.
Until 1944 he bakes his pieces in a wood-oven and his production undergoes the successive aesthetic changes of the time until 1972. Since 1949 he has been teaching ceramics at the Ecole des Arts Decoratifs of Geneva, until 1952 when a car-accident seriously damages his legs.
After that, Max BIEDERMANN, hired as a thrower, takes over the workshop under the management of Marcel. He will eventually assume the management in 1972 and continue for 10 years a production of ceramics bearing the brand of La Chapelle.
A man of faith, mad about arts and nature, mindful to the evolution of taste and having a keen interest in what was produced outside Switzerland, Marcel NOVERRAZ achieved a plentiful ceramics production, very diversified and much debated, made on one hand of magnificent pieces and on the other hand of everyday utilitarian pieces.
He is, with Paul BONIFAS and MENELIKA one of the most important Swiss ceramists of the first half of the 20th century.
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