Midcentury Moment

Midcentury Moment

California potters in the 1950s and ’60s were onto something big — and they knew it.

Shana Dambrot Current PSL, Modernism

Midcentury Moment
POTTERY PHOTOGRAPHS BY DAN CHAVKIN

Like painters with their pigments, ceramicists use clay as a medium of self-expression as well as decoration. One cannot overstate the use of color and imagery in the development of midcentury California-style pottery. With or without regard for functionality, artists of the era forged a seismic generational shift not only in what ceramic art could be but also in how and where audiences could experience it.

In more recent years, institutions like Museum of California Design (MOCAD) and American Museum of Ceramic Arts (AMOCA) dedicated themselves to ceramics and related genres, while more comprehensive venues such as the Autry Museum of the American West, Craft and Folk Art Museum, Laguna Art Museum, Long Beach Museum of Art, Scripps College, and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art collect and exhibit Californians’ accomplishments in clay. And clay-based sculpture is now ubiquitous as a pillar of the design market.

Palm Springs Life spoke to a few experts about the history of making, showing, and collecting midcentury California pottery, along with the pleasures and terrors of a resurgence in attention being paid to its charms, including both its famous and underappreciated historical practitioners.

Bill Stern founded MOCAD in Los Angeles in 1999, having enjoyed a fruitful and prolific career as an arts journalist — until he fell in love with pottery while on assignment looking into vernacular architecture for an L.A. Weekly cover story on California’s commercial pottery scene. What he learned captured his imagination and curiosity, setting in motion the forces that would engender the museum about a decade later. In the intervening 19 years, Stern has curated and published a number of blockbuster exhibitions and catalogs, becoming a true potter familias and a renowned advocate for the California pottery genre and beyond. “What I discovered is that California pottery is part of something much larger,” he says. “California Design.”

Stern’s colleagues at AMOCA in Pomona would concur. But while California clay is certainly the heart and soul of the operation, their historical and geographic reach is broad, and their focus on ceramics is deep. Executive director Beth Ann Gerstein explains, “AMOCA exhibits work from pre-Columbian to contemporary and from industrial to studio ceramics.”

Paul Soldner

The student of legendary ceramacist Peter Voulkos put his own twist on the Japanese firing technique raku and created wildly spontaneous sculptural vessels.

PaulSoldner

PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY ASPEN HISTORICAL SOCIETY

PaulSoldnerart

PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY PATRICK HENTRY COLLECTION

Sculpture and photography have a lot in common.
Both have had to justify their dual citizenship in the
worlds of art and craft. And both operate through
plays of light and shadow, speaking a language of
positive and negative space. But when it comes to
ceramics, particularly the inimitable pottery of
post-war California, sculpture seems to have
much in common with painting, too.
Richard Saar

In 1949, Richard Saar opened a studio in El Segundo to design and hand-paint works while his brother, William, managed the business and its production.

PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY AMERICAN MUSEUM OF CERAMIC ARTS

Harrison Mcintosh

Taking a modern approach to classical vessel forms, the Claremont artist was known for his sensual shapes and distinctive surface decoration.

HarrisonMcintosh

PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY AMERICAN MUSEUM OF CERAMIC ARTS

HarrisonMcintoshArt
“Voulkos led the charge in the 1950s that altered the
status of ceramics forever — from a craft material
suitable only for vessels to a medium appropriate
for sculptural works of art. His break from tradition
in pursuit of individual artistic expression has had an immeasurable impact on contemporary ceramics.”
Peter Voulkos

The founding figure of the American “clay revolution” helped transform clay into a medium that spoke to the contemporary human condition.

PHOTOGRAPH BY GETTY IMAGES

PeterVoulkos

AMOCA’s inaugural exhibition in 2004 was dedicated to the work of Paul Soldner, who began his own journey to iconic status in the genre as a student of Voulkos back when Otis was still called the L.A. County Art Institute. Soldner later taught at Scripps College for almost 40 years, helping to establish its widely anticipated annual ceramics exhibition and cement its reputation as a center for innovation in the medium. Soldner is best known for reinterpreting the exceptionally traditional Asian pottery process of raku for a modern American audience and era. He was as intrigued by its material techniques as he was by the spiritual implications of its methods. As Soldner wrote in 1973, “In the spirit of raku, there is the necessity to embrace the element of surprise. There can be no fear of losing what was once planned, and there must be an urge to grow along with the discovery of the unknown. Raku offers us deep understanding of those qualities in pottery which are of a more spiritual nature, of pots by men willing to create objects that have meaning as well as function.”

When Harrison McIntosh (1914–2016) turned 100 years old, the Claremont Museum and AMOCA got together and threw him a birthday party — and a landmark exhibition surveying his vast and impossibly stylish output. In some ways McIntosh made pottery that was perfect for a party. He drew on the curvilinear surfaces and decorated his plump, classic vessels with chic and perfect, finely executed honeycombs, scales, bubbles, cells, and parabolas that evoked textile or mosaic styles. His quirky palette enlivens sensuality. The work embodies the spirit of the cheeky, elegant avant-garde of the 1950s. A pioneer but not necessarily a rebel, and in fact something of a purist, McIntosh “followed his own path,” according to the museum website. “McIntosh chose to build on his foundation in modern design rather than pursue the expressionistic approach to clay that became popular in the 1960s. Working in his Claremont studio for more than 60 years, he continued to explore the subtleties of form — both vessel and sculptural — in his personal, thoughtfully deliberate manner.”

Doyle  Lane

The East L.A. potter, known for his tactile glazes,  created a range of work, from delicate vases and ceramic sculptures to large-scale clay paintings and mosaics.

DoyleLane

PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY VENICE CLAY ARTISTS

DoyleLaneArt

Another purist by all accounts was studio potter Doyle Lane (1925–2002), the subject of an attention-grabbing solo show at West Hollywood’s Reform Gallery in 2014. Reform’s owner, Gerard O’Brien, knew and worked with Lane, whom he describes as a bit of a loner. But he was also a master colorist and a prolific artist who was dedicated to his craft. Lane enjoyed some success as a commercial potter and also showed his works at Leimert Park’s famous Brockman Gallery, a hub of black art and known for its inclusion of design idioms in the same cultural discourse as conceptual fine art. “I’m known for showing American studio pottery of the post-war era,” O’Brien says, “but it has always been an art and design salon; I’ve always shown it all together.” Over time, he began to see the nuances and distinctions along the design-art continuum in ceramics, flickering between making and self-expression. “But sometimes, creativity just transcends functionality,” he says.

One of the most charming stories from this area of art history has to be that of the Natzlers —  Otto (1908–2007) and Gertrud (1908–1971) — a married couple who worked side by side in the studio, where everyone knew that “Gertrud threw and Otto glazed.” That was their arrangement. The Natzlers were Austrian immigrants who became educators and made their living as studio potters and garnered attention from many within the fine art world as well. “Otto had a supreme understanding of glaze chemistry,” O’Brien says. “He understood glaze as paint, through science, practice, and discipline.” Their work is prized for its synthesis of delicate forms and sublime, painterly skins. As far as the boundaries between design, craft, and art, “It’s always been a blurry distinction,” he says, “depending on whose hands the materials are in. The Natzlers in the 1950s–60s were showing on La Cienega [Boulevard in L.A.] with other so-called ‘decorative’ artists and the artwork of architects, too.” O’Brien says they and their peers were all aware of the midcentury moment they were in; they knew they were onto something new. It was a fertile time for makers, and it seems our time is that again now, perhaps for different reasons, fueled by different culture and even emotional impulses. O’Brien, who also owns The Landing in the West Adams art district, agrees there’s a new prevalence of interest in materialism, especially ceramics. “But remember,” he says, “that all through artist history, at some point, every great artist works in clay.”

Otto and Gertrud Natzler

The Natzlers met in Vienna in 1934, married, and maintained a studio, emphasizing Gertrud’s sophisticated, thin-walled vessels and Otto’s refined glazing.

OttoGertrudNatzler

PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY HELLA HAMMID/COURTESY AMERICAN CRAFT COUNCIL LIBRARY & ARCHIVES

HarrisonMcCintosh