Ceramic Pottery Art

At first the various vase forms made in ancient times were copied by European craftsmen, but then classical vases became a point of departure for the creation of something new. An exhibition that
ceramic pottery production Myanmar

traces the evolution of the vase in the decorative arts of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries is the subject of an exhibition on view at the Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, Design, and Culture in New York City through October 17. It is entitled Vasemania--Neoclassical Form and Ornament: Selections from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The show includes some one hundred objects, and is the outgrowth of a collaboration between a group of graduate students under the leadership of Stefanie Walker, a professor and curator at Bard, and William Rieder of the department of European sculpture and decorative arts at the Metropolitan Museum.

The ceramics -pottery vases-, metalwork, furniture, textiles, and works on paper in the show are mostly drawn from the storage rooms of the museum, and therefore are not often seen by the public. Almost all the objects were made in France and England and are either functional, like vase-shaped inkwells or perfume burners, or they incorporate vases in their decoration.

Collectors and antiquarians were largely responsible for the vogue for collecting ceramic and other antiquities that took root in the eighteenth century.

Among them were Sir William Hamilton in England; Anne Claude Philippe, comte de Caylus, in France; Giovanni Battista Piranesi in Italy; and Johann Joachim Winckelmann in Germany. Vases were the most highly sought after of all the antiquities then available. The exhibition examines the important role the Hamilton collection played in the rise of the neoclassical style. Hamilton served as British envoy extraordinary and plenipotentiary to the court of Naples starting in 1764. While in Italy he formed an enormous collection of antiquities, which, according to the Dictionary of National Biography, included some 730 vases, 175 terra cottas, 300 glass objects, 627 bronzes, 150 ivories, 150 gems, 143 gold ornaments, more than 6,000 coins, and a few marble statues, all of which he later sold to the British Museum in London.

When the collection was published in several volumes with beautifully hand-colored engravings and a text in French and English in 1766 and 1767, it was promoted to craftsmen and designers as a definitive source. Among the most astute makers of decorative objects was the innovative businessman Josiah Wedgwood, who quickly saw the potential in producing both faithful reproductions and interpretive adaptations of antique vases. Hamilton formed a second collection that was partly lost at sea en route to England. What did survive was bought by the influential designer Thomas Hope in 1801.

In France starting in the 1760s the neoclassical style developed in three stages: the gout grec, the gout etrusque, and gout antique (or early Empire style). Like their British counterparts, French designers were not always strictly imitative. For their imaginative interpretations they used the geometrical symmetry of the classical past as a point of departure, but they pulled out bits of the decorative ornament--swags, garlands, ram's heads, and masks--and combined them in innovative ways. The exhibition examines how artisans at the Sevres porcelain manufactory created ceramic objects that are classical in overall form but much more voluptuous and flamboyant than their prototypes, particularly because of brilliant colors and gilding, which are not found on their antique counterparts.

The evolution of the vase as a form and a decorative motif examined in this exhibition and its catalogue provides an exemplar of the progress of the neoclassical style in France and England. The catalogue is edited by Stefanie Walker and contains essays by Heather Jane McCormick and Hans Ottomeyer. It is available from Yale University Press and may be obtained by telephoning 800-405-1619.

Author Allison Eckardt Ledes, COPYRIGHT Brant Publications, Inc.& Gale Group

already in the 14th century celadon export ceramic was shipped on Chinese vessels all over Asia. Several sunken ship off the Malaysian east and west coast plus several places in today Indonesia show this.

Beautiful tableware, voluminous water pots and vases are available in Chiang Mai, the production of Celadon ceramics was done in Thailand for centuries. Before the 15th century most Thai export ceramics came from the kilns of Sisatchanalai north of the ancient city of Sukothai (the first Capital City of Thailand) and archeological excavation show that pottery was made already at the 4th Millennium BC.

Fine and very old celadon items are on display at Malaysia's Maritime Archeological Museum in Kuala Lumpur, recovered from sunken Chinese vessels from the 14th century and later. At that time ancient China was the main customer for Thai Celadon. The old Chinese knew Thai celadon as "Sangkalok" which was "Sawan-khalok".

Thailand got a edge over China in export ceramic items after the ban on export of anything from China by the emperor.

At Chiang Mai locally produced Benjarong Ware -decorated with 5 different colors and glaze plus Terra Cotta and Sandstone art items are available, the Blue-White porcelain and Celadon. Celadon pottery gets is beauty by using iron oxide for glaze. The chines used cobalt oxide for their blue color which was not available in this part of Thailand at that time. Iron oxides green-blue jade color gives this particular shade of Thai celadon items.

Several Celadon manufacturers are located in Chiang Mai and a visit to their showrooms -the factory usually is just behind and can be visited- is a look into a creative ceramic world with beautiful celadon ceramic items who adorn any place anywhere.

Ancient pottery

You probably know students who worship professional athletes--but did you know the adulation of sports stars dates back to Ancient Greece? The Greeks glorified strong, graceful bodies. Every four years, the largest of athletic competitions was held at Olympia, where young men vied for prizes and honor. Runners carried torches through the dark, hoping to arrive first to light the flame on the altar to Zeus.

Greek Pottery

In Ancient Greece, art was part of everyday life. Historic, epic, and mythological scenes of heroes and gods were often painted on household pottery. Because the Ancient Greeks loved athletics and competition, many painters featured scenes from sporting events.

To make a pot, clay was dug out of the ground and cleaned of imperfections. Then a lump was placed on a potter's wheel. A young apprentice turned the wheel while the master potter shaped the clay. The handles and base of the pot were made separately and attached later. Before the pot was fired in the kiln, a scene was sketched out and painted. Sometimes one artist created the pot and another artist painted the scene.

About the Vase

The Etruscans, who lived in northern Italy, traded with the Greeks. They bought Greek pottery and began to create their own pieces in a similar style, showing scenes from Greek life. Hang the Masterpiece Poster and look at it with your class. Women's Foot Race is a black-figured hydria, or water jug, attributed to the Painter of Micali, an Etruscan painter who worked in the last part of the 6th century BC. He is considered one of the most original and imaginative painters of vases. People shown on Etruscan pots often exhibit loose, energetic movements. Imagine how fast those women are running!

Olympic Hydrias

Have your students create Olympic water carriers out of plastic water bottles. Remove the label from one bottle and use it as a template for making orange construction-paper labels. Have students use black marker to draw repeating, silhouetted sports figures engaged in their own favorite Olympic event along their labels. Use white colored pencils for accent details and secure the labels with tape. Host your own Olympic Games and invite athletes to cool off with their water jugs!

HYDRIA This ceramic water jar, called a hydria, has two side handles and one long handle at the neck for pouring.

BLACK-FIGURE STYLE These lively runners are shown in silhouette. They are painted with a fine liquid clay mixture called slip. Detailed lines, such as flying hair, were cut through the slip with a sharp tool.

WOMEN ATHLETES Women weren't allowed to watch or participate in the Ancient Olympics. Instead, they held a festival for women only, dedicated to the goddess Hera. The winners of the women's foot race were crowned with olive wreaths, just like at the men's games.

ALL FIRED UP! As the kiln is fired, air mixes with iron in the clay and turns it rusty red. (The clay stays black if no air is let in.) Potters added thin decorative layers of clay and experimented with letting air in and out of the kiln to produce both red and black colors.

THE ATHLETE IN ART

The beautiful drawings on this ancient water jug, or hydria, celebrate the women's footrace at the Festival of the Goddess Hera, the wife of Zeus. The ancient Greeks loved sport and competition, but women were not allowed to participate in the men's contests at Olympia, held in honor of Zeus. Instead, they competed at this special Festival, set up for women's sporting events only. These early Greek competitions led to our modern Olympics, in which male and female athletes from countries all over the world compete for glory.

Author Christy Hale, COPYRIGHT Scholastic, Inc. & Gale Group

Asian Art in London ranges from Indian miniatures to Chinese ceramics

Asian Art in London is more than an art and antiques fair without the claustrophobia. Launched eight years ago as an initiative to promote London's pre-eminence as a marketplace for Asian art--the city boasts far more specialist dealers than anywhere else--and to focus attention on its many peerless museum collections, it offers a ten-day feast of gallery and museum shows, auctions, seminars and lectures--and parties galore for those who have the stamina. In fact, this great sprawling, eclectic event offers something for just about anyone interested in Asian art of any region, medium or period (visit www. asianartinlondon.com for the full programme). This year, 3-12 November, it is blessed by a spectacular centrepiece in the form of the Royal Academy's blockbuster 'Qing' show--'China: The Three Emperors 1662-1795', which opens on 12 November.

As one might expect, the dealers in Chinese art are fielding impressive displays. Eskenazi, for instance, is offering forty-seven pieces of Song ceramics from the distinguished collection of the late Hans Popper. It was during the Song period (960-1279) that Chinese potters effectively transformed stoneware from the rough and haphazard to the precisely potted, smooth-textured and brilliantly glazed vessels that take a bow here. Their understated beauty lies in a combination of balanced form and subtle surface decoration, be it jade-inspired glazes from the palest cream or bluish-green to strong olive, unusual cracklure, elegant relief or an abstract splash of colour.

S. Marchant & Son celebrate the firm's eightieth anniversary with a show of 'Chinese Jades from Han to Qin'. Sydney L. Moss, meanwhile, presents Chinese paintings and calligraphy; Ben Janssens, early Chinese and South-East Asian sculpture; Robert Kleiner, snuff bottles; and Jacqueline Simcox presents later Chinese textiles. Speelman's show even includes a pair of imperial lacquered wood elephants. Contemporary pieces play an increasingly large role. Cohen & Cohen's 'Now & Then' show contrasts major Chinese export porcelains with a one-man show devoted to the seemingly flawless contemporary porcelain sculptures by a Taiwanese-American neurosuregeon-turned-ceramist: Cliff Lee has spent seventeen years working out the recipes for 1,000 year-old Song glazes (Fig. 1). New exhibitors Marlborough Fine Art similarly present a tribute to the painter Chen Yifei, who died earlier this year.

That contemporary theme is also picked up by the likes of Malcolm Fairley, who presents Meiji warrior costumes and recent Japanese ceramics, and Rossi & Rossi, whose show of fifty Tibetan paintings spans an impressive 900 years. The whole Indian subcontinent is well represented too. John Eskenazi offers characteristically impressive early--fifth and sixth century--Kashmiri and Gupta period stone and terracotta sculptures (Fig. 3). Francesca Galloway presents thirty-five miniatures from the Muslim and Hindu courts of India from the famed collection of Mildred and W.G. Archer, while Sam Fogg unveils 'Jain Painting 1450-1850'. In all, forty dealers take a bow.

In contrast to the offerings unveiled in New York this month, Asian art looks like small change. For this month sees the annual fall sales of big-buck Impressionist, modern and contemporary art. It also sees a choice single-owner collection of furniture and decorative arts, not unreasonably heralded as the one of the greatest collections of the twentieth century. This is the property of Lily and the late Edmond Safra--over 800 lots drawn from their various residences in London, Geneva, Paris and New York and offered by Sotheby's on 3 and 4 November. This is a collection that began with Faberge and Tula-Russian metalwork- and evolved to include furniture and paintings. It is the furniture, however, that steals this particular show.

Most of the great eighteenth-century French cabinetmakers are represented in this collection. Arguably the most important piece of its kind is a Louis XVI ebony bureau plat and cartonnier of around 1770 and attributed to Joseph Baumhauer, as imposing a neoclassical piece as one is likely to find on the market (estimate $5m-$7m). Here, too, is the peerless Andre-Charles Boulle, represented by a sarcophagus-shaped coffre de toilette or casket whose entire surface--inside and out--is veneered in marquetry in brass and tortoiseshell, its lid cornered by ormolu lions' masks and the whole resting on lion's-paw feet. It is expected to fetch $700,000-$1m.

Perhaps even more wonderfully expressive of the Safras' taste for bold pattern and design and luxurious materials are the best of the English pieces--if one counts the work of the prolific emigre Pierre Langlois as such. Here, for instance, is a spectacular pair of George III serpentine commodes, their tops and sides exquisitely--not to mention ingeniously--veneered with coromandel lacquer depicting brightly coloured figures and pavilion scenes, flowering trees and birds (Fig. 2). Attributed to Langlois, they appear to have been commissioned by the Earl of Hertford for Ragley Hall around 1765 (estimate $600,000-$800,000). Notable, too, is a pair of ormolu-mounted Blue John wing-figure candle vases of much the same date, attributed to Matthew Boulton ($500,000-$600,000). Needless to say, the ormolu retains its original gilding, and the Blue John body is richly hued and striated. There is even a quantity of Anglo-Indian pieces, inlaid with elaborately ornamented ivory.

As for the Impressionist, Modern and Contemporary sales, I whet your appetite with just one sublime Rothko. Homage to Matisse (Fig. 4) was painted in 1954 and its tall, slender format--it measures 268 cm by 129 cm--suggests that its particular inspiration was the late cut-out designs Matisse made for stained-glass windows, most particularly the Nuit de Noel illustrated in Life magazine in 1952 and displayed in the Time Life Building in New York the following year. Acquired by the collector Edward R. Broida for less than $1 m in 1984, it now comes to the block at Christie's on 8 November with an estimate of $10m-$15m.

New York looks positively Old Money when compared to the burgeoning--and potentially exceedingly lucrative--markets of China, Russia and India. Of course, as soon as one writes any such sweeping statement, the inherent contradiction immediately presents itself. While there is no doubting the explosion of an enormous local market in China--vast auctions are now taking place not only in Hong Kong but also in Beijing and Shanghai, and new salerooms are popping up all the time--it is interesting to see just how international this market remains. Revealingly, the most expensive lots sold in the September sales in New York went to non-Chinese buyers--as did both the 15m [pounds sterling] blue-and-white Yuan dynasty jar sold at Christie's, London, in July and the 2.6m [pounds sterling] double-gourd vase sold three days later by Woolley & Wallis.

High prices inevitably winkle out more stellar pieces, and Sotheby's sale on 22 September unveiled another exceptional piece of early blue and white from an old family collection. This particularly large and refined Ming meiping (Fig. 5), from the estate of Laurence S. Rockefeller, came with an estimate of $300,000-$400,000 and sold--to a client of London dealer Eskenazi--for ten times the amount, $3.9m. Similarly, a fourteenth-century hanging scroll by Wang Meng sold for a record $1.696m to an American buyer at Christie's on 20 September. That said, both sales were dominated by Chinese bidding and buying. Christie's sale realised the highest total of any various-owner sale of Chinese art in New York--$14.5m.

Christie's Indian and Southeast Asian sale on 21 September similarly notched up another record auction total, $11.3m. Both houses did roaring business in the hot, hot market for modern and contemporary Indian painting and auction records for individual artists fell like ninepins. Christie's pioneered these contemporary sales in London in 1993, moving their location to New York and Hong Kong in recent years. It is a market fuelled by the huge Indian diaspora--even so, Christie's has just appointed a full-time representative in Mumbai. A neat indication of how the market is moving is provided by Tyeb Mehta. In 2003, his Celebration surpassed the $100,000 mark, selling for a record $317,500. Three years later, Mahisasura (Fig. 6) broke through the $1 m barrier, selling for $1.58m and becoming the most expensive contemporary Indian painting ever sold at auction. It was acquired by an Indian collector living in North America. The two sales found twenty-five new artist's auction records.

Some other ceramic items:

History of ceramics, painting ceramics, Chinese ceramics, properties of ceramics, ceramics artists, Japanese ceramics, uses of ceramics, architectural ceramics, heath ceramics, pictures of ceramics, antique ceramics, ceramics supplies, definition of ceramics, ceramics vocabulary, ceramics

CERAMIC POTTERY ART