Ceramics (Art History)

After the second world war, there was a growing interest in the material of clay among European artists. Pablo Picasso, Asger Jorn and many others appreciated the way in which they could easily and quickly form the material, brightness and steadiness of glazes and inevitable role of a coincidence in the process. Besides, in the time of increasing production of artificial materials such as plastics, clay bore connotations of a tradition reaching to the prehistoric times and of “un-spoiled” folk culture. On the other hand, a growing number of students in studios of ceramics at schools of applied art shifted their focus from mugs and vases to sculpture. In 1959 a new format of artistic work was established by sculptor Karl Prantl in Sankt Margarethen, Austria: a symposium. A group of artists spend ca. 5 weeks in one place ─ far from artistic centres ─ and experiment with different approaches to one material, sharing their experience. This idea resonated a lot in the Central Europe, where symposia in different materials came to existence in the 1960s and artists from both sides of the Iron Curtain started to meet there and work together after a roughly 15 years long break. For clay, the first symposium was founded in Austria as well, in 1963, by ceramicist Kurt Ohnsorg in Gmunden, a small city with a ceramic factory.
The second “International Symposium of Ceramics” was founded three years later in the small spa city of Bechyně in Czechoslovakia ─ on the other side of the Iron Curtain. How did this idea transfer across this political barrier and why did it resonate in both systems, which offered very different conditions for artists, who were dealing with a different set of problems? What did the ideals of collectiveness, folk art and experiment mean in those different contexts?
Ohnsorg met his Czechoslovak colleagues supposedly at the International Exhibition of Ceramics in Prague in 1962. It was one of the first events in Czechoslovakia, where artists from the Western countries could present their work after the second world war. The exhibition was eagerly supported by the Czechoslovak authorities, who could demonstrate the cultural advancement of the country two years after they had officially announced, that Socialism had been successfully built in Czechoslovakia. They planned to support creation of business connections and export Czechoslovak ceramic products. But it was equally important for the ceramicists, who made their independent international contacts there and many of them focused on something else: they wanted to further explore possibilities of clay in context of fine art.
Political relaxation in Czechoslovakia during the 1960s enabled ceramicists and other young artists to get elected to a management of the Union of Czechoslovak artists in 1964 and they transformed this centralized institution into a progressive force, which got rebellious after the Soviet occupation in 1968 and so it had to be disbanded completely and founded again with a completely new set of members. Before that it gave the ceramists a chance to enforce their goals including the establishment of a symposium focused on collective work, experiment, exploration of both art and design and above all on crossing the borders between East and West using the network of peripheral cities, separated from the traditional art centres.

Chapter "Ceramic Contacts: Foundation of the International Symposium of Ceramics Bechyně" explores different strategies used by Czechoslovak ceramicists to re-establish their international contacts during the 1960s, which culminated with the establishment of the Bechyně Symposium.

Other chapters and interviews deal with topics such as creation of European network of art symposia (Marcel Fišer),  context of workf of Austrian ceramicist Kurt Ohnsorg and Czech sculptor Zbyněk Sekal (Marie Klimešová), complicated relationship between "fine art" and ceramics in the 1970s (Kristýna Péčová).

The book includes interviews (by Veronika Rollová, Eva Pelechová and Kristýna Péčová) focused on historical context of symposia (with Gabi Dewalt, Jindra Viková, and Helena Samohelová) and with contemporary artists Yael Atzmony, Ellen Kleckner, Katie Sleyman, Giorgio di Palma, Sofie Norsteng and Adam Železný.

Poems by Ondřej Buddeus.
Photography by Tomáš Brabec and Pavel Baňka.

Joint lecture given at the 2017 NCECA Conference, Pittsburgh. Outlines a broad overview of what is happening in Iran today, including a few local and active centers of traditional pottery as well as new directions being explored by contemporary artists.

Watch here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4OSHeHbkARA&t=2644s

This paper focuses on ceramics advertised in St. Louis newspapers between 1809 and 1850. The bulk of references to ceramics in these advertisements referred to inexpensive refined British earthenwares, which were generically called “Queenswares.” While that term was coined by Wedgwood to refer to his creamware product lines, the term was soon used to refer to most inexpensive British earthenwares, including post-1780 pearlware and post-1830 whiteware. Annotated ceramic product descriptions as found in random samples of the Lousisian Gazette (sampled at four month intervals) are presented. . Examined chronologically, these advertisements offer a glimpse into the changing terminologies, tastes, and fashions that were applied to ceramic products in Midwestern markets before the Civil War.