Great Pots: Contemporary Ceramics from Function to Fantasy

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Summary: Pots of all shapes and all colors, and ranging in design
Review: Great Pots: Contemporary Ceramics From Function To Fantasy by Ulysses Grant Dietz (Curator of Decorative Arts, The Newark Museum) is an eye-catching full-sized artbook showcasing studio ceramics ranging from the late 1930s down to the modern day. American, European, Asian, African, and Native American pots of all shapes and all colors, and ranging in design from elegant simplicity, to brilliant color, to intricate fine detail, are pictured on virtually every page by full-color photographs and accompanied by an extensive text commentary. Great Pots is very strongly recommended speciality artbook which would prove a seminal contribution to 20th Century Art History reference collections in general, and informative reading for either amateur or professional potters in particular.

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Summary: Great Pots, Great Book
Review: This book is beautiful. What a shame the show was only a temporary exhibition at the Newark Museum. It has a fabulous variety of work from artists around the globe. Buy it while you still can!

Rating:
Summary: Great Pots: Contemporary Ceramics from Function to Fantasy
Review: This is the most beautiful book on studio ceramics ever produced! Not only that, it focuses on a collection that dates back two generations, but which most people have never seen published anywhere else. Of course the pictures and the design of this book make it worthy of any coffee table--but it's far more than that. The photographs are wonderful, but the texts (one long and one short essay) are both readable and informative. Perhaps the most "radical" aspect of this book is its point of view. There is no judgmental hierarchy about whether one potter's work is "more art" than another's. In fact, the author purports not to be talking about art at all. But it is all about art, in spite of those protests to the contrary. It shows how the traditionalist potters of the late 1930s worked their way into being modernists--and how they took their homage to Asia with them on that journey. The great radicals of the late 1950s--Voulkos, Autio, Price--are all given their due, but this break from tradtionalist potting is not seen as something inherently "better," nor is it portrayed as the be-all and end-all of studio ceramic history. Perhaps even more interesting is the fact that the great Japanese studio potters, and the great Native American studio potters, are given the same sort of respect and careful consideration as the European and American potters that most collectors today are familiar with.

The book is broadly divided into three thematic sections: the Beautiful Pot, the Useful Pot, and the Wise Pot. Each of these is then subdivided, by means of an easily flowing narrative, into about a dozen smaller sections. It is a well-written and lucid account of how the humble pot came to be great art, in spite of the art world and all its prejudice.

For anyone who likes pottery--even the plain old hand-made coffee mug from the local craft fair--this book will tell a great story about why people love to work with clay, and all the ways they come to express themselves with clay.