by Gloria Kennedy
Reprinted From: Open for Discussion
An Open Forum for Current Topics
Affecting Brooklyn's Cultural Community.
Published by the Brooklyn Arts Council in
BAC NEWS.
Ceramics: Applied Art or Fine Art?
A recent exhibition in my gallery showed work by ceramic artists from all over North America. The work on view ranged from finely crafted tea bowls to life-size figurative sculptures...
Public response to the exhibition was overwhelmingly positive. I was also praised for putting on the exhibition because ceramic art is not often presented in fine art galleries. Many exhibition spaces do not show ceramic art because it not considered one of the so-called fine arts. In fact, as I will demonstrate, ceramic art is undeniably fine art. To support my point I will refer to the Fine Art Pot and the Arts and Craft movements, and I will mention a few significant artists whose work supports my ideas. In modern art theory, the fine art pot or expressive pot refers to pottery that aspires to be fine art and whose abstract and artistic qualities overshadow its functionality. William Staite Murray, head of Ceramics at the Royal College of Art in London, taught fine art pot styles beginning in 1926. He believed pottery was a fine art medium of equal significance to painting and sculpture. The term fine art pot has been used by art historians since the 1940s.
Unlike the fine art pot, an ethical pot refers to utilitarian pottery. The so-called ethical pot grew out of the Arts and Crafts movement, a British and American aesthetic movement that took place during the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries. Bernard Leach and his students pioneered the ethical pot and inspired a legion of potters in the United States known as the Studio pottery movement. Studio pottery styles emerged as potters were looking to define crafts in the age of industrialization and mechanized production, while seeking to reestablish ceramics as a fine art medium. Examples of Studio pottery include Grueby, Newcomb, Teco, Rookwood, Pewabic Pottery in Detroit and the Pasadena, California-based Batchelder Tile Company, directed by Ernest A. Batchelder, which produced art tiles. Although different stylistically, these movements have all done a lot to establish ceramics as a fine art created purely for aesthetic expression, communication, or contemplation.
Some fine artists have used ceramics in their work. Picasso, for instance, painted on pots. Duchamp used a ceramic urinal in his work Fountain. Duchamp described his purpose for this seminal piece as shifting the focus away from an artwork’s craft to intellectual interpretation. These well-known fine artists certainly had the right idea. However, the fine artist most responsible for transforming the critical approach to ceramics was Peter Voulkos, a Los Angeles-based ceramic sculptor working in the 1950s and 1960s. Voulkos’s work is considered pivotal to modern ceramic art history because he single-handedly moved ceramics beyond the confines of applied art (i.e., pottery) and into the realm of Abstract Expressionist art. Voulkos’s clay works gained legitimacy among his peers working with contemporary sculpture, paving the way for those who would follow.
Ceramics: Applied art or fine art? I have presented my point of view promoting ceramics as fine art. However, ultimately the decision is up to the owners of a ceramic piece. Do we drink out of the finely crafted tea bowls or do we display them on a pedestal?
Gloria Kennedy is the owner of the Gloria Kennedy Gallery located Brooklyn New York.
Please visit The Brooklyn Arts Council at WWW.BROOKLYNARTSCOUNCIL.ORG
* Image Charles Birnbaum 'Pouring Vessel'
Pictured 'Pouring Vessel' by Charles Birbaum.
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