A Ceramic History by Edmund de Waal

1. Clay and Process
2. Pioneering Definitions 1900-1940 The Studio Pot
3. European Influences: Lucie Rie and Hans Coper
4. Art Schools: A New Ceramics?
5. Teachers: Who Taught You Then?
6. Altogether Elsewhere: Cultural Diversity and the Studio Pot
7. Painterly Surfaces?
8. Does it Pour? Function in Studio Pottery
9. Necessary Pots? Unnecessary Pots?

4. Art Schools: A New Ceramics?

At the Art Schools of the 1950s a new movement of more overtly sculptural ceramics began to form. Without the need for a functional identity and outside the Leach trainee system running at St Ives, ceramics could look to other models of what clay could be used for. Coper's interest in Cycladic sculpture was paralleled by other artists use of Minoan and Mediterranean art. This art seemed to be fresh in contrast with the worked-over territory of the Orient: It was both archaic and primitive, and yet profoundly modern. This was caught up with Piccaso's ceramics becoming known . They were much emulated: the combination of strange constructed forms and direct painting onto a surface (rather than 'decorating' a pot) seemed exciting. The colours that they used were not those of historic ceramics but came from the worlds of interior decorating and fashion. One group of young potters at the Central school were derided by Leach as the 'Picasettes': to him they seemed too playful and colourful to be taken seriously. They included the potters Nicholas Vergette, (1923-1974) William Newland (1919-)and Dora Billington.(1890-1968). Newland made modelled figures of animals that proved an abiding influence for the interest in figurative modelling that continues in studio pottery. Billington wrote of these potters that they were truly contemporary in their outlook;

'they are producing things which are neither 'pot-boilers', nor precious collectors' pieces, but made to fit into the contemporary scene and already decorating a number of shops and cafes in London.'(1956)

One of the greatest figures of this period was James Tower (1919-88). He made earthenware forms that were flattened to produce vertiginous illusions of movement, and decorated them with complex painterly markings. They prefigured some of the concerns of 'Op art': they lie in the area that Elizabeth Fritsch (1940-) has worked in, of making ceramics that play with the illusions of depth, fragility and balance.

A new generation of potters came to prominence in the 1960s and 1970s. There is no 'school' of sculptural ceramics but clear connections can be made between potters of wildly divergent stylistic manners. This kind of work often relates to other art-forms rather than earlier canons of pottery. In the work of Gordon Baldwin (1932-) and of Ewen Henderson (1934-), for instance, the influences of American abstraction are more apparent than any particular approach to making sculpture per se.