After the Great Depression and years of shared sacrifice during World War II, the United States enacted economic and social policies that encouraged growth through unfettered consumerism. Returning G.I.s entered the housing market en masse, the automobile market flourished, and a new Populuxe aesthetic emerged that endowed cars and household appliances with gleaming chrome and candy colors. Women like the Syracuse Museum of Fine Arts’ director Anna Wetherill Olmsted and Aileen Osborne Webb, who founded the American Craft Council, used their respective platforms to provide new opportunities and professional development for craft artists.
The range of such opportunities was wide indeed. William Daley and Peter Voulkos were typical of returning soldiers who threw themselves into the study of ceramics through opportunities that the G.I. Bill provided. Other artists embraced ceramics as a bohemian alternative to the increasingly consumerist lifestyle that swept the nation. Having fled Nazi Germany, Bauhaus-trained potter Marguerite Wildenhain operated a rural pottery school at Pond Farm in Northern California from 1947 until her death in 1985. At Pond Farm, Wildenhain favored experience over tangible results by making her students recycle their efforts in clay rather than firing them.
In 1949, potter Robert Turner accepted an invitation to build a pottery program at Black Mountain College in North Carolina. This emerging center of avant-garde learning included teachers like Josef and Anni Albers, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, and Buckminster Fuller, and students like Ruth Asawa, Elaine de Kooning, and Robert Rauschenberg. Potter Karen Karnes succeeded Turner at Black Mountain College, although her then-husband, David Weinrib (in photo at right), got the official recognition and salary! Under Karnes, Black Mountain hosted visiting potters like Shoji Hamada and Peter Voulkos, both of whom ultimately had immense influence in ceramics. Photo courtesy of American Craft Council
National exhibitions like the Scripps Annual and the American Craft Council’s Young Americans joined the Ceramic Nationals in 1944 and 1950 respectively, but the Syracuse exhibition still provides the most comprehensive lens through which to view these developments. The Ceramic Nationals reflected the progressive views of Olmsted and the jurors she chose. In 1947, only two years after her release from a U.S. Internment camp, Japanese-American artist Minnie Negoro received a purchase prize for a tea set she made as a student at Alfred University. The next year, jurors lauded pioneering queer ceramist Sascha Brastoff’s grotesque Surrealist platters. Juror Maija Grotell praised that year’s entries for overcoming the trend of whimsical, small-scale work, remarking that “in 1948, ‘cuteness’ is definitely on the wane.”
During the 1940s and 1950s, the figurative sculptures that artists like Viktor Schreckengost and Vally Wieselthier pioneered increasingly gave way to abstraction. Oregon’s Betty Feves and Central New York’s own Dorothy Riester found success in the Ceramic Nationals by exploring the abstraction of the human form in clay. Then in the mid-1950s, Peter Voulkos and others began following the lead of Lucio Fontana and other European counterparts by using the vessel as a vehicle for abstraction. Voulkos’ award-winning 1956 Tall Covered Jar anticipates his turn to abstraction, which occurred only months later when he began inverting and slicing his pots to negate their function.
This style of Abstract Expressionism in ceramics coincided with a moment of great change at the Syracuse Museum of Fine Arts. After nearly fifteen years of court challenges, donor Helen Everson’s bequest to fund the more contemporary-minded Everson Museum of Art became a reality. The two institutions merged in 1959 with William Hull as the new director. This transition forced Olmsted to move into a curatorial role, and the Ceramic Nationals never regained the institutional support and stability that they had under her leadership. The Ceramic Nationals began to flag just as the field of studio crafts started to reach a critical mass.
Credits:
Jamie Young