Crafty Collectors

Rookwood pottery by William Ernst Hentschel, Kataro Shirayamadani and Matthew Daly, c. 1889-1931, porcelain and clay.

The Gordon Collection of Rookwood pottery, now at the PMA, is a timeline of American craftsmanship.

by Robin Rice

Who but a collector can fully appreciate another collector’s collection? Surely the most knowledgeable and appreciative collector is the uber-collector: a large comprehensive museum. Therefore, it is only right that institutions like the Philadelphia Museum of Art wind up with really important private collections, like the Gerald and Virginia Gordon Collection of Rookwood pottery, recently presented to the PMA.

The Gordons long ago recognized that the ultimate destination of their Rookwood would be a museum and made choices accordingly. The collection contains representative samples from nearly the entire 80-year production of the Rookwood company. It should be noted that the PMA is an especially suitable home for the Gordons' collection because the museum itself has been collecting Rookwood almost since the pottery's founding. No doubt, some viewers will be educated and seduced into becoming collectors themselves, expanding on the enjoyment of American art pottery.

The idea of Rookwood commenced when a wealthy young woman, Maria Longworth Nichols (1849-1932), visited the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia. She was especially impressed with the ceramics from Europe and the Far East. She and others at the fair felt that America could improve its pottery-making. She did something about it.

Nichols' Cincinnati-based Rookwood manufactory opened in 1880. It operated on a division of status and labor somewhat similar to Greek vase-making. The bodies of vessels were made by less prestigious craftspeople and the exteriors were individually decorated with carving, underglazes, glazes and overglazes by artists, most originally trained as easel painters. Each piece was a singular work of art.

In October 1884, the prize-winning Tiger Eye glaze was born in a firing accident. In this "gift of the gods," an iridescent layer of golden crystals in the underglaze is suspended in a translucent red mahogany layer. Attempts to reproduce the elusive Tiger Eye met with minimal success.

This glaze can be fully appreciated in what is most likely the finest of the seven original Tiger Eye pieces: Albert Robert Valentien's tall vase decorated with aquatic creatures. Unquestionably the pinnacle of the collection, the Gordons believe it may have won a gold medal at the Paris Exhibition Universelle in 1889.

Valentien's asymmetrical compositions were strongly influenced by Japanese painting and design, and Japonisme was popular at Rookwood. In 1887, after a long search, a real Japanese painter was hired, Kataro Shirayamadani (Sherry), who remained, with the exception of a 10-year visit to Japan, until his death in 1949.

For me, the glossy vases covered with ultra-realistic pastel blossoms (the Iris Glaze line, often painted by Valentien) awaken early memories of some ancient relation's ornate parlor and the judgment "tasteless Victorian" whispered by elders of the modernist generation. In fact, many naturalistic pieces have the whiplash lines of art nouveau. Also from the late 1800s, startling photorealist portraits of Native Americans by painters like Grace Young have a crisp precision hard to reconcile with the tacky fire-on decals of our day.

At the dawn of the century, artists like William Ernst Hentschel carved geometricised Arts and Crafts flowers into stoneware and covered them with drippy, free-flowing semi-matte glazes. A particularly handsome example of this style is the anonymous 1910 vertical Modeled Stoneware Vase with a squared-off neck, glazed in melting milk-chocolate brown.

Restrained forms in porcelain with elegant pseudo-Sung dynasty glazes were popular from 1915 to 1928. During this period Rookwood began to augment its unique thrown, decorated pieces with slip-cast production. Simultaneously, artists like Sara Sax and Arthur P. Conant continued to invent elaborate linear decorations based on Islamic ceramics and tile work. A modest blue vase covered with white flowers by Lorinda Epply (1920) might be my favorite piece in the entire show.

Hentschel's 1927 high-shouldered matte turquoise vase, precisely patterned in a severely abstracted plant motif, exemplifies cool art deco geometry. Some of Hentschel's pochoir paintings, utilizing a method of shaded stenciling, are exhibited near his pochoir glazes. (The exhibition "Popular, Pop and Post Pop: Color Screenprints 1930s to Now," downstairs in the Berman and Stieglitz Galleries, includes more pochoir work for those who are intrigued.)

It is instructive to recognize a shared sensibility to line and plane in the pochoir examples and Wharton Esherick's cabinetry from around the same period. Installed with the pottery in the Rookwood gallery are an unusual angular Radio Phonograph Cabinet in cherry and an oak fireplace and doorway, with beautiful radiating stair-step shapes (both 1936-37).

From 1953, near the end of Rookwood's production, Loretta Holtcamp's white vase decorated with a grid of calligraphic black squares possesses the Eastern aesthetic that was there at the start, but it is aloof, minimal, abstracted. You can learn a lot of design history from this show: what people valued, what they wanted to see every day, what projected their own vision of themselves for others to see. You can also learn a lot about the technical potential of ceramics. It's all here.

"Elegant Innovations: American Rookwood Pottery, 1880-1960"

Through Feb. 8, Philadelphia Museum of Art, 26th St. and the Parkway, 215-763-8100