Introduction | Section 1 | Section 2 | Section 3 | Section 4 | Section 5 | Section 6

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Paul Gauguin Double-Vase decorated with a Breton Figure, 1886-7 Photograph © The Danish Museum of Decorative Art/photographer Pernille Klemp

The story begins with the artist Paul Gauguin: his Double-vase Decorated with Breton Figure 1886-7 is a domestic object that defies its function: it is a vase unable to hold a bouquet of flowers. By placing the figure of a Breton woman on the side of the pot Gauguin draws a parallel between the female body and the domestic vessel.

Gauguin rejected the perceived frigidity and frippery of decorative art ceramics (epitomised by the traditional ceramic production of Sèvres). For him, ceramics were another form of sculpture, and working in clay was about a personal communication with the earth, a facet of his engagement with the ‘primitive’. He wrote: ‘Needless to say Sèvres has killed ceramics…with the American Indians it was a central art. God gave man a little bit of mud, with a little bit of mud he made metal and precious stones, with a little bit of mud and a little bit of genius.’

Like Gauguin, George Ohr – also know as The Mad Potter of Biloxi – rejected studio pottery, and what he perceived to be its coldness and lack of engagement with the creative process. To Ohr, his pots were like people, his ‘clay babies’. In addition to this anthropomorphism, there is a deep sensuality in Ohr’s pots; they collapse, ruffle and dimple into sexual forms, as seen in Untitled Vase c 1900.

George Ohr Untitled Vase  circa 1900 © the artist Courtesy Collection Museum for Contemporary Art 's-Hertogenbosch/NL

The German Expressionist sculptors of the artists’ group Die Brücke favoured the technique of woodcarving, as they revered its direct engagement with both material and form. However, both Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, a founding member, and Emil Nolde, who was an active member of the group from 1906-7, also worked in ceramics. For these artists, firing could preserve the unique spontaneity of clay and also heighten and intensify the expressive colouration of their work. As with Gauguin, this was an engagement with the primitive as part of their search for pure expression. Nolde described the expressive potential of clay: ‘Our age has seen to it that a design on paper has to precede every clay pot, ornament, useful object or piece of clothing. The products of primitive people are created with actual material in their hands, between their fingers…The primeval vitality, the intensive, often grotesque expression of energy and life in its most elemental form – that, perhaps is what makes these native works so enjoyable.’ Nolde made his ceramic works, of which Tile – Dancing Girls 1913 is an example, during his travels in the South Seas.

For Ernst Barlach, as for Nolde and Gauguin, an engagement with real life was a key aspect of his ceramic production. Works such as Russian Beggarwoman with a Bowl 1906 demonstrate an engagement with contemporary social and political themes. Wilhelm Andreas’ three-piece sculpture Pleasure 1921 uses the tension between the physicality of clay and the fragility of porcelain to explore the relationship between the body and architectural space, through the motif of expressionist dance.

In contrast to the figurative ceramics of their German counterparts, Fauve artists such as Henri Matisse and Maurice de Vlaminck painted the surfaces of plates, dishes and vases with bright abstract patterns. The artists had no direct involvement in the making of the forms that they were to decorate, which were produced by André Metthey. Many of the artists in this show collaborated with potters in this way. It is interesting to note that whilst critics of the day shunned such abstraction on canvas, they accepted it on three-dimensional decorative objects.