November 2015 Newsletter
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San Francisco Ceramic Circle An Affiliate of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco November 2015 P.O. Box 15163, San Francisco, CA 94115-0163 www.patricianantiques.com/sfcc.html New Sunday Lecture Timeframe! 9:45 a.m. – Mini-exhibition set up & social time (no change) 10:25 a.m. – Announcements and speaker introduction 10:30 a.m. – Lecture begins 12:00 Noon – Deadline to clear the Gould Theater SFCC NOVEMBER LECTURE What California Modern Wrought: Sunday, November 15, 2015 The Apotheosis of Ceramic Sculpture 9:45 a.m. – Theater opens 10:25 a.m. – Program begins Diana Daniels Florence Gould Theater, Legion of Honor Curator of Contemporary Art Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento About the speaker: Curator of one of the top collections of modern to contemporary Northern California art, Diana Daniels has organized shows across the full range of media. Among other work with ceramics, she curated the retrospective honoring Clayton Bailey at the Crocker in 2011. About the lecture: The talk will present the emergence of sculpture from the studio pottery movement in California. It will include leading late-20th century artists such as Peter Voulkos, Robert Arneson, and Clayton Bailey, and then discuss current work. Mini-exhibit: Please bring ceramic sculpture of all types and periods. Paul Dresang, American, b. 1948 Loving Cup, ca. 1995 Porcelain, soda-fired, 10 ½ x 8 ½ inches Sacramento, Crocker Art Museum, promised gift of Sidney Swidler SFCC LECTURES, JANUARY - APRIL 2016 SUNDAY, JANUARY 17. John Johnston, former Curator of Asian Art, San Antonio Museum of Art, and Research Fellow, Victoria and Albert Museum, Picturing China on Porcelain: From Local Landmarks to the Willow Pattern. SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 14. Jeffrey Ruda, Professor Emeritus of Art History, UC Davis, Raphael, Engraving, and the Art of Maiolica (in cooperation with the Graphic Arts Council, Achenbach Foundation). SUNDAY, MARCH 13 or 27 (TBD). Charlotte Jacob-Hanson, independent scholar and lecturer, In the Footsteps of Fidelle Duvivier: The French-English Connection. SUNDAY, APRIL 17. Loren Zeller, President, Transferware Collector’s Club, The Influence of Jean Pillement on 18th- and 19th-Century Ceramic Designs. NOVEMBER LECTURE BACKGROUND: CERAMIC SCULPTURE Most fired clay is at least nominally “useful.” Even when a vase is expensively made and delicate, its umpteenth-great grandparent was a plain storage jar. Clay is sometimes used for pure representation—that is, sculpture—because it is malleable, and especially because it can be cast as multiples. Other than porcelain, ceramics are also relatively cheap to produce. Ancient Greece, for example, used molded terracotta as architectural decoration, as cult statues, and as small objects that may have been purely decorative. For a few hundred years starting in the late 4th century BCE, the city of Tanagra, northwest of Athens, mass produced cast figures that were found in huge numbers in local graves and were widely exported as well. The figures were coated in white slip before firing and some were then cold-painted in naturalistic colors. Many examples show the dynamic poses of Late-Classical and Hellenistic monumental sculpture. The figures used contemporary clothing and hairstyles, and the subjects may include both theater characters and votives. Greece, c. 350-250 BCE Standing Draped Figure (Venus?) Terracotta, height 26 cm. San Francisco, Palace of the Legion of Honor In the 1440s, the Florentine sculptor Luca Della Robbia developed glazes that made ceramic sculpture both colorful and weather- resistant. The breakthrough showed that multiples could, potentially, equal the artistry of Luca’s renowned work in marble and bronze. Luca Della Robbia (1399/1400-1482) Madonna and Child (detail), c. 1460 Glazed terracotta with painted and gilded details New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art There are fine terracotta and maiolica figures and groups after Luca Della Robbia’s, but European ceramic sculpture blossomed in the 18th century, with soft-paste porcelain in France and hard-paste porcelain in Germany. Johann Joachim Kändler was the dominant sculptor at Meissen. In the 1730s, he more or less invented the genre of porcelain figures as ornaments. His characters range from courtly to gross, but they are always dynamic. Painting was a separate department, and the treatments vary enormously. Harlequin’s mask is bi-colored in the V&A’s example at right, mustachioed in another pull at the V&A, and solid black in the pull at the Met. All three pulls have different color schemes; this one is the boldest and most complex. Johann Joachim Kändler (1706-75) Meissen Porcelain Factory Harlequin with a Tankard, c. 1738-40 Porcelain with enamels and gilding, height 16.3 cm Photo © The Victoria and Albert Museum The subtlety of Nymphenburg’s porcelain body surpassed even Meissen’s. Franz Anton Bustelli, Nymphenburg’s lead sculptor, exploited the material with highly refined detailing and expression. The new emphasis may reflect a new function, as well as the general shift from late- baroque to rococo styles. Kändler’s figures and figure groups of the 1730s and 1740s were made to include in lavish dining-table settings. This use had disappeared by mid-century, when porcelain figures began to serve as individual ornaments throughout elite living spaces. Franz Anton Bustelli (1720-67) Nymphenburg Porcelain Factory, Munich Harlequina, c. 1763 Porcelain with enamels, height 20.3 cm New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art Ceramic sculpture as a modern studio art arguably started with Paul Gauguin. He grew up with his great-uncle’s collection of Moche ceramics from Peru, and then he studied French folk pottery along with other popular arts. With technical help from the ceramist Ernest Chaplet, he adapted practical shapes such as mugs to purely expressive design. He regarded the treatments as deliberately awkward—folky—including the choice of stoneware as the body, though now we may see them as complex and sophisticated. Peter Voulkos, 1924-2002 Tientos, 1959 Clay with iron glazes, height 139.7 cm San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Paul Gauguin (1848-1903), possibly with Ernest Chaplet (1835-1909) Portrait Vase of Mme. Schuffenecker, c. 1889-90 Glazed stoneware, height 23.654 cm. Dallas Museum of Art In the late 1950s, ceramists in California moved from ironized pottery shapes to either pure abstraction, as with Peter Voulkos, or to representational sculpture, as with Ralph Arneson. Voulkos’s tall “Stacks” include parts that suggest pottery, but overall they parallel mid- century abstraction in recognized sculptural media such as wood or bronze. Arneson’s work may have seemed less avant-garde at the time, but in hindsight it was more radical. Like Bay Area figurative painting, it encouraged a return to the interplay of overt subject matter with inventive technique. Ceramic sculpture now ranges through politics, social issues, and intimate personal experience, like art in general. Tip Toland, born 1950 Wall Flower (detail), 2011 Stoneware, with paint, pastel, and synthetic hair; wood and wall paper, 86 x 111 x 53 inches Sacramento, Crocker Art Museum Toland’s collectors include the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Nelson Atkins Museum, Kansas City; and the Renwick Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. .