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ABOVE, LEFT: Fig. 1: Hans Nosek for Ceramic Art Company, Trenton, N. J. Two-handled vase with scenic decoration, 1905. Porcelain, enamel, gold. H. 17, W. 12, Diam. 8-1/2 in. Marked: Printed green mark, CAC in a wreath above LENOX. Gift of Brown-Forman, Incorporated, 2006 (2006.45.1). ABOVE, RIGHT: Fig. 2: Maria Longworth Nichols for Rookwood Pottery, Cincinnati, Ohio. “Oriental” vase, 1883. Earthenware with underglaze slip decoration. H. 20-1/2, Diam. 10-1/2 in. Marked: impressed on bottom, kiln-shaped stamp, G (ginger clay), ROOKWOOD / 1883. Purchase 1985 Mathilde Oestrich Bequest Fund and Eva Walter Kahn Bequest Fund (85.281). | ||||
| by Ulysses Grant Dietz | ||||
The Newark Museum, founded in 1909, began collecting art pottery from the start. From its first art pottery exhibition in 1910 until the death of its founding director, John Cotton Dana, on the eve of the Great Depression, the museum was one of the nation’s pioneers in the exhibition of ceramics as art. For its centennial, the museum has mounted an exhibition that explores this idea, 100 Masterpieces of Art Pottery, 1880–1930. Artistic ceramics is not a new concept. However, in the third quarter of the nineteenth century, there was increasing reaction against industrial, “soulless” factory production coupled with a growing awareness in the West of revered ceramic traditions from Asia. All of this came together, for the United States at least, at the national Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia in 1876. It was in the aftermath of the Centennial that Americans began to see the potential for transforming domestic ceramics from merely decorative objects into art objects—in their shape, glaze, and surface treatment. | ||||
The Arts and Crafts aesthetic that still tends to define art pottery today did not dominate the decorative arts in America in the early part of the twentieth century. The inclusion of Lenox china (Fig. 1) in the Newark Museum’s 1910 Modern American Pottery exhibition, alongside Grueby and Newcomb, reminds us that porcelain was also seen as art pottery. Walter Scott Lenox ran his Ceramic Art Company in the same way Rookwood and Grueby were run, with different segments of the production process assigned to specific people or groups of people, from glaze chemists and potters to kiln-loaders to decorators. His aesthetic goals were similar (to make art from clay), and his desire to balance art and commerce was the same. Like them, he was influenced by contemporary taste, and he was deeply involved in current ceramic technology. The art pottery business model involved divisions of labor, hierarchies of art and craft, and (of course) the balancing of art with profit. At the same time, however, the work of such pioneer studio potters as Adelaide Robineau, Frederick Walrath, and William Joseph Walley (in the United States) and Adrian Dalpayrat, Edmond Lachenal and Auguste Delaherche (in France) arose from the idea of making art first, profit second. Moreover, in Europe artists often worked in studio-like settings within factories (Christian Neureuther and Michael Powolny in Germany, Arthur Percy in Sweden). They produced ceramic objects that do not fit today’s idea of art pottery, but which were certainly collected as such in the 1910s and 1920s. | ||||
At the 1876 Centennial, Japanese and Chinese ceramics were seen by millions of visitors, as was the new “barbotine” decoration (painting under the glaze with liquid clay), perfected by Ernest Chaplet at the Haviland factory in Limoges, France.1 Two core concepts grew out of this moment relative to art pottery: the vessel as a canvas to be painted and the vessel as a sculptural object. Each would develop in its own way as the Gilded Age moved toward the twentieth century. China Painters & the Art Pot Art pottery was the offspring—or perhaps the sibling—of the china painting vogue that burgeoned in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Maria Longworth Nichols (1849–1932), founder of the Rookwood Pottery, had started china painting in 1873, joining affluent women all over the country in this newly fashionable hobby. Dazzled by the Centennial Exhibition, and financed by her father, Nichols established her pottery in Cincinnati in 1880. It was America’s first official art pottery.2 Rookwood’s goal was to make pottery that was art, and to make that art commercially viable. The heavier technical work such as mixing clay, potting, and firing, was done by men, while the painting and decoration was done by both men and women, who were allowed to sign their pots. The early pots from Rookwood were strongly reflective of the Aesthetic movement and its fascination with Near- and Far-Eastern design (Fig. 2). The Rookwood technique of underglaze painting was developed from French “barbotine” or “Limoges” decoration. | ||||
Enameling on either porcelain or fine white earthenware was already a well-established tradition by 1876. European and Asia ceramic factories—from Satsuma, Japan, to Worcester, England—had specialized in exquisitely rendered floral decoration, landscapes, and mythological scenes since the development of low-fire enamels in the early eighteenth century. Enamellers generally worked on blanks designed and made by others; as was also true in art potteries, where ceramic decorators were kept apart from the potters and technicians. European art porcelain in the late nineteenth century mingled Japanism with other aesthetic influences. Royal Worcester’s ivory-bodied enameled wares (Fig. 3) were the standard against which American efforts at porcelain production were judged. The elaborate enameling and raised goldwork on Worcester porcelain paralleled similarly complex decoration on Japanese pottery and porcelain. English-born Edward Lycett (1833–1892) used his skills as a china painter to produce Worcester type ceramics at the Faience Manufacturing Company in Brooklyn in the 1880s.3 Considered the father of china painting in America, Lycett’s work demonstrated a close knowledge of both Japanese and English art pottery. The late twentieth-century appreciation of the Art Nouveau and Arts and Crafts styles marginalized the romantic decoration and gilded details of china-painted porcelain; but one shouldn’t forget that, to Walter Scott Lenox, who hired skilled European china-painters to decorate his vases, his porcelains were as much art as were Rookwood’s painted pots. | ||||
The counterpoint to the exotic patterns and colors of Japanism in the 1870s were the monochromatic Chinese porcelains that depended entirely on simple forms and beautiful glazes. The Chinese displays at the Centennial Exhibition in 1876 were enormous, but they offered less novelty to American eyes, and caused a less obvious public sensation. The founding collection of the Newark Museum in 1909 was overwhelmingly Japanese, but it included a large number of Chinese monochrome porcelains. The importance of these minimalist form-and-glaze art pots has been underestimated by most recent scholarship. However, there is no question that from the 1890s to the 1920s, these minimalist art pots epitomized the ceramic artist’s attempt to capture the essence of pottery as art through the rediscovery of the primal beauty of glazed clay. Hugh Robertson and Adrien Dalpayrat exemplify the minimalist art potter at work on both sides of the Atlantic. In Massachusetts, Hugh Robertson (1845–1908) produced a line of austere Chinese-form vases with deceptively simple, richly textured glazes, in a wide range of colors. Never profitable, Robertson’s art pottery was subsidized by the popular blue and white crackled dinnerware lines developed in the 1890s that bore the Dedham name. His “volcanic” line was closer to studio pottery than art pottery, lacking the technical predictability that was a necessity for an art pottery that relied on consistency from the kiln.4 In France, Adrien Dalpayrat (1844–1910), who was born and trained as an artist and china painter in Limoges, focused on a high-fired (grand feu) vitreous stoneware (grès) body and simple forms covered with superb glazes (Fig. 4) that gained him a bronze medal in the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago and a gold medal in the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1900.5 | ||||
Even George Ohr (1857–1918) from Mississippi was clearly knowledgeable about Chinese forms and glazes. Ohr was the best thrower in the world in his day, and was the first American potter to push the art pottery envelope, manipulating his thin earthenware bodies in ways most Americans wouldn’t imagine until decades later (Fig. 5). He was also one of the first studio potters in America, working largely alone, and overseeing every aspect of his work directly. Both the commercially successful “Vasekraft” line of New Jersey’s Fulper Pottery (Fig. 6), and the hand-made, one-off porcelain gems of studio potter Adelaide Robineau (1865–1929) reflected a reverence for Chinese monochrome minimalism. Fulper, who showed at the Newark Museum in 1915, and Robineau, who sold three little pots to the museum in 1914 (the first acquisition by a museum of her work), used simple Chinese forms with carefully studied glazes achieved through much experimentation. Both Fulper and Robineau carried on the tradition of potters from the 1890s such as Robertson and Dalpayrat, but their output in the 1910s and 1920s reflects an ongoing interest in minimalist art pottery that was seen as modern in the 1920s. | ||||
The painted vase was the ideal ceramic art object, because, while functional, it did not have to serve a purpose other than contemplation. Stylistically, the vessel followed the aesthetic trends of the moment. In instances where the artist who decorated a pot and the potter who made it were not the same person (as was the case in almost every quasi-commercial art pottery), the decorative artist normally received the recognition, because his or her talents were seen as higher on the artistic scale than the manual skills of the potter. Rookwood exploited the reputations of its best artists (Fig. 7), as did European potteries such as Rozenburg in the Netherlands (Fig. 8) and Wachtersbach in Germany. On the other hand, art potteries limited the artistic freedom of their artists, requiring them to follow designs created by others and to stick to the general aesthetic guidelines that created the specific pottery’s “look.” The artists at Newcomb College Pottery in New Orleans were allowed some room to grow artistically––more, say, than their peers at Arthur Baggs’ Marblehead Pottery (Fig. 9)––but even they were circumscribed by the pottery’s overarching aesthetic goals and the need to sell. The eggshell porcelains produced at the Rozenburg factory in The Hague had to conform to the ethereal Art Nouveau style established as their main feature, and the pared-down stylizing adopted by Christian Neureuther’s studio at the Wächtersbach stoneware factory had to be commercially viable to survive. | ||||
If the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia was a seminal event in the transformation of decorated ceramics into art; then it was equally the wellspring—in America at least—for the sculptural possibilities of ceramics. Professor Isaac Broome, working for Trenton’s Ott and Brewer, brought the artistic spotlight to ceramic sculpture in 1876.6 Broome, however, only made a few actual pots, preferring busts and figures. Just as was true with painterly pots, sculptural art pottery evolved as artistic taste and aesthetic ideology changed over time. Among the many European art potters who worked in sculptural ceramics, Clément Massier (1845–1917) established his first ceramic studio in 1872 in Vallauris in the Golfe Juan area of the French Riviera, and became famous for his metallic luster glazes (Fig. 10). Massier moved from the Japanism of the 1870s to the Art Nouveau of the 1890s, producing sculptural vessels that shimmered with surfaces unlike any other in the world. One student of Massier’s, Jacques Sicard, would take the secret of these glazes to America and build his own reputation with them in the early twentieth century. | ||||
The plainer, low-key translation of the sculptural qualities of the Art Nouveau in America is exemplified by the stylized foliage, simple outline, and silky matte glaze of Grueby pottery. A vase purchased by the museum in 1911 for half of its retail cost of $50 (Fig. 11), was modeled by Ruth Erickson (ca. 1899–1910), but, as was usually true in art potteries, her role in the artistic development of the vase was limited to the physical application of someone else’s designs. Inspired by French potters seen at international exhibitions, Grueby achieved huge success, winning a gold medal at the Paris exposition of 1900 and the Saint Louis exposition in 1904. Ironically, Grueby’s participation in the Newark Museum’s 1910 exhibition was the last public display of Grueby pottery in William Grueby’s (1867–1925) lifetime. For all his artistic success, the financial aspect of running an art pottery had eluded him. Former Rookwood decorator Artus Van Briggle was already long dead by the time his work was included in the Newark Museum exhibition in 1910 (Fig. 12). Van Briggle had adapted French art pottery’s low-relief sculptural effects and focus on superb glazes to the American market, slip-casting his designs and experimenting with innovative glazes.7 His enterprising widow continued to develop Van Briggle designs for decades after her husband’s death. With converse irony, Van Briggle’s commercial success has resulted in its artistic devaluation in the eyes of collectors and curators. | ||||
| 100 Masterpieces of Art Pottery, 1880–1930 will run until January 10, 2010, at the Newark Museum. Art pottery, in all its manifestations between 1880 and 1930, is explored in the accompanying centennial catalogue. | ||||
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| Ulysses Grant Dietz is curator of decorative arts at The Newark Museum, Newark, New Jersey. | ||||
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2. See Alice Cooney Frelinghuysen, “Aesthetic Forms in Ceramics and Glass,” in In Pursuit of Beauty, Americans and the Aesthetic Movement (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Rizzoli, 1986), 228. 3. He taught in Saint Louis and in Cincinnati, where he fired some of Maria Longworth Nichols’ own amateur china painted ceramics. See Alice Cooney Frelinghuysen, “Aesthetic Forms in Ceramics and Glass,” in In Pursuit of Beauty, Americans and the Aesthetic Movement (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Rizzoli, 1986), 426. 4. See Paul Evans, “Context and Theory, Binns as the Father of American Studio Ceramics,” in Margaret Carney, ed., Charles Fergus Binns The Father of American Studio Ceramics (New York City and Alfred, NY, Hudson Hills Press and New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University, 1998), 103. Also Paul Evans, Art Pottery of the United States (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1974, reissued by Feingold & Lewis Publishing Group, 1987), 83. 5. See Henry-Pierre Fourest, L’Art de la Poterie en France de Rodin a Dufy (Sèvres, France: Musée National de Céramique, 1971), 25. Also see www.ceramique1900.com/dalpayrat.html and www.fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre-Adrien_Dalpayrat. 6. For a detailed history of early porcelain sculpture in America, see Alice Cooney Frelinghuysen, American Porcelain, 1770–1920 (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1989), 166–179. 7. See Barbara M. Arnest, ed., Van Briggle Pottery, The Early Years (Colorado Springs: Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, 1975), 65–66. |
Root of the Problem: This blog features some of my work in addition to visual research and articles I am reading. There will also be an occasional project with my students to look at.
Friday, November 5, 2010
When Pottery Became Art, 1880-1930
Artist: Winslow Homer - Artists Sketching in the White Mountains
Winslow Homer (1836–1910)
Artists Sketching in the White Mountains, 1868
Oil on panel, 9-1/2 x 15-7/8 inches
Bequest of Charles Shipman Payson, 1988.55. 4
The White Mountains served as a national landscape in the years that followed the Civil War. One of the first regions to engender and exploit a tourist economy in the United States, the towns surrounding the Presidential Range of New Hampshire provided the infrastructure for a generation of artists to capture the view while taking in the fresh air of the country. Painting Mount Washington, the highest peak in the range, came to be considered a rite of passage for artists of every stripe. Homer—ironic in temperament and possessing a keen, self-deprecating sense of humor—took obvious pleasure in depicting himself as last in this queue of plein-air painters as evidenced by the knapsack bearing the inscription “Homer.” Although Homer would continue to paint genre subjects throughout the 1870s, the subtle critique evidenced in Artists Sketching in the White Mountains would eventually lead him to darker, existential dramas.
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in General
Damon Winter/The New York Times
The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum was founded in 1939 by Guggeneheim, a copper magnate, and his German adviser, the artist Baroness Hilla Rebay. Before he met Rebay, Guggenheim collected Old Masters, but she converted him to modern art.
Rebay pressed Guggenheim to collect nonobjective art, a style without recognizable figures or objects that she followed in her own work. She urged him to start a museum for such art. With her encouragement, the tycoon acquired works by Kandinsky, Gris, Léger, Moholy-Nagy and others that would one day form the groundwork for the Guggenheim's famous collection, now housed in a Frank Lloyd Wright landmark building, which celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2009.
The Museum of Non-Objective Painting, as the Guggenheim was initially called, mingled pictures by Klee and Kandinsky with piped-in organ music, mostly Bach. It did not allow sculptures, which were deemed too ''material'' and insufficiently mystical. Not long after the museum opened in a former car showroom on East 54th Street, its founders commissioned a Wisconsin-born architect to design a temple for their collection in 1943. Frank Lloyd Wright's masterpiece took so long to complete that by the time the building was unveiled, on Oct. 21, 1959, both he and Guggenheim had died.
Since its opening, drawing huge crowds and controversy because of its design, the building, with its spiraled interior rising 96 feet, has been the primary reason many people go to the Guggenheim.
Museum surveys show that for the 900,000 to 1,000,000 people who visit every year, the building consistently ranked over the art as the reason for visiting. Architecture buffs say the Guggenheim is Wright's most visited building and his only major commission in New York City.
Neither the building's design nor its construction went smoothly. The only builder Wright could find to execute his drawings economically was a man whose expertise was in constructing parking garages and freeways. The building's outer wall was made by spraying layers of gunite (a mixture of sand and cement commonly used to line swimming pools) from within the building, through steel reinforcements, against pieces of plywood that were molded into the building's shape. Every few years the exterior is patched and painted, but the cosmetic touches camouflage far deeper problems.
A 2009 Frank Lloyd Wright exhibition drew more people to the Guggenheim Museum than any other exhibition since the museum started keeping track of such figures in 1992. ''Frank Lloyd Wright: From Within Outward,'' a retrospective of Wright's work timed to the museum's 50th anniversary that included drawings and his original model for the museum, drew 372,000 visitors for the 87 days the show was open (May 15 - Aug. 23).
The Guggenheim, which has forged an international network of museums, also has locations in Venice, Berlin, Las Vegas and Bilbao, Spain, along with partnerships with the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia, and the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna.
Petah Coyne: Everthing That Rises Must Converge
Petah Coyne, Untitled #1240 (Black Cloud), 2007–2008, taxidermy birds, silk flowers, silk/rayon velvet, plaster statuary, feathers, wax, cables, cable nuts, paint, plaster, metal, felt, pearl-headed hat pins, pigment, thread, wood, vinyl, dimensions variable. Untitled # 1240 (Black Cloud) courtesy the artist and Galerie Lelong, NY
Unlike many contemporary artists who focus on social or media-related issues, Petah Coyne imbues her work with a magical quality to evoke intensely personal associations. Her sculptures convey an inherent tension between vulnerability and aggression, innocence and seduction, beauty and decadence, and, ultimately, life and death. Coyne's work seems Victorian in its combination of an overloaded refinement with a distinctly decadent and morbid undercurrent. Her innovative use of materials includes dead fish, mud, sticks, black sand, old car parts, wax, satin ribbons, artificial flowers and birds, birdcages, and most recently, taxidermy animals, Madonna statues, and horsehair.
A selection of Coyne's recent work along with two new works are on view at MASS MoCA. Viewers are transported when entering the galleries, baroque works delicately combining taxidermy birds and dripping with wax rise up from the floor and chandelier-type sculptures descend from the ceiling, taking full advantage of the multiple vantage point of MASS MoCA's triple height gallery space. This exhibition particularly focuses on works from the last 10 years including selections from Coyne's series based on Dante's Inferno, such as Untitled #1180 (Beatrice) which transforms Dante's love into a monumental sculpture of black wax covered flowers with the most subtle color breaking through, velvet and various taxidermy birds diving in and out of the towering form. Galleries filled with white wax sculptures are adjacent to the black works -- these pale, ghostly images call forth Victorian lace and at the same time the frailty of life. Some of Coyne's ghostly photographs featuring blurred figures of children and Buddhist monks are also on view.
Petah Coyne was born in Oklahoma City in 1953. She lives and works in New York and New Jersey. Solo exhibitions include Vermilion Fog at Galerie LeLong, NY; Petah Coyne: Above and Beneath the Skin at Sculpture Center, Long Island City, NY, Chicago Cultural Center, Chicago, IL, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO, Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, Scottsdale, AZ, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; Petah Coyne: Hairworks Cincinnati Art Museum, Cincinnati, OH. Selected group exhibitions include Damaged Romanticism: A Mirror of Modern Emotion at the Blaffer Gallery, University of Houston, Houston, TX, Grey Art Gallery, New York University, NY, the Parrish Art Museum, Southampton, NY; Uncontained, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; and Material Actions, Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, CA. Coyne�s work is in the collections of the Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover, MA; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY; Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; Museum of Modern Art, NY; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NY; The Whitney Museum of American Art, NY and many more.
This exhibition is made possible by the Toby D. Lewis Philanthropic Fund of the Jewish Community Federation of Cleveland, the Elizabeth A. Sackler Museum Educational Trust, Galerie Lelong, McBride & Associates Architects, and the Massachusetts Cultural Council. Additional support provided by Dennis Braddock and Janice Niemi, Carol and William Browne, Linda and Ronald F. Daitz, Pamela and Robert Goergen, Jane and Leonard Korman, Anita Laudone and Colin Harley, the Barbara Lee Family Foundation, Kari McCabe and Nate McBride, Kate and Hans Morris, Sam and Martha Peterson, Elizabeth Ryan, and Stone Ridge Orchard.
Images from the Brooklyn Museum Show - https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/opencollection/exhibitions/1033/Petah_Coyne%3A_Untitled_Installation/image/5886/community/posse/tab/photos/right-tab/talk/Artist: Modest Huys - Some landscapes
Zomernamiddagzon
Petite écluse: a lock with a village beyond
Populieren in Maartezon
"Vlasoogst"Biography
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Modest Huys was a Belgian painter of landscapes and portraits. He received advice from Emile Claus and was later a student at the Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp. Modeste Huys was an enthusiast of anything concerning light and colours and the poet of joyous and happy country life. His works are full of optimistic luminism, translating with delight the most beautiful aspects of an ever-admirable nature. His art glorifies the fertile and plentiful Flanders where the silvery and slithering ribbon of the river Lys flows. Modeste Huys is more particularly the painter of the River Lys and of flax. His works are an hymn for his native country.
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