Victor Anicet

Victor Anicet was a Martinican ceramist, painter, sculptor and teacher whose work, over six decades, gave clay, glass and metal a voice for the memory of the Caribbean. Born on 18 April 1938 at Le Marigot, on the north Atlantic coast of Martinique, he died on the morning of Monday 26 October 2026 in Schœlcher, aged 88. His death was announced the same day by RCI and Martinique la 1ère.

He grew up in a large and poor family. His father, Victor, was a fisherman who went to sea in a gommier, the traditional dugout canoe, and his mother, Véronique, worked on a sugar estate. His father died while Victor was still a small boy, and he spent his childhood in a two-room house during the hard years of the Second World War, when Martinique lived under the Vichy administration of Admiral Robert. On the Duhaumont estate, the manager François de Reynal taught him to read in the evenings, and as a boy he followed the archaeological digs of the priest Robert Pinchon, who uncovered Amerindian pottery on the island. That encounter with the work of the first peoples of the Caribbean stayed with him for life. "I always think Amerindian," he said many years later.

At 14 he entered the École des Arts Appliqués in Fort-de-France, where he earned his ceramics diploma in 1956. In 1957, aged 19, he left for Paris and the École des Métiers d'Art, graduating first in his class in ceramics in 1961. He added training in the physics and chemistry of ceramics at the Arts et Métiers and served apprenticeships with some of the leading potters of the age: Yves Mohy and Jean and Jacqueline Lerat at La Borne, potters in Vallauris, and in England with John Reeve, Bernard Leach and at Michael Cardew's pottery, as well as Marion Mangold in Germany. He also ran a workshop at Palasca in Corsica in 1964.

He returned to Martinique for good in 1967 and set up a rural studio near the Lézarde river. In 1970 he showed "Soleil noir", a series of black and white paintings on wood displayed in the open air under UNESCO auspices. The exhibition was supported by the writer Édouard Glissant, at whose school he taught evening classes, and curators later saw it as an early visual expression of Glissant's ideas. From 1971 he taught in Guadeloupe, at Morne-à-l'Eau, trained art teachers, and helped found the Centre des Métiers d'Art de Bergevin in Pointe-à-Pitre. He went on to teach visual arts in both islands for more than three decades.

In 1984 he co-founded Fwomajé, the Martinican art collective named after the silk-cotton tree, with artists including Ernest Breleur, René Louise and Bertin Nivor. The group sought an art rooted in Caribbean history and its Amerindian, African and Indian memories. Anicet's own series, among them Carcans, Ferrements, Invocations amérindiennes, Restitutions and Strates, returned again and again to the chains, collars and trays of slavery and to the vanished Kalinago and Taino peoples.

His public works are spread across Martinique and Guadeloupe, from murals in Le Marin and at a school in Sainte-Claire to commissions in Pointe-à-Pitre, Fort-de-France, Le Diamant, Sainte-Luce, Le Lorrain, Gros-Morne, Morne-Rouge, Basse-Pointe and Saint-Pierre. With the Atelier Simon Marq in Reims he designed the stained glass of the cathedral of Saint-Pierre, dedicated in December 2006. After Glissant's death in 2011 he made the writer's tombstone at the cemetery of Le Diamant, a work Glissant had already named "La Présence de l'Est multiple".

Recognition came late but widely. A tribute exhibition, "Sève", was held at Tropiques Atrium, and in 2021 his ceramics were shown at the 34th São Paulo Biennial, then at LUMA Arles. In 2017 the vocational lycée of Saint-Pierre was renamed the LPO Victor Anicet. The Fondation Clément held a 1967 to 2024 retrospective, "Opacité et transparence", in 2024, and in 2025 his work hung at the Centre Pompidou in the exhibition "Paris noir". He was made a knight of the Légion of Honour in 2000 and promoted to officer in 2024. A biography by Daniel Olière appeared in 2026.

For more than forty years his studio in the heights of Schœlcher was open to visitors, students and fellow artists. "For me the studio is above all a place of creation, exchange and transmission," he said. "In fact, it is a place of life." He leaves behind a body of work that taught a generation of Martinicans to look at clay as memory, and at memory as something to be shaped by hand.