All Fired Up

Courtesy Lee Mindel

Diverse ceramic pieces in a Scandinavian-inspired interior including, from left, a crescentshaped Borderie, 1960, a selection of bluegreen Friberg vases, 1955–59, and a Cloutier brothers head, 1960

Rachel Whiteread Robert Mangold Fred Sandback Giorgio Morandi Jean Besnard Andre Bloc Wilhelm Kage Matisse

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Click here for Lee Mindel's checklist of where to find great art pottery around the world.

We may all own some interesting ceramics, but we often take them for granted and tuck even the best pieces away in cabinets or just park them on a shelf. Art pottery is not bric-a-brac but sculpture on a small scale that can play a very powerful role in animating a space. Painters have always understood that ceramics are works of art in their own right. Think of Giorgio Morandi’s haunting compositions, which are built around the bowls and vases, or the way the shapes of ceramics jump-start still lifes by Cézanne and Matisse. Inside the paintings, there is a beauty that belongs to the pottery itself. These painters were right to fore ground objects that are usually consigned to a second-tier category that we call the decorative arts.

Maybe we can create in three dimensions what the painters did in two, composing still lifes in which these objects engage in conversation. After all, ceramists, designers, artists and architects are concerned with the same elements—form, color, abstraction—so there is already an understanding among them.

There are many wonderful ceramic cultures, but the art pottery that interests me most belongs to the tradition of European modernism, specifically that practiced in Austria, France and Scandinavia from the1940s through the 1970s. Among the major artists in this tradition are the Frenchmen Jean Besnard, André Borderie, Pol Chambost and Georges Jouve and the innovative Scandinavians Berndt Friberg, Wilhelm Kage and Axel Salto. Over the past decade, the works of these ceramists and of many of their contemporaries have had a growing presence in the market. What is so appealing about a great deal of this pottery is that it gives a sense of the natural but is completely man-made.

One of the pioneers in recognizing this material has been Phillips de Pury & Company. At Phillips’s design sale in New York in June, the specialists Alexander Payne and Ben Williams curated a collection of rare ceramics by Lucie Rie (1902–1995). Rie, a Viennese artist who trained at the school of the Wiener Werkstätte, was committed to the importance of a well-designed everyday object. At the same time, her forms have a certain roughness—she was not afraid to look at the imperfections. We acquired several of Rie’s 1930s pieces at Phillips on behalf of a California client with an impressive Arts & Crafts residence. Rie left Vienna for London before World War II and carried one of these, a blue cylinder (est. $25–30,000), in her suitcase when she fled.

Modern ceramics is still a relatively unknown field, and the canon has not really been defined, but academic sources are beginning to tell the story. Some recent books are La céramique française des années 50 by Pierre Staudenmeyer (Norma); Scandinavian Design by Charlotte and Peter Fiell (Taschen); Pol Chambost: sculpteur-céramiste (Somogy); and a monograph on Jouve published by Philippe Jousse. More historical knowledge means fewer mistaken attributions and problematic restorations, and a better understanding of provenance means greater ease in tracking down important works. Wonderful pieces can still befound for very reasonable prices—from $1,000 to $8,000. But more-established artists, such as Jouve (1910–1964) and Jean Besnard (1889–1958), can command from $100,000 to $500,000, depending on scale, provenance and rarity. This makes some production pieces relative bargains. In the June design sale at Christie’s New York, a Besnard lamp from the 1930s sold for $25,000, and another from the same decade brought $15,000.

Ceramics, such as those lamps by Besnard, may seem very common, but if you go back to the studios where they came from, you realize that the best makers treated their work as an art form. This is particularly true of Jouve, who was both a minimalist and a naturalist, a master at reducing forms to their essence. Early in his career, he worked with applied patterns and ornamentation that were typical of the decorative arts between the wars, but by the late 1940s, he had taken a different route and pursued abstraction. He created subtle imperfections by throwing the clay on the wheel slightly off center to achieve the kind of fortuitous “mistakes” that only nature can generate. His globular forms resembled gourds rather than perfect spheres. Besnard had a more primitive style, which was common in the 1930s, when he was most active. He would often create a classical shape but treat its surface with unexpected colors—pink, brown and green together, for instance—and he played a great deal with texture.