Pop Art & Pottery: vessels for mass consumption

pop art and potterycontemporary ceramicsceramicslondon jamessusan folwelleduardo paolozzidavid hockneyroy lichtensteincorita kentart exhibitioncurating

Apr 8

Written By Nick Duxbury

In 1957 when Richard Hamilton wrote to the brutalist architects Alison and Peter Smithson that “Pop art is: Popular, transient, expendable, low-cost, mass-produced, young, witty, sexy, gimmicky, glamorous, and Big Business” he not only tried to define a burgeoning art movement, but he also coined the movement’s name: Pop Art. However, by extrapolating a few of the words we get to something which could be a definition of something completely different: Pottery

Popular, low-cost, mass-produced, glamourous, Big Business are words that would have made Josiah Wedgwood very happy with his ceramics production process at Etruria in Staffordshire in the 18th Century. Fast-forward to the middle of the 20th Century and the taste in luxury goods had shifted away from manufacturers like Wedgwood to the point where ‘expendable’ and ‘gimmicky’ could unfortunately be applied to the public perception of the output of ceramic mass manufacturers around the world. At the same time Pop Art had become completely ubiquitous around the Western world just at the point where the executives at the biggest mass manufacturers of ceramics had realised that they needed to add ‘young’ and ‘sexy’ to their output to attract a new generation of collector.

In the UK these two worlds collided when Eduardo Paolozzi started designing a set of six plates for Wedgwood using his abstract collages that would eventually be presented in a fluorescent orange Perspex collector’s box, featuring the shapes and colours that would be familiar to anyone who knew Paolozzi’s screen prints. Paolozzi would go on to design a further set of six plates for Wedgwood, a set of espresso cups for Royal Doulton and a series of porcelain vases and bowls for Rosenthal in Germany, along with a couple of special edition plates, making it part of his artistic practice and a further way for collectors to own Pop Art.

It might seem like a match made in cynical commercial heaven but there was logic in the collaborations; unlike the art movements of the early 20th Century the artists that fell under the Pop umbrella did not sign up to any artistic manifesto or group, there was no particularly defining single exhibition that launched it, it was a label applied by critics and historians to a series of artists who emerged around the same time between the late 1950s to mid-1960s. Also, unlike Abstract Expressionism, Dada, Surrealism or Minimalism the roots of Pop Art were very tangible to casual art observers; here you could see collage, sculpture, comic book art, recognisable brands, figurative painting, screen printing and still-life.

Over the course of the past 60 years exhibitions and publications that have centred on Pop Art have tended to highlight the bold-coloured, heavily-outlined works that fall into the ‘low-cost, mass-produced, sexy, glamorous, Big Business’ part of Hamilton’s definition. Roy Lichtenstein’s In The Car or Whaam! and Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe are so recognisable that they, and the visual language they have created, can be seen echoed and reproduced in advertising across the world to this day. Far less recognisable would be Tom Wesselmann’s Still Life with Two Matisses or Jann Haworth’s Donuts, Coffee Cups and Comic but they are so distinctly Pop Art that most observers would be able to place them in the category without much guidance.

In fact, the more work by prominent Pop artists we look at, beyond the most famous pieces, the more we encounter still-life at the core of their practice; everyone from Patrick Caulfield and Roy Lichtenstein to Claes Oldenburg and James Rosenquist produced extensive numbers of works that fall into the still-life category. At the heart of these Pop Art still-lives there is something even more unusual linking them all together: ceramics. Whether it’s the cup and saucer on the coffee table in the middle of Richard Hamilton’s Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different so appealing or the prominent vase with flowers in David Hockney’s Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy the ceramics featured seem to ground the images in an era before the young and vibrant 1960s, maybe in the artist’s parent’s era.

When viewed in this context the collaborations between the ceramics mass manufacturers and the Pop artists seems far less cynically all about profit and collector markets – the Pop artists embraced the opportunity to create designs for mass production on things that were recognisably tableware. These collaborations continued between the mass manufacturers and the Pop artists into the 1980s and 1990s, even into the 2020s Ed Ruscha offered a design for a limited edition plate to raise money for charity.

In the late 80s and early 90s the visual language of Pop Art was being appropriated by artists across many disciplines, none more so than studio ceramics, with artists like Richard Slee incorporating the yellow smiley face associated with the Acid House music scene for a series of Toby jugs in the UK and Susan Folwell using comic book imagery on her coiled native clay vessels in the US. Folwell’s vessels in particular feel like something from the heyday of Lichtenstein, with the added interest of her being from a Native American Pueblo upbringing. There is a long tradition for pottery to be passed down from generation to generation in Pueblo communities, mainly through the female lineage, and Folwell is no exception: her mother and sister are both celebrated artists, as is her niece. Folwell, though, is the pioneer of Pueblo pottery: abandoning traditional designs and motifs for imagery closer to Pop Art.

Pop Art was called the American art movement, drawing on the branding, advertising and popular culture being produced in America and exported around the world post-World War Two, alongside ‘The American Dream’. There is a certain irony, then, that so many Native American artists working with ceramics have appropriated this movement for displaying their own stories, given how awfully Native American communities have been, and are still, treated by, firstly, European settlers and then, latterly, the US Government. In most subsequent reviews of the American Pop Art scene the work of female artists has all but been overlooked, artists who were involved in the scene in the 1960s like Rosalyn Drexler, Corita Kent and Marjorie Strider have become footnotes, so to include women using Pop Art imagery in their work with ceramics in the 21st Century allows the conversation to be far more inclusive again.

The exhibition Pop Art & Pottery will open at Wolverhampton Art Gallery on Saturday 14th October 2023 and tour in 2024 to The Burton Art Gallery and Museum in Bideford and other venues to be announced.