"Full of surprises [and] evocative." The Spectator
"Passionately written." Apollo
"An extraordinary accomplishment." Edmund de Waal
"Monumental." Times Literary Supplement
"An epic reshaping of ceramic art." Crafts
"An important book." The Arts Society Magazine
In his major new history, Paul Greenhalgh tells the story of ceramics as a story of human civilisation, from the Ancient Greeks to the present day. As a core craft technology, pottery has underpinned domesticity, business, religion, recreation, architecture, and art for millennia. Indeed, the history of ceramics parallels the development of human society.
This fascinating and very human history traces the story of ceramic art and industry from the Ancient Greeks to the Romans and the medieval world; Islamic ceramic cultures and their influence on the Italian Renaissance; Chinese and European porcelain production; modernity and Art Nouveau; the rise of the studio potter, Art Deco, International Style and Mid-Century Modern, and finally, the contemporary explosion of ceramic making and the postmodern potter. Interwoven in this journey through time and place is the story of the pots themselves, the culture of the ceramics, and their character and meaning. Ceramics have had a presence in virtually every country and historical period, and have worked as a commodity servicing every social class. They are omnipresent: a ubiquitous art. Ceramic culture is a clear, unique, definable thing, and has an internal logic that holds it together through millennia. Hence ceramics is the most peculiar and extraordinary of all the arts. At once cheap, expensive, elite, plebeian, high-tech, low-tech, exotic, eccentric, comic, tragic, spiritual, and secular, it has revealed itself to be as fluid as the mud it is made from.
Ceramics are the very stuff of how civilized life was, and is, led. This then is the story of human society's most surprising core causes and effects.
Acknowledgements
Prologue: A History in Shards
CHAPTER 1. WHAT CERAMIC IS
1. Fundamentals
2. Stuff of the Earth
3. The Art of Heat
4. The Potter
5. Nomenclature and Culture
6. The Ceramic Continuum
7. Transformers: Classicism, Islam, China, and the Modern
8. The Discipline
9. Industry and the Levels of Production
10. Ubiquity: The Plastic of the Ancient World
11. Telling Stories
12. Civilisation, Power, and Domestic Life
13. Conclusion: Western Ceramic
CHAPTER 2: THE VALUE OF THE GREEK POTTER
1. The World in Black and Red
2. Positioning the Pots
3. The Earlier Greek World
4. Reducing Iron and Oxygen
5. Who Were These People?
6. Secular Life
7. Anachronism, the Value, and the Price of Things
8. The Value and the Price of Things
9. Conclusion: The Spread of Red and Black
CHAPTER 3: ROME AND THE ARRIVAL OF THE MEDIEVAL WORLD
1. The Feel of Roman Pots
2. Red Gloss
3. The Pots of Empire
4. Greece, Rome, and the Classical Idea
5. Standardisation
6. Dark, Light, an End and a Beginning
7. Europe: The Coarse and the Local
8. Revivalism and the Vernacular
9. Conclusion: The Classical Heritage
CHAPTER 4: RENAISSANCES OF TIN
1. The Chemistry of Islam
2. Islam and Ceramic History
3. The Pottery Revolution
4. Islam in Europe
5. Renaissance Pots
6. Colour, Line and Life
7. Secular Life
8. Pottery and Painting
9. Quantity, Quality, and Status
10. The Arrival of the Meal
11. Sculptural Form
12. Italian Potters and Potteries
13. Renaissances
14. Conclusion: a European Ethos
CHAPTER 5: THE ENLIGHTENED REIGN OF WHITE
1. Chinese Pots
2. Technology, Style, Confidence
3. Porcelain City
4. China in Europe
5. The Quest for a European Porcelain
6. The Porcelain Explosion
7. Blue, White, War, and Peace
8. Delftware
9. Frivolity and Melancholy: the Figurine Reinvented
10. The Rise of Staffordshire
11. Conclusion: Modern Whiteness
CHAPTER 6: THE NATURAL AND THE INDIVIDUAL: LEAD, SLIP, STONE, SALT
1. History, the Collective, and the Individual
2. The Renaissance Man
3. The Palissystes
4. The Salt Renaissance
5. Prose and Poetry
6. The Nature of Slip
7. Configuring Life
8. The Arrival of America
9. Conclusion: The Ingredients of Modernity
CHAPTER 7: THE ACCELERATION OF STYLE AND THE ARRIVAL OF THE MODERN
1. Decoration, Complication, and Anxiety
2. The Last Transformer: Another Modernity
3. Institutionalisation
4. Exhibitions
5. Ugliness and the Era
6. The Invention of Style
7. Design Reform and the Ingredients of Modern Design
8. The Meaning of Majolica
9. The Vortex of Large-scale Production
10. The Republic of Tile
11. Ceramic Hell
12. Gender
13. Exoticism
14. The Designer
15. The Art Nouveau style
16. Conclusion: High Eclecticism to Art Nouveau
CHAPTER 8: THE STUDIO ARRIVES
1. A Modern Place
2. Art Pottery
3. Defining Art
4. The Invention of Craft
5. The Completeness of Existence
6. The Artist-potter
7. Émigrés
8. Art Deco
9. The International Style
10. Mid-century Modern
11. Potters and Painters
12. Conclusion: A World is Formed
CHAPTER 9: THE CREATIVE EXPLOSION
1. Thunderous Emotion
2. Another Modernity
3. The World of Funk
4. Conceptualism and Minimalism
5. A New Arena
6. New American Symbolism
7. The Ceramic Landscape
8. Abstract Vessels
9. Postmodernism
10. The New Ornamentalism
11. Conclusion: The Potter Now
Postscript: Attica to California
Notes
Bibliography
Index
About the Author
