Tate Liverpool | Past Exhibitions | A Secret History of Clay: From Gauguin to Gormley

Artists used ceramics as propaganda. In the Russian Revolutionary ceramics shown here, domestic objects are decorated with political slogans. The role of art was to agitate for the transformation of all aspects of life through the dissemination of propaganda. The clay vessel – innocuous, demotic and utilitarian – was an ideal vehicle for the communication of Revolutionary values to the masses, taking those values into the home with slogans such as Knowledge lightens work and Long live Soviet power. As well as these explicit messages, the associated link between vessel and nourishment provided a subliminal message for the paternal Communist state. Curiously, some of the pieces here, such as Sergei V Chekhonin’s Cubist Design with Hammer and Sickle 1919, used plates remnant from the Imperial Porcelain Factory in St Petersburg, so are marked with the monogram of the Tsar. The Communist demand was for these items to only fulfil their function, but ironically, they quickly became precious collectors’ items.

Another group of artists to use ceramics as propaganda were the Italian Futurists, whose colourful, lavish ceramics include Ivos Pacetti’s gilded terracotta Gas Mask 1932, a work in clay which appears to be made of metal. Proponents of the Futurist aeroceramica movement created politicised ceramics for a new world. Mussolini’s desire for self-commemoration found many willing contributors among Futurist artists, under order to produce work that was dynamic and new. Renato Giuseppe Bertelli’s Continuous Profile – Head of Mussolini 1933 is an ultra-modern interpretation of a noble tradition of portraiture, in polished Fascist black.

Renato Giuseppe Bertelli
Continuous Profile - Head of Mussolini 1933
Imperial War Museum, London

In 1936, the artist Lucio Fontana began working intensely at the workshop of the Futurist potter Tullio d’Albisola. Like Gauguin, Fontana hated the academicism of ceramics: ‘I am a sculptor, not a ceramicist. I have never thrown a plate on a wheel nor painted a vase. I detest lacy designs and dainty nuances.’ Treating the clay purely as a sculptural material to push, pull and mould into shape, Fontana was voracious in his consumption of materials. His figures based on commedia dell’arte porcelains are grossly extended, and are modelled with passion and speed. This, combined with his use of colour, reflects the drama of his approach to clay.

Alexander Archipenko and Isamu Noguchi demonstrate two different approaches to the figure: Archipenko reduces forms to an almost abstract simplification, his constructions – often highly polished or coloured – confuse the viewer into believing the work is made of anything but clay. For the American-Japanese sculptor Noguchi, the primitive Japanese Haniwa figure, which dates from the prehistoric Jomon period, provides the inspiration for the fragmentary, abstracted totems shown here – Hot Day 1950 and Face (Me) 1952. Displayed on their stands, these works appear like exhibits from an ethnographic display.

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