Pottery

Inexpensive transfer-printed wares for mass sale were popular in 19th-century England and on the Continent, as were relief-decorated wares. These spread to the United States, along with the manganese-brown Rockingham glazes developed in England in the early 19th century; the latter were popular with New Jersey and Ohio potteries. Mass-produced ware gradually displaced the dominant US folk pottery, a vigorous, salt-glazed stoneware.

Industrial ceramics after 1860 were of high quality. Art Nouveau, the Paris Exhibition of 1900, and the Bauhaus in the 1920s all influenced industrial ceramic design.

The individual studio or artist potter has been as important to the history of modern pottery as the industrial potter. England's Arts and Crafts Movement had its impact after 1861, as did the salt-glazed stoneware of the Doulton factories in Lambeth after 1871. In the United States the Rookwood factory (1880, Cincinnati, Ohio), the Grueby Faience Company (1897, Boston), and the Pewabic Pottery Works (1900, Detroit) brought prestige to the artist-potter. In France, artists such as Pierre Auguste Renoir, Henri Matisse, and André Derain, in collaboration with a pottery workshop, created bright and painterly ceramic decoration. These came to the attention of Roger Fry, who founded the Omega Group in London in 1913 and employed artists such as Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell in the designing and making of pottery. Bernard Leach, ultimately responsible for the revival of studio pottery in Britain, went to Japan to learn Japanese methods of making pottery. He returned to St Ives in the 1920s to set up his own pottery, working with high-fired stoneware, and promoting oriental methods and aesthetics, and a holistic approach to art and life. The influence of Leach and his pupils, who included Michael Cardew and Katharine Pleydell-Bouverie, was far-reaching and dominated the domestic pottery scene for many years.

There was a generally felt desire for change after the dull utilitarianism of the World War II period, and imaginative designs with a more varied colour palette began to appear in studio pottery. Catalysts for change came from the influences of Pablo Picasso, Scandinavian design, and Mediterranean food and culture. Dora Billington, who taught ceramics at the Central School of Art, was instrumental in the formation of a new breed of potter, more in tune with contemporary urban design and architecture, their style based on a much broader knowledge of ceramic techniques than that promoted by Leach. William Newland, Margaret Hine, and Nicholas Vergette exemplified this new attitude to ceramics. Evidence of a very different aesthetic can be seen in the work of Lucie Rie and Hans Coper, two major figures in post-war ceramics who settled in London in the late 1930s. The influence of the Bauhaus is manifest in the austere and formal simplicity of their work. In the United States, Peter Voulkos and Paul Soldner brought a new relaxed freedom to ceramics in the mood of the prevailing Abstract Expressionist fine art movement.

By the 1970s in England, a group of potters was beginning to turn to a more exploratory, referential, and sometimes ironic approach to ceramics, as embodied in the so-called “abstract vessel”. Alison Britton, Elizabeth Fritsch, Angus Suttie, Gordon Baldwin, and Richard Slee among others, were reworking the tradition of ceramics, making hand-built, vessel-based but increasingly abstract pieces, more metaphorical than functional. Their influence is still very powerful in contemporary ceramics, moving ceramics into an ambiguous middle-ground between pottery and fine art. Within the field of wheel-thrown ceramics, trends toward refinement and still-life groupings can be discerned in the work of Walter Keeler, Takeshi Yasuda, Gwyn Hanssen Pigott, and Edmund de Waal. In contrast, there is also renewed interest in “primitive” hand-built forms and processes, as in the work of Gabriele Koch and Lawson Oyekan.