ASIAN INFLUENCE IN AMERICAN CERAMICS

ASIAN INFLUENCE IN AMERICAN CERAMICS

By Jayne E. Shatz, PhD
www.jayneshatzpottery.com--FREE Ceramic History presentations and GALLERY of artwork.

To ponder the influence of Asian arts on American pottery since 1900, we need to consider our country’s artists, musicians and poets, as they are the revealers of culture. By the end of the 19th century, art was ensconced in representational ideals; realism prevailed and only those daring Impressionists defied the status quo. Upon entrance into the new century, we drowned in Art Nouveau, then rambled into the cleaner, sexier Art Deco with all its Modernist clutches. It was all too neat-too contrived. Picasso was escalating onward, then suddenly turned a corner. That turn tumbled Western art. Jazz became the voice of the American backstage, and artists were bending to its anisotropic sounds. Americans yearned for the avante garde. Ceramists of the 1930’s developed a thirst for bending the rules. They were ready for the disproportionate ideals of the Asian aesthetic- irregular, asymmetrical and unbalanced. When Hamada and Yanagi hit our shores, ceramists swam urgently toward them, like salmon propelled upstream. Volkos drank Japanese art, Jazz and Abstract Expressionism, becoming our Picasso. He coursed a path toward unbalanced forms, corrupt with irregularities and ripped open with the desire to embrace a new sense of beauty. Freedom to make art with no restrictions or rules echoed in the hearts of an America that was expanding its shores and its potential. It is no wonder that potters looked toward Asia as the masters and teachers in clay. Their ancient heritage dates back over twelve thousand years to the wondrous ceramics of the Japanese Jomon, where the first coiled pots emerged. Those Jomon pots were as impetuous as today’s most contemporary work.

The Asian influence was not an influence of style, but rather an emanation in philosophy. It was a credo in the speculative rather than the observational, and the freedom to design.