: "Centers and Edges: Modern Ceramic Design and Sculpture,
1880-1980," featuring select works from several influential
movements in the history and development of Twentieth Century
ceramics and design, will be presented at the Smart Museum of Art
at the University of Chicago from June 2 to September 18.
At the exhibition opening reception on Thursday, June 2, from 5
to 7 pm, Smart Museum senior curator Richard A. Born and ceramic
artist and collector Mary Seyfarth, chair of the ceramics
department at Columbia College, will introduce the exhibition and
lead an informal gallery talk.
The exhibition, organized mainly from the museum's collection,
focuses on five key moments of influence, invention and impact
that are marked by shifting geographical centers of creative
energy - late-Nineteenth Century British and American Arts and
Crafts pottery; functionalist designs from 1920s and 1930s
Germany and Austria; the modernist figuration of Aristide
Maillol, Henry Moore and other European sculptors; a widespread
embrace of studio and folk pottery traditions in America, Europe
and Japan after World War II; and an expressive reworking of
vessel and sculptural forms from 1950s California to 1970s
London, featuring pieces by such leaders in the field as the West
Coast master Peter Voulkos and the émigré Chicago-based Ruth
Duckworth.
These groupings offer insight into the medium through the social,
gender, political and industrial histories that, over time,
surrounded the production, marketing and use of such diverse
works in clay.
The exhibition begins by addressing the Nineteenth Century
phenomenon of historicism in England. Designers turned to past
styles for inspiration and produced elaborately decorated
ceramics in neo-Gothic, Orientalist and Eighteenth Century French
rococo revival manners.
In the Twentieth Century, studio pottery developed in two
directions. On one side were designers for industry who generally
supplied working drawings of innovative products for assembly
line production. On the other were studio potters who, working
alone, undertook all phases of production. This exhibition
section views important centers of design theory and practice in
Austria and Germany.
The section on early modernist sculpture highlights the differing
responses to clay by modern masters who worked in diverse
mainstream styles, including Cubism and Surrealism, in the first
half of the Twentieth Century. Alongside works by Maillol, Henri
Laurens and Moore, the exhibition includes a casting in bronze
after a clay original by Auguste Rodin.
Examining the relation of East Asian philosophy and ceramic
traditions and Western practice and post-World War II
experimentation are the themes examined in the exhibition's other
two sections. Drawing upon the Smart's important concentrations
in the former area are classic examples of the studio pottery
movement's leading practitioners, including the émigrés
Marguerite Fried-länder-Wildenhain, Maija Grotell from Finland,
and the Austrian husband-and-wife team of Gertrud and Otto
Natzler, alongside American-born potters Edwin and Mary Scheier
and Beatrice Wood.
The Smart Museum of Art is at 5550 South Greenwood Avenue. For
information, 773-702-0200 or www.smartmuseum.uchicago.
