The next question, and a good one, is why should we even bother to examine this issue? Does it matter to ceramics whether we are part of Modernist art history or not? The answer is, “yes,” it does matter. There are no restrictions on the type of ceramic object that could be selected traditional, non-traditional, functional, vessel or sculptural. The term ceramics here is used in a neutral form meaning fired clay. Then we must ask what the findings tell us about the practice of ceramic art history and what this means for our future. If it did then why has this never been acknowledged and if it did not, what were the reasons for the failure to be a participant.

The question posed in this paper is whether or not the ceramics movement made a contribution to the history of Avant-Garde of the fine arts mainstream in the first half of the 20th century. This stature is easy enough to achieve in our field where one has only to be two steps to the left of Warren McKenzie to be considered a radical. Every movement has its interior Avant-Garde element. Thirdly, this is not about whether an Avant-Garde movement exists within ceramics. For the purpose of this talk, let’s accept as a given that a part of ceramics is fine art. craft debate although this is always a subtext. It is about the relationship between ceramics and the fine arts from 1900 to 1950. Firstly, it is not about ceramics made within the disciplines of design, crafts, or the decorative arts. The subject of this paper has great potential for misunderstanding so let me begin by refining the thesis and by explaining what this will not be about. Crapper, the erstwhile 19th century father of the modern toilet, could never have imagined that his development of porcelain bathroom furniture would eventually lead to one of the great controversies in fine art and provide the arts with its most infamous ceramic object. Alas, this is not that kind of lecture and instead of being taken into the sedate Zen world of Bernard Leach we will spend much of our time in the land of another Englishman, Thomas Crapper. Ceramic history has tended to be a safe subject, without rancor, unpleasant images or disquieting points of view. It is reasonable to expect that a paper on ceramic history will be a warm and nostalgic trip through glaze discoveries, quaint old pottery studios, accompanied by a picture gallery of charming, non-threatening pots that one can take home to mother.

Between a Toilet and a Hard Place: Is the Ceramic Avant-Garde a Contradiction in Terms?įirst Annual Dorothy Wilson Perkins Lecture Schein International Museum of Ceramic Art at Alfred University

The Artful Teapot by Garth Clark