‘A little bit of mud and a little bit of genius’: A history of modern ceramics in nine pieces

Paul Gauguin was among the first modern artists to elevate ceramics to the realm of high art. Recognising the immediacy and vitality of clay, he strove to liberate ceramics from the staid, domestic world of ornament and decoration to which it had long been confined by Western tradition. Across the 20th century, as many artists came to similar conclusions about the medium’s limitless potential, ceramics finally gained currency as an artistic mode.

On 2 October, Christie’s presents Un/Breakable, its first-ever curated sale celebrating the incredible diversity and versatility of ceramics. Featuring work by both traditional and experimental artists from the Impressionist and Modern eras to the contemporary — including the likes of Lucio Fontana, Fernand Léger, Julian Schnabel and Grayson Perry — the sale encapsulates the history of ceramics as they evolved from a functional, decorative practice to a marker of 20th and 21st-century sculpture. Here we look at nine key pieces from the sale that reflect the development of the medium.

1. Paul Gauguin, Vase porte-bouquet ‘Atahualpa’

As the 19th century drew to a close, the great Post-Impressionist Paul Gauguin found in ceramics a means to achieve his desire for a primitive mode of expression — and for ever changed our understanding of the medium.

Gauguin began to produce ceramics in 1886, having been introduced to Ernest Chaplet, one of the leading ceramicists of his day. Gauguin arranged to make pottery in Chaplet’s Paris studio, and to split the proceeds of any sales between them. While the initial arrangement was that Gauguin would decorate the pieces that Chaplet made, the artist fast developed a talent for throwing his own pottery, quickly forging a unique and radical aesthetic. He was inspired by a range of sources, from the vogue for Japonism to pottery from Peru, where he had lived for part of his childhood.

Gauguin returned frequently to Chaplet’s studio over the coming the years, with his most experimental pieces created following his return from Martinique in late 1887. (It was around this time that he executed Vase porte-bouquet ‘Atahualpa’.)

Instead of throwing pieces on a potter’s wheel — the traditional technique — Gauguin preferred to construct his ceramics by hand using a method known as coil and slab construction. This practice, he believed, was essential to a new, avant-garde form of ceramics. He called for artists to ‘transform the eternal Greek vase... replacing the potter at his wheel by intelligent hands, which could impart the life of a figure to a vase while remaining true to the character of the material.’ Consequently, Gauguin’s pieces have an anthropomorphic and sculptural form, often with appendages attached, their functional uses playfully subverted so that they become fantastical artistic objects.

‘God created man with a little mud,’ Gauguin wrote in 1889. ‘With a little bit of mud we can make metal, we can make precious stones — with a little bit of mud and a little bit of genius.’

2. George Ohr, Glazed Ceramic Vase

The self-styled ‘Mad Potter of Biloxi’ (who also described himself as the ‘Unequalled! Unrivalled! Undisputed greatest art potter on the Earth’), George Edgar Ohr defied all convention. The diverse body of work he produced in the late 1890s and early 1900s was astonishingly ahead of its time. 

His studio, a five-story wooden ‘pagoda’ in Biloxi, Mississippi, overflowed with pots in an array of wild, warped shapes and explosive colours that stood in vivid contrast to the Victorian beiges of the era. Glazed Ceramic Vase, with its exuberant biomorphic shape and shimmering glaze, is a charming demonstration of his pots’ unique character.

Although many contemporaries regarded Ohr as nothing more than an eccentric tourist attraction, he predicted in a 1901 interview that his time would come. ‘When I am gone, my work will be praised, honoured, and cherished,’ he said. He was right. Half a century after his death in 1918, an amazing cache of 7,000 works was discovered in his son’s auto repair garage. 

Jasper Johns and Andy Warhol began buying Ohr’s pots, later followed by Steven Spielberg and Jack Nicholson. Examples of his ceramics are now held in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. The Frank Gehry-designed Ohr-O’Keefe Museum, a major centre dedicated to Ohr’s work and to the cultural heritage of Mississippi, opened in 2011.

3. Bernard Leach, Two Tile Panels

Although Bernard Leach is today acclaimed as the father of studio ceramics, he began his career studying painting and etching at the Slade School of Fine Art in London. At the time, pottery was not considered an art form — potters were paid only to throw pots for others to decorate.

Leach disagreed with this view, believing strongly that the manipulating and forming of earthenware, stoneware or porcelain was as important as its surface decoration. In time, he became an evangelist for the medium.

Leach’s works combine influences from his time in Japan, where he studied under Ogata Kenzan VI; his knowledge of Korean and Chinese ceramics; his appreciation of the English ceramic tradition; and his fascination with medieval history. The tiles he produced demonstrate the union of these different passions and his great skill as a draughtsman.

4. Pablo Picasso, Grand vase aux femmes voilées

Conceived in 1950, Grand vase aux femmes voilées  is a remarkable example of Pablo Picasso’s early development in the medium of ceramics.

Picasso first visited the Madoura workshop in Vallauris in July 1946. The ancient associations of the village with ceramic production appealed to Picasso and, fascinated by the unusual combination of pictorial and sculptural possibilities the medium offered, he returned a year later with ideas for the creation of a range of flat and three-dimensional pieces. He soon began combining different techniques, and observing the transformation of his creations in the kiln.

Ceramics is perhaps the medium in which Picasso most developed his own interpretation of Classical imagery, with mythical beings and goddesses becoming central in his designs. With their thin garments and head garlands, each of the figures in Grand vase aux femmes voilées  is transformed into a maenad-like creature, taking part in what could be interpreted as a Bacchic ritual.

5. Dame Lucie Rie (1902-1995), Bowl

An Austrian émigré who came to London in 1938, Lucie Rie had studied pottery at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Vienna and was familiar with the works of the Vienna Secession. During the war she made buttons and tableware for department stores such as Heal’s and Liberty in order to supplement her income; she also taught at Camberwell College of Arts from 1960 to 1972. By 1991 she had gained sufficient recognition to be honoured as a Dame Commander of the British Empire.

What distinguished Rie was her ability to find endless variety within a narrow range of forms and decorative techniques. She opted to fire her works only once, and employed minimal decorative motifs, although she was constantly experimenting with glazes. Rather than dipping her works in glaze, she used a brush for greater control, incising her works with a pin or needle.

‘To make pottery is an adventure to me, every new work is a new beginning,’ Dame Lucy once said. ‘There is nothing sensational about it, only a silent grandeur and quietness.’

6. Fausto Melotti, I gessetti

In the aftermath of the Second World War, Italian sculptor Fausto Melotti turned to ceramics, explaining, ‘I must confess that the war has caused me great inner pain and sickness. One cannot make abstract art, one cannot even think about it when the soul is full not of desperation, but of figures of desperation.’

His series of teatrini — puppet theatres — which he developed at this time, served as the setting for his experiments in figuration. Spare in decoration and with intimate settings, Melotti’s teatrini  present open-ended worlds in which new narratives can unfold.

Executed in 1959, I gessetti  is an early example of these figurative terracotta works. Divided into two levels, its architecture evokes Piet Mondrian’s neo-plastic compositions. On each floor a softly modelled figure sits sideways, knees bent, lost in thought. On the lower level Melotti has placed a small table and covered it with the titular chalks that provide the only colour in an otherwise monochromatic tableau.

7. Hans Coper, Hourglass Vessel

Hans Coper fled Nazi Germany in 1939 and when war was declared he was interned in Lancashire in the north of England. He was subsequently sent to Canada, where he remained for two years, before serving in the Non-Combatant Corps of the British Army. From 1946 he worked with Lucie Rie, making buttons, cups, saucers and salad bowls. Like Rie, with whom he remained close friends throughout his life, Coper went on to teach at the Camberwell School of Art; he also taught at the Royal College of Art.

As an artist, Coper distinguished himself as a creator of new forms. His pots, formed mainly of conjoined elements, are at once functional and highly sculptural. He much admired the work of Alberto Giacometti and Constantin Brancusi, and shared their fascination with form, surface, outline and space.

To execute his pieces, Coper layered slip and then sanded, scratched and stained, limiting his palette to neutral shades of cream, manganese and burnt black. Like Rie he elected to raw-glaze his works rather than firing them twice. Ultimately, the physical shape of Coper’s creations became almost indistinguishable from its glaze. Glazing was for him not about decorating a surface, but about creating a whole.

8. Thomas Schütte, Ceramic Sketch

With his deft command of form, texture and finish, Thomas Schütte uses ceramics as a way to confound expectations. The production of smaller ceramics — in some cases as maquettes for his large-scale bronze and aluminium works — is a key part of Schütte’s process, allowing an expressive, three-dimensional immediacy of creation. Integral to his exploration of sculptural tradition is the plinth, which typically confers a certain gravity upon the figure it supports.

In the above Ceramic Sketch  from 1997-99, a dripping, geisha-like figure kneels upon a raw-edged base, the top of which is glazed and spattered. It is as if she has emerged from the Earth, foregrounding the material congruence between figure and plinth. In this particular piece, the plinth also recalls the raised tatami flooring in a traditional Japanese home.

9. Takuro Kuwata, Red Black-Slipped Gold Kairagi Shino Egg

Born in Hiroshima in 1981, Takuro Kuwata is fascinated by the concept of beauty born from destruction. His practice offers a contemporary view of postwar Japanese anxiety, exploring a correlation between Japan’s recent natural and social disasters. The natural world plays an active role, with bursting stones and broken glazes acting as metaphors for erupting volcanoes and earthquakes.

Reflecting the Japanese aesthetic philosophy of wabi-sabi, which focuses on the beauty of incompletion and imperfection, Kuwata employs the traditional Japanese technique of kairagi  to create imperfections in the glaze through shrinking and cracking. The kairagi  method introduces a degree of uncertainty that enhances the dysfunctional, organic nature of the object. In Red Black-Slipped Gold Kairagi Shino Egg, Kuwata pushes this to its extreme so that the outer layer of the sculpture appears to be slipping away from the colour beneath.