'Centers And Edges' Modernist Ceramic Arts In America

Among the earliest pieces on view is a circa 1835 Masons & Sons plate in the Rococo Revival style with an overglaze, transfer print and gilded decoration. Another is a circa 1849 octagonal dessert plate in the Gothic Revival style designed by A.W.N. Pugin for Minton and Company.

At the same time, the Arts and Crafts movement ordained the simple and straightforward in design, decoration and substance. While that movement embraced the joy of creativity, it did not disdain industrial production. In America, the Ohio firms of Rookwood and Weller became the premier manufacturers of the new American pottery forms, which were immediately and widely popular.

The new pottery was largely utilitarian, comprising bowls, tableware, vases, umbrella stands and tiles that stood on their own as art objects. At the same time, an element of Orientalism permeated the new designs influenced by the craze for all things Japanese that had swept the United States periodically since the opening of Japan to the west in the mid-Nineteenth Century.

When Japanese art potter Kataro Shirayamadani visited America in 1886 as part of the Japanese delegation to the 13th Cincinnati Industrial Exposition, he met Maria Longworth Nichols, founder of Rookwood. The following year, he joined the pottery. His designs gained immediate popularity for their incorporation of the Japanese aesthetic into American ceramics. His earthenware vase made in 1908 exhibits the distinctive matte vellum glaze over a slip-painted decoration. The one on view is decorated with geese in misty flight, and, as Richard A. Born, senior curator at the Smart Museum, observes, it replicates a Japanese painting at the same time it exhibits a classic American Arts and Crafts shape.

A number of wares from the Rookwood, Weller and Hampshire potteries and their English counterparts like Pilkington and Ruskin are on view.

Another major thread in the tapestry of art pottery was a reform of Arts and Crafts design that was built on the same movement. In Austria, studio artists working at the Wiener Werkstätte in Vienna espoused the philosophy, "Better to work ten days on one product than to manufacture ten products in one day."

Those potters usually worked alone, creating remarkably beautiful and individual objects. Exquisite craftsmanship and execution was the governing principle. The range was vast.

A covered porcelain butter dish that was executed in about 1905 by Josef Hoffman, founder of the Wiener Werkstätte, for Josef Bock with an overglaze enamel decoration is an exercise in geometric restraint. A vibrantly colorful vase designed by Viennese artist Hilda Jesser in 1921 for Wiener Werkstätte on view is decorated with quirky naturalistic elements.

When Walter Gropius established the Bauhaus in 1919 in Weimar, Germany, his mission was a utopian unification of all the arts, but by 1923 the Bauhaus modified its aims to a looser unification of art and technology. The revised Bauhaus pottery aesthetic of melding art and technology permeated ceramic design around the world. Bauhaus artists Otto Lindig and Theodor Bogler developed new prototypes for ceramics that could be produced in small numbers or adapted for mass production.

A classically simple yet sophisticated glazed and slip-cast earthenware teapot that Lindig created for Staatlich Majolica in 1929 is on view. Born describes it as, "The proper machine for living well and pouring tea." He notes that it was carefully composed. The teapot remained in production until 1962.

American ceramic designers heeded the developments at the Bauhaus and took advantage of improved technology and new mechanized manufacturing processes to produce exceptionally high quality objects.

Modernism, as exemplified by the work of sculptors Aristide Maillol, Henry Moore and other European artists, including Auguste Rodin, embodied new artistic freedom and experimentation. Many practitioners believed that rejecting tradition would enable them to adopt radically new ways of making art. It did, as Cubism and Surrealism emerged.

Clay was an important cog in the emergence of modern sculpture. Works in clay by Moore and French sculptors Maillol and Henri Laurens are on view. Moore's 1945 "Sketch Model for Reclining Figure" in unglazed modeled earthenware is on view, as is "Titan I," a cast bronze after a clay original by Rodin. As a ceramicist, Rodin helped modernize the products at the Sèvres factory. While at Sèvres, he made a number of experimental ceramic pieces, very few of which survive.

Leading European art pottery makers had arrived in the United States before World War II. They included Marguerite Friedländer-Wildenhain, who had trained at the Bauhaus and worked with Lindig and Bogler, and the Austrian husband and wife team of Gertrud and Otto Natzler, who had been at the Bauhaus. Finnish artist Maija Grotell, who worked and taught first in New York and later at Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan, also came to America. Their influence was also profound.

At the same time, American-born potters Edwin and Mary Scheier worked and taught in New Hampshire producing objects that melded the primitive with decorative. Beatrice Wood's work is notable for the elegant luster glazes she used and for her amusing renderings of her fellow men. Although she lived and worked in California, she was closely linked with the New York Dada movement.

After World War II, American pottery opened itself to the influences of Japanese and European studio and folk pottery. California ceramic artists, such as Peter Voulkos, Robert Arneson and Marilyn Levine, whose works are on view, eschewed the symmetrical styles of the 1930s and 1940s and adopted free-flowing sculptural forms and irregular surfaces. Native Montanan Voulkos worked in California for most of his career. He was a respected teacher and proponent of Abstract Expressionism, which added a powerfully sculptural element to his work.

Inspired by Picasso's ceramics, Voulkos exerted a strong influence on his students and potters farther afield. In Arneson's case, his work stood as topical and humorous political and social commentaries. Levine, who studied with Voulkos, created leather objects in clay, mastering detailed trompe l'oeil compositions, such as the whimsical leather suitcase on view.

A strong Anglo Japanese influence was imposed on postwar pottery by such artists as the studio potter Bernard Leach and his colleagues Hamada Shoji and Kawai Kanjiro at the Leach Pottery in St Ives, Cornwall, England, that opened in 1920. The three were important practitioners and proponents of mingei, the Japanese folk art that effects a fine balance of creativity and tradition with the production of utilitarian wares. Its influence was profound and worldwide. Although based along the remote cliffs of Cornwall, Leach felt the inspiration of Korean arts and of the Middle Ages, inspirations that were reflected in his work.

His colleague Kawai experimented with glazes while still a student in Tokyo and later developed several distinctive ones in red copper, brown iron and cobalt that he applied to his asymmetrical ceramic pieces.

Midcentury English and European artists, such as the Scandinavian potters Wilhelm Kåge, who studied under Henri Matisse, and the Norwegian artist Eric Pløen, also evinced a strong Japanese influence in their works. The Scandinavians also resurrected ancient European traditions. No fewer than five ceramic pieces, including three bowls and two vases, by Kåge are on view, all of which were produced at the Gustavsberg Factory in Sweden.

The final section of the exhibit explores the more sculptural turn that pottery took in the last half of the Twentieth Century as demonstrated by work of such artists as Voulkos in California and German émigré Ruth Duckworth in Chicago. Californian Robert Carston Arneson, considered a founder of the contemporary ceramic sculpture movement, wove many strands through his works, at the same time adapting and rejecting traditions.

Many consider Voulkos a pioneer of post-Modernist ceramics whose work stands in contrast to that of Leach, whom many others view as an anti-Modernist. Duckworth, who remains prolific at 86, is considered an outstanding Modernist sculptor whose works frequently take on organic natural forms in subtle colors.

The Smart Museum is at 5550 South Greenwood Avenue.

For information, 773-702-0200 or www.smartmuseum.uchicago.edu.