Video and Books The Complete Kagan: Vladimir Kagan: A Lifetime of Avant-Garde Design Because the Earth is 1/3 Dirt Ceramic Art in Finland: A Contemporary Tradition Archive
	The Complete Kagan: Vladimir Kagan: A Lifetime of Avant-Garde Design by Vladimir Kagan, 2004, Pointed Leaf Press, New York, NY, 212-535-1086. 272 pages, preface by Tom Ford, illustrated. $65. The name Vladimir Kagan conjures an array of furniture that seems quintessentially 1950s—Serpentine sofas, unfussy buffets and sideboards on sculptural legs, aluminum pedestals and contoured chaises. These Kagan signature pieces, whose hallmarks are comfort, practicality and a modernist idiom, are considered classics today, when interest in American mid-20th-century design is strong, and many are being collected or reissued. In this exuberant autobiography, drawing on 60 years of personal and professional archives, Kagan chronicles his childhood in Europe, his family’s escape to New York from Nazi Germany in the late 1930s, learning his craft in the workshop of his father, a skilled cabinetmaker, while he studied architecture, his rise to success as a designer which he sustained over many decades despite business reversals, and his continuing creativity today, at age 77. An engaging family album, the book is also a compendium of all Kagan’s designs. It ends, fittingly, with his 2003 sculptural sofa in the shape of a bone, and his musings on the challenges of the 21st century. TOP
	Because the Earth Is 1/3 Dirt 2004, CU Art Museum, University of Colorado at Boulder, 303-492-3008. 56 pages, texts by co-curators Lisa Tamiris Becker, Jeanne Quinn, Scott Chamberlin and Kim Dickey (with Kirk Ambrose), illustrated. $25 paperback. A thought-provoking account of an exhibition (and symposium) at the CU Art Museum in 2004, this catalog deals with “the material, visceral, and metaphoric potency of the ceramic medium, exploring its intrinsic association with the earth and its material connection to both nature and culture,” writes Lisa Tamiris Becker, director of the museum. Though diverse in scale and sensibility, the ceramic works of an international roster of 11 artists—Saint Clair Cemin, Johan Creten, Wim Delvoye, Léopold Foulem, Backa Carin Ivarsdotter, Walter McConnell, Kristen Morgin, Ted Muehling, Lawson Oyekan, Annabeth Rosen and Pieter Stockmans—express “the inherent aesthetic interrelationship between perfection and imperfection, the tamed and the untamed, dirt and beauty.” Many of their works explore the motif of memento mori, asserting clay’s connection to fragility and ephemerality. Biographies of the artists and curators are included. TOP
	Ceramic Art in Finland: A Contemporary Tradition edited by Åsa Hellman, 2004, Thames & Hudson, New York, NY, 212-354-3763. 272 pages, texts by Hellman and six contributors, illustrated. $45. This handsome survey confirms that in ceramics, as in other areas of craft and design, Finnish artists rank among the world’s finest, whether in utilitarian pottery or sculpture. More than 160 ceramists, from the late 19th century to the present, are introduced in brief but insightful profiles, their work shown in dramatic photographs. The introductory essay traces the role of pioneers like Alfred William Finch, an Anglo-Belgian who settled in Finland in 1897, founded an influential design company and later held the ceramics teaching post at the Central School of Industrial Art, Helsinki; his student Maija Grotell, who as an émigré artist and teacher at Cranbrook Academy of Art influenced generations of American ceramists; and Kyllikki Salmenhaara, who through her work at Arabia, Finland’s major ceramics factory, contributed greatly to the international reputation of Finnish ceramics. Other topics covered are Arabia’s art department, ceramic art in modern Finnish architecture, the advent of small workshops, and the new generation.
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