American Ceramics: 1876 To the Present
American ceramics have made a quantum leap in status and marketability since Clark published his path-breaking survey A Century of Ceramics in the United States (1979). This greatly expanded and revised update includes scores of beautiful new illustrations. Proceeding decade by decade, Clark's brisk narrative spotlights strong personalities who left their personal stamp on ceramics. In addition to Louis Tiffany, we meet, for example, George Ohr, "the mad potter of Biloxi" whose weird, ruffled forms anticipated modern verbal/visual juxtapositions by over half a century, and Beatrice Wood, who rejected perfectionistic standards to create "art pottery" with the luster of Roman glass. On the contemporary scene, Mary Frank's fiery Lovers is at the opposite pole from Super-Objects of the conceptualists; a different tack is taken by Michael Lucero in his glazed, painted-in-the-round fantasy, Lunar Life Dreamer. There are uncountable riches in this treasure-trove of an album.Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.