Ceramic, Art and Civilisation

"Full of surprises [and] evocative." The Spectator "Passionately written." Apollo "An extraordinary accomplishment." Edmund de Waal "Monumental." Times Literary Supplement "An epic reshaping of ceramic art." Crafts "An important book." The Arts Society Magazine In his major new history, Paul Greenhalgh tells the story of ceramics as a story of human civilisation, from the Ancient Greeks to the present day. As a core craft technology, pottery has underpinned domesticity, business, religion, recreation, architecture, and art for millennia. Indeed, the history of ceramics parallels the development of human society. This fascinating and very human history traces the story of ceramic art and industry from the Ancient Greeks to the Romans and the medieval world; Islamic ceramic cultures and their influence on the Italian Renaissance; Chinese and European porcelain production; modernity and Art Nouveau; the rise of the studio potter, Art Deco, International Style and Mid-Century Modern, and finally, the contemporary explosion of ceramic making and the postmodern potter. Interwoven in this journey through time and place is the story of the pots themselves, the culture of the ceramics, and their character and meaning. Ceramics have had a presence in virtually every country and historical period, and have worked as a commodity servicing every social class. They are omnipresent: a ubiquitous art. Ceramic culture is a clear, unique, definable thing, and has an internal logic that holds it together through millennia. Hence ceramics is the most peculiar and extraordinary of all the arts. At once cheap, expensive, elite, plebeian, high-tech, low-tech, exotic, eccentric, comic, tragic, spiritual, and secular, it has revealed itself to be as fluid as the mud it is made from. Ceramics are the very stuff of how civilized life was, and is, led. This then is the story of human society's most surprising core causes and effects.

Paul Greenhalgh is internationally renowned as an historian of art and design and the decorative arts. For the last decade he has been Director of the Sainsbury Centre at the University of East Anglia, UK, and Professor of Art History and Museum Strategy there. Prior to this, he held a number of senior roles in museum and university life in a number of countries, including Head of Research at the V&A Museum, London, Director and President of the Corcoran Gallery of Art and College of Art and Design in Washington DC, USA, and President of NSCAD University, Canada. He has published widely on the visual arts, and curated and taught in leading organisations all over the world. He originally trained as a painter before becoming an art historian. Early in his teaching career, he encountered ceramic, which eventually led to Ceramic, Art and Civilisation (Bloomsbury, forthcoming 2021).

Acknowledgements Prologue: A History in Shards CHAPTER 1. WHAT CERAMIC IS 1. Fundamentals 2. Stuff of the Earth 3. The Art of Heat 4. The Potter 5. Nomenclature and Culture 6. The Ceramic Continuum 7. Transformers: Classicism, Islam, China, and the Modern 8. The Discipline 9. Industry and the Levels of Production 10. Ubiquity: The Plastic of the Ancient World 11. Telling Stories 12. Civilisation, Power, and Domestic Life 13. Conclusion: Western Ceramic CHAPTER 2: THE VALUE OF THE GREEK POTTER 1. The World in Black and Red 2. Positioning the Pots 3. The Earlier Greek World 4. Reducing Iron and Oxygen 5. Who Were These People? 6. Secular Life 7. Anachronism, the Value, and the Price of Things 8. The Value and the Price of Things 9. Conclusion: The Spread of Red and Black CHAPTER 3: ROME AND THE ARRIVAL OF THE MEDIEVAL WORLD 1. The Feel of Roman Pots 2. Red Gloss 3. The Pots of Empire 4. Greece, Rome, and the Classical Idea 5. Standardisation 6. Dark, Light, an End and a Beginning 7. Europe: The Coarse and the Local 8. Revivalism and the Vernacular 9. Conclusion: The Classical Heritage CHAPTER 4: RENAISSANCES OF TIN 1. The Chemistry of Islam 2. Islam and Ceramic History 3. The Pottery Revolution 4. Islam in Europe 5. Renaissance Pots 6. Colour, Line and Life 7. Secular Life 8. Pottery and Painting 9. Quantity, Quality, and Status 10. The Arrival of the Meal 11. Sculptural Form 12. Italian Potters and Potteries 13. Renaissances 14. Conclusion: a European Ethos CHAPTER 5: THE ENLIGHTENED REIGN OF WHITE 1. Chinese Pots 2. Technology, Style, Confidence 3. Porcelain City 4. China in Europe 5. The Quest for a European Porcelain 6. The Porcelain Explosion 7. Blue, White, War, and Peace 8. Delftware 9. Frivolity and Melancholy: the Figurine Reinvented 10. The Rise of Staffordshire 11. Conclusion: Modern Whiteness CHAPTER 6: THE NATURAL AND THE INDIVIDUAL: LEAD, SLIP, STONE, SALT 1. History, the Collective, and the Individual 2. The Renaissance Man 3. The Palissystes 4. The Salt Renaissance 5. Prose and Poetry 6. The Nature of Slip 7. Configuring Life 8. The Arrival of America 9. Conclusion: The Ingredients of Modernity CHAPTER 7: THE ACCELERATION OF STYLE AND THE ARRIVAL OF THE MODERN 1. Decoration, Complication, and Anxiety 2. The Last Transformer: Another Modernity 3. Institutionalisation 4. Exhibitions 5. Ugliness and the Era 6. The Invention of Style 7. Design Reform and the Ingredients of Modern Design 8. The Meaning of Majolica 9. The Vortex of Large-scale Production 10. The Republic of Tile 11. Ceramic Hell 12. Gender 13. Exoticism 14. The Designer 15. The Art Nouveau style 16. Conclusion: High Eclecticism to Art Nouveau CHAPTER 8: THE STUDIO ARRIVES 1. A Modern Place 2. Art Pottery 3. Defining Art 4. The Invention of Craft 5. The Completeness of Existence 6. The Artist-potter 7. Émigrés 8. Art Deco 9. The International Style 10. Mid-century Modern 11. Potters and Painters 12. Conclusion: A World is Formed CHAPTER 9: THE CREATIVE EXPLOSION 1. Thunderous Emotion 2. Another Modernity 3. The World of Funk 4. Conceptualism and Minimalism 5. A New Arena 6. New American Symbolism 7. The Ceramic Landscape 8. Abstract Vessels 9. Postmodernism 10. The New Ornamentalism 11. Conclusion: The Potter Now Postscript: Attica to California Notes Bibliography Index About the Author