American ceramics. The collection of Everson Museum of Art

Umschlag leicht berieben, sonst gutes Exemplar. - Ceramics, long considered the most fertile source for expression of the arts and crafts ideal, has only recently come to be appreciated as high art in the West. While once rarely seen outside craft fairs and specialty galleries, ceramics are today exhibited in nearly "very major American museum and sold by the leading fine arts dealers. American ceramists, in particular, have been great moving forces in this transformation, creating, in the process, a highly original and distinctly American ceramic style. Ancient Americans created clay figurines and coil-form ollas, or water jars, with intricate geometric designs. But this first native tradition, while in revival today, was virtually lost for centuries when colonists arriving from Europe brought their own trained potters and, most significantly, the wheel. The first wares of colonial America typified the emerging nation-they were functional and formed from local materials. Gradually the creative instinct found expression in the floral decorations on early salt-glazed jugs, in the whimsical shapes of Griffen, Smith, and Hill's majolica, and with the innovative flint glazes developed in Bennington in the mid-nineteenth century. The American art pottery movement of the 1880s, which held artistic integrity above commercialism, was short-lived but an enormously influential phase of the ceramics revolution. Such luminaries as Charles Fergus Binns, founder of the School of Claywork-ing at Alfred University; his student Arthur Baggs; Maria Longworth Nichols, founder of the Rookwood Pottery in Cincinnati; Mary Sheerer, head of the Newcomb Pottery in New Orleans; Adelaide Robineau; and Mary Chase Perry Stratton emerged as the creators of an American aesthetic that was to pervade the American ceramics scene for years. Robineau and Stratton, both extraordinary artists, were two of the first women to escape from the traditional Victorian role of woman as china painter and emerge as ceramists in their own right. In the 1930s three young American ceramists, Viktor Schreckengost, Russell Aitken, and Edward Winter, went to study in Vienna, and brought back to America the free, loose'handling of clay they had learned there. But even in the face of this and other influences from abroad-Art Deco, the Bauhaus, Primitivism-a distinctive American style began to appear, often in direct reaction to these foreign elements. Henry Varnum Poor exhibited dented and kiln-cracked ceramics to emphasize the spirit of the piece, rather than the technical perfection so important to European ceramists. Glen Lukens made his expressionistic vessels from materials found in the mountains and deserts of the West Coast, giving them a raw, elemental look seldom before seen outside of the United States. After World War II a totally new, much more aggressive aesthetic found expression in the innovative work being produced by the young followers of the Englishman Bernard Leach, whose oriental classicism reflected the Mingei folk art movement of Japan, and the avant-garde and seditious Peter Voulkos, founder of the ceramics department at Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles. Robert Arneson shared Voulkos's philosophy, but applied it to sculpture rather than the vessel in his anti-establishment, faintly pornographic "Funk" style. In opposition to "Funk," Richard Shaw was producing in the seventies his elegant, meticulously crafted trompe l'oeil sculptures. This constant confrontation, innovation, and experimentation in ceramics continues today, making clay one of the most interesting and inspiring media of contemporary art. Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse has been at the forefront of the ceramics movement since the museum's founding (as the Syracuse Museum of Fine Arts) in 1896. It initiated the Ceramic National Exhibition-the first forum for American ceramists-and has continued this avant-garde tradition launching the controversial exhibition "New Works in Clay by Contemporary Painters and Sculptors," assembling the innovative "Nine West Coast Clay Sculptors," and masterminding the first historic survey, "A Centjary of Ceramics in the United States, 1878- 1978." Today, ten years after this monumental exhibition, Everson is documenting one-thousand years of this art form in America. Nearly 800 pieces have been selected from Everson's collection to illustrate this chronological history, and five essays by the country's leading ceramics scholars provide penetrating and original insights into the American ceramics tradition. ISBN 0847810259