R E V IE W E D
Ceramic
Design:
Manufactured
Brilliance
and Beauty in
Daily Life
By Edward Lebow
Arizona State University A rt Museum
Ceramics Research Center
Tempe,
AZ
Apr. io-Aug. 24,2010
asuartmuseum.asu.edu
It’s been 70 years since Bernard Leach’s
A Potter’s Book
sent industry to its room and
urged potters to take the beauty of func-
tion into their own hands, and less than 60
since Peter Voulkos figured beauty could
do without function altogether. Ever since,
American ceramics has wheeled along the
divided highway of creative anachronism
and expressive form, advancing the suprem-
acy of touch while proclaiming, as Lewis
Mumford once put it, “the autonomy of the
human spirit.”
Yet more than half a century into the
post-World War II reign of handmade stu-
dio ceramics, the glow from behind indus-
try’s door has become too bright for the
field to ignore. In the past year, two major
exhibitions—“Object Factory: The Art
of Industrial Ceramics,” at New York’s
Museum of Arts and Design, and “Conver-
gence: Pottery from Studio and Factory,”
sponsored by Philadelphia’s Clay Studio-
have explored some of the extraordinary
advances industry has made (ceramic scis-
sors, peelers, knives and a staggering array
of high-tech applications) in extending the
T his show zeroes in on an aspect o f in d u stria lp ro d u ctio n
th a t studio ceram ists once considered a ch ief weakness:
the capacity to convey a compelling sense o f d e ta il a n d touch.
030 american craft aug/scp ю
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Schmidt photo courtesy of Roden International Inc.
