Ceramic Culture Innovation 1826-2000 [antikvár]

Introduction This exhibition is part of a larger European project bearing the same name - Ceramics, Culture and Innovation. Its overall aim is to focus attention on artistic and technological developments that have taken place in the field of ceramics since 1850 and to this end, the six participating museums have each selected forty representative works from their rich collections. They provide an opportunity to measure the enormous changes that have occurred over the last century and a half, over what is perhaps the most decisive period in mankind's history. Technological advances have had repercussions in art as elsewhere in society With industrialisation came mechanisation and duplication of objects. Unique hand-made or hand-decorated products slowly gave way to large numbers of identical reproductions, so provoking a shift in the position of artists and craft workers in society, and perversely affecting the status of decorative arts which subsequently became relegated to a "minor" art. One way manufacturers found to resist this loss of consideration was, paradoxically, to limit production volumes and thereby increase the status of products through rarity value. However, the main result of industrialisation was to make art objects suddenly affordable to a large segment of the population. And this was the spark that ignited the Arts and Crafts movement as well as Art Nouveau, both fired by the ideal of bringing good art into the home of 'everyman'. Samuel Bing expressed it this way: "Art Nouveau will fight to remove ugliness and pretentious luxury from everyday life, introducing in their stead, good taste and the charm of simple beauty even for the most mundane of utilitarian objects." Artists reacted in two different ways to their change in status, some inventing the new area of design, others defending the idea of individual expression through artwork. Those artists who would later proudly call themselves designers, were fascinated by the potential of industrial production and sought to improve the aesthetic quality of ordinary inexpensive goods available to the man in the street. Other artists reacted by exploring physical and visual properties of the materials they used, for example ceramic clays, with absolutely no interest in having their work reproduced. Despite the difficulties of modelling and firing, these artists, like painters or sculptors, were intent on creating unique works of art. Among the many profound changes that have occurred over the last one hundred and fifty years, one of the most far-reaching has been in the area of communication. Today we can be instantly in touch with any corner of our planet and influences are exchanged at the speed of light. An artist has access to any number of different techniques and a world of possible sources of inspiration at his or her fingertips. In this sense, a mere forty pieces of ceramic ware cannot faithfully represent the gamut of creative ingenuity that has taken place, but hopefully they will help us understand something of this remarkable evolution and of the changing role of the humble ceramic object. Chantai Meslin-Perrier