Heath Ceramics: The Complexity of Simplicity
Biedermeier: The Invention of Simplicity
Bruno Mathsson: Architect and Designer
Fertile Forms: The Sculpture of Gustav & Ulla Kraitz
Crafting
a Modern World: The Architecture and Design of Antonin and Noémi
Raymond
Ted Noten.
CH2=C(CH3)C=O)OCH3 enclosures and other TN’s
Art
of the Northwest Coast
Archive
Heath
Ceramics: The Complexity of Simplicity
by Amos Klausner, 2006, Chronicle Books, San Francisco, CA, 800-722-6657.
192 pages, 19 contributors, illustrated. $29.95.
Fundamental, handsome forms made for function are the hallmark of Heath
Ceramics, the company founded in 1948 by Edith Heath (1911-2005) in Sausalito,
California. The history and legacy of these ceramics and the story of
the woman who created them, are revealed in this fine book, complete with
hundreds of archival and new images. An arts educator who became a studio
potter, Heath, with the help of her husband, Brian, made a transition
to industrial design. Enjoying her hybrid role and the recognition of
both peers and design professionals, she produced one-of-a-kind pieces,
dinnerware and, eventually, tiles favored by architects, for which she
was awarded the Industrial Arts Medal by the American Institute of Architects
in 1971. Among the contributors are the ceramics historian Garth Clark,
who praises Heath’s synthesis of classical and contemporary forms
as, quoting Bernard Leach, “Bauhaus over Sung,” and the restaurateur
Alice Waters, who suggests that the durable, elegant dinnerware Heath
developed for her Berkeley restaurant helped create a sense of place.
Heath’s designs remain fresh today, and the traditions of the company,
owned since 2003 by Catherine Bailey and Robin Petravic, are reaching
a new generation.
TOP
Glass: Material Matters
by Howard N. Fox, 2006, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California, 323-857-6183. 176 pages, illustrated. $48 paperback.
The use of glass across a range of decorative objects, sculpture, conceptual and installation art, and architecture is explored in this catalog of an exhibition of more than 100 works from the mid-1980s to the present by nearly 70 artists at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (April 30-December 10, 2006). The challenge of the show, organized by Howard N. Fox, LACMA’s curator of contemporary art, and Sarah Nichols, former chief curator at the Carnegie Museum of Art, was to break down the “apartheid” existing between divergent artistic pursuits that are nonetheless unified by their use of the same material. With so many artists working in glass, Fox writes, “it is illuminating to look over the tops of those fences and to find the affinities and confluences that inform so much disparate creativity.” Fox discusses the works, more than half of which are in LACMA’s permanent collection, according to theme, form and technique.
Biedermeier: The Invention of Simplicity
by Hans Ottomeyer, Klaus Albrecht Schröder and Laurie Winters, 2006,
Milwaukee Art Museum, Wisconsin, with Hatje Cantz Verlag, Ostfildern,
Germany. D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers, New York, NY, 800-338-2665.
400 pages, 10 contributors, illustrated. $65.
In the history of artistic styles, Biedermeier was once a mildly disparaging
term suggesting bourgeois, cozy taste. No longer. Judging from this companion
book to a landmark exhibition of more than 400 works encompassing all
branches of the decorative arts as well as paintings and drawings produced
in Austria, Germany and Denmark between 1815 and 1830, the word has been
transformed into a positive characterization of a complex period that
seems to have anticipated modernism a century in advance. “Biedermeier
is here identified as a term for an artistic era characterized by an emphasis
on functionality and natural beauty,” writes the Milwaukee Art Museum’s
Laurie Winters, a co-curator of the show. “The style is marked by
a considered balance of opposites in the ideal of nature and the simplicity
of design. In its pure form, Biedermeier is characterized by an overall
abstraction and geometry, brilliant color, and a lack of superficial ornamentation.”
The works, shown in splendid photographs, include porcelains, wallpaper,
clothing, and silver and metalwork with pared-down forms. Furniture, which
more than any of the other arts here seems to embody the Biedermeier ethos,
is the largest category, with almost 100 examples of tables, cabinets
and seating. “The simple form of the furniture built between the
late eighteenth century and around 1830 appears in a wide range of variations,”
writes Christian Witt-Dörring on the aesthetics of this work. “Born
of the tectonic qualities of classicism, the straight line took precedence
over the curved. If a line was curved, it exhibited clear, sharp contours
that extended into the flat plane rather than into three-dimensional space
and thus emphasized frontality.” Premiering at the Milwaukee Art
Museum last fall, the exhibition is at the Albertina in Vienna through
May 13, and travels to the Deutsches Historisches Museum in Berlin (June
8 – September 2) and the Louvre in Paris (October 15, 2007 –
January 15, 2008).
The Arts and Crafts Movement
by Rosalind P. Blakesley, 2006, Phaidon Press Limited, New York, NY, 212-652-5400.
272 pages, illustrated. $69.95.
The British art historian Rosalind Blakesley here charts the Arts and
Crafts movement from the 1860s through the First World War, but unlike
many other books covering the subject, hers goes beyond discussing its
origin and development in Victorian England with William Morris and his
circle to encompass the movement’s expansion to the Continent. Although
some European countries—France, Spain and Italy, for example—were
caught up in Art Nouveau, Germany, Austria, Poland, Russia and the Nordic
countries saw extensive developments in craft. When the movement originated
in England, it was a call to respect the maker during a time of industrialization
and dangerous working conditions, reflecting the era’s social, political
and artistic concerns. In Austria and Germany it arose from the desire
to acknowledge local traditions and create a standard for modern design,
and in Hungary and Poland, the movement developed as a manifestation of
national pride. Blakesley moves on to the United States, where the Arts
and Crafts movement flourished, but in a different way than in Britain.
In a brief epilogue touching on more recent developments, she suggests
that the original ideals of the movement—to reinvent the crafts
as activities of social and moral relevance—live on today in issues
as supranational as Third World policy and environmental debates.
Bruno
Mathsson: Architect and Designer
by Dag Widman, Karin Winter and Nina Stritzler-Levine, 2007, Yale University
Press, New Haven, CT, 203-432-0960. 227 pages, illustrated. $60.
It's a safe bet to call the Swedish furniture designer Bruno Mathsson
(1907-1988) a true renaissance man. Born into a family of cabinetmakers,
Mathsson was a quick study in his father's shop and gained international
recognition for his unique, yet subtle, modernist bentwood furniture designs—especially
his curvaceous chairs with webbing—by the time he was in his late
20s. But Mathsson's tale is also a cautionary one. Unwilling to relinquish
control of any part of his product—from design to construction,
to marketing—Mathsson is far less well-known than his contemporaries
in the United States today despite being a predecessor and mentor to so
many. Thankfully this book, with excellent reproductions of his furniture
and architecture, is now available to illuminate a career often lost in
the gleaming lights of mid-century modern Scandinavian design. The book
accompanies an exhibition that opened in 2006 at the Swedish Museum of
Architecture in Stockholm and is at the Bard Graduate Center for Studies
in the Decorative Arts, Design and Culture, New York City, through June
10.
Fertile Forms: The Sculpture of Gustav & Ulla Kraitz
2006, American Ceramics Books, New York, NY, 212-661-4397, and Bokförlaget Arena, Malmö, Sweden. 172 pages, essays by Suzanne Ramljak, Donald Kuspit and Göran Christenson, illustrated, designed by William Bernard and Milton Glaser. $60.
In a dual career spanning more than four decades, Gustav and Ulla Kraitz, a Swedish artist-couple of complementary talents, have created a body of mostly ceramic sculpture, especially outdoor installations, that draw inspiration from the forms of the natural world. A striking aspect of their oeuvre, as described in this monograph, has been the duplication of the ancient Chinese practice of flame firing, a technique that has enabled them to achieve glazes that are deep and sumptuous as well as extremely durable. Among the many site-specific commissions they have done in different countries is their monument in New York City near the United Nations honoring Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat responsible for rescuing Hungarian Jews during the Holocaust. The essays, complemented by evocative photographs, examine the couple’s technical and artistic evolution.
TOP
Crafting a Modern World: The Architecture
and Design of Antonin and Noémi Raymond
edited by Kurt G. F. Helfrich and William Whitaker, 2006, Princeton Architectural
Press, New York, NY, 212-995-9620. 364 pages, essays by Helfrich with
Mari Sakamoto Nakahara, Ken Tadashi Oshima and Christine Vendredi-Auzanneau,
illustrated. $75.
This attractive monograph brings to light the prolific but not widely
known careers of Antonin Raymond (1888-1976) and Noémi Raymond
(1889-1980), a husband-and-wife design team with European roots—his
background was Czech, hers Swiss-French. The couple spent more than 60
years collaborating as modern designers in Japan and the United States.
Brought to Japan by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1919 to help with the construction
of the Imperial Hotel, they remained in Tokyo and are best known for a
series of finely detailed, exposed wood and reinforced concrete houses
built in Japan in the 1930s. Committed modernists, they completed more
than 500 structures in Asia, Europe and the United States, including homes,
office buildings, churches, schools and factories. They also designed
furniture and rugs. In the introduction, Kurt G. F. Helfrich and Mari
Sakamoto Nakahara explore the Raymonds’ concept of synthesis, viewing
it as an outgrowth of their background and training in the context of
Japan’s own cultural assimilation of modernism during the 20th century.
For the Raymonds, they write, “the Japanese approach was rooted
in the ideal of artisan production, defined by them as skillful construction
or artistry—the way of making things. Attention to craft of design
became the fundamental precept that informed the very act of creation
and became evident at all levels of their design.” Their Japanese
experience prompted the Raymonds to challenge designers and the public
“to learn from architecture before it became an expert’s art.
The untutored builders in space and time . . . demonstrate an admirable
talent for fitting their buildings into the natural surroundings.”
Ted Noten.
CH2=C(CH3)C=O)OCH3 enclosures and other TN’s
by Gert Staal, 2006, 010 Publishers, Rotterdam, Netherlands, +31-(0)-10-4-333-509,
www.010publishers.nl. 328 pages, illustrated. $50 paperback.
A dead mouse wearing a pearl necklace encased in a block of clear acrylic
as the pendant of a necklace, a “chew-your-own-brooch” project
in which museumgoers are invited to chew gum into shapes that are then
cast in silver or gold plate, brooches cut out of the metal of a Mercedes—these
are a few of the startling designs by the Dutch jewelry artist Ted Noten
in this volume, in which the images are interspersed with provocative
text printed on smaller, non-glossy bound-in pages. Noten’s designs
are at once a critique of contemporary life and of contemporary art jewelry
practice which, he claims, is isolated from both the art world and the
public. He sees his work as a narrative that engages passersby as an audience
in his process. As the photographs of his many projects suggest, Noten
finds the familiar in our surroundings and, by his idiosyncratic response,
makes it strange.
Art of the Northwest Coast
by Aldona Jonaitis, 2006, University of Washington Press, Seattle, 800-441-4115.
344 pages, illustrated. $26.95 paperback.
In this survey of the native art of the Northwest Coast, an area ranging
from Puget Sound to Alaska, Aldona Jonaitis, professor of anthropology
at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and director of the university’s
Museum of the North, places the work in context of the region’s
social history, drawing on the insights of anthropologists, art historians
and the native peoples themselves. Beginning in prehistoric times, she
describes how, among other things, art has demonstrated wealth, served
as a major component in performances and dancing societies, and functioned
as protective military gear. She points out that in the 19th century,
contrary to popular belief, upheavals from European contact did not cause
the demise of native art, but rather brought about new forms of artistic
expression. The period between 1900 and 1960 was marked by cultural persistence
on the part of native people, and a growing appreciation of this distinctive
art by non-natives. The final chapter suggests that native art has flourished
since 1960, noting artists who have expressed their heritage in innovative
ways.
ARCHIVE
Oct/Nov 2007
Aug/Sept 2007
June/July 2007
April/May 2007
February/March 2007
December/January 2007
October/November 2006
August/September 2006
June/July 2006
April/May 2006
February/March 2006
December 2005/January 2006
October/November 2005
August/September 2005
June/July 2005
April/May 2005
February/March 2005
December/January 2005
October/November 2004
August/September 2004
April/May/June/July 2004
February/March 2004
December 2003/January 2004
October/November 2003
August/September 2003
June/July 2003
April/May 2003
February/March 2003
December 2002/January 2003
October/November 2002
August/September 2002
June/July 2002
April/May 2002
February/March 2002
December 2001/January 2002
October/November 2001
August/September 2001
June/July 2001
April/May 2001
February/March 2001
December 2000/January 2001
October/November 2000