From ceramics to silversmithing, calligraphy to textiles, hot glass to bookbinding, crafts have played a rich and complex role in the social, cultural, and artistic history of twentieth-century Britain. This all-encompassing book is the first to survey the full range of individual craft disciplines and key practitioners from the pre-World War I years of the Arts and Crafts Movement to the 1990s. Tanya Harrod shows how the crafts movement emerged in response to generalized anxiety about the production, commodification, and consumption of objects in a highly industrialized society. Caught between the more powerful disciplines of fine art, architecture, and design for industry, crafts have defined and redefined themselves throughout the century. The book begins with the craft revival of the early 1900s, tracing the complex legacy of John Ruskin and William Morris. The author then discusses how the Arts and Crafts Movement was forced to reexamine its aims during the Great War; how the development of the crafts was closely connected to the development of modernism between the wars; and how during World War II the idea of the handmade, often in the form of vernacular craft discovered in remote pockets of England, played a significant part in propagandizing a national culture worth defending. The book also explores the postwar beginnings of a countercultural workshop-based craft movement led by Bernard Leach and the continuing redefinition of crafts as the government-funded Crafts Council pushed them toward the fine arts and then the government attempted in the 1980s to recast them as exemplars of enterprise culture. Harrod describes the increasingly blurred division between craft and design for mass production at the conclusion of the book. Along with historians, educators, artists, craftspersons, and collectors, readers with an interest in British cultural history will find in this book much to delight and fascinate. This book accompanies an exhibition of British crafts, “The Pleasures of Peace: Craft, Art and Design in Britain from the 1940s to the 1960s,” that will open at the Sainsbury Centre at the University of East Anglia in spring 1999.

The Crafts in Britain in the Twentieth Century

Arts & Photography

Harrod, Tanya

History & Criticism

Bard Graduate Center

The British studio potter Michael Cardew (1901-1983) was a man of paradox, a modernist who disliked modernity, a colonial servant who despised Empire, a husband and father who was also homosexual, and an intellectual who worked with his hands. Graduating from Oxford in 1923, training with the legendary Bernard Leach, he went on to lead a life of pastoral poverty in Gloucestershire, making majestic slipware and participating in the polarised design and political debates of the 1930s. A wartime project in Ghana turned him into a fierce critic of British overseas policies; he remained in West Africa intermittently until 1965, founding a local tradition of stoneware inspired by the ambient material culture, independent of European imports, made by Africans for Africans. He ended his days a ceramic magus, his pottery at Wenford Bridge, Cornwall, an outpost of the counterculture and a haven for disaffected youth. In North America, the Antipodes and sub-Saharan Africa he offered the egalitarianism of craft as an antidote to racism and inequality. As the novelist Angela Carter observed in 1977, he came to seem 'the Last Sane Man in a crazy world.'
Along with historians of Empire and civil rights, and art and design historians, readers with a general interest in British cultural history will want to read this book.

The Last Sane Man: Michael Cardew: Modern Pots, Colonialism, and the Counterculture

Paul Mellon Centre

The first book on important British ceramicist Carol McNicoll (b.1943), best known for her imaginative interpretation of the vessel-making tradition. Examining the development of McNicoll's career, this book places her work in the context of the art, fashion and music scene of 1970s London.

Carol McNicoll

Individual Artists

Lund Humphries

Part of the acclaimed series of anthologies which document major themes and ideas in contemporary art. A vital resource through which to understand the ways technologies, materials, techniques and tools are investigated through the lens of craft in contemporary art. Craft is a contested concept in art history and a vital category through which to understand contemporary art. Through craft, materials, techniques and tools are investigated and their histories explored in order to reflect on the politics of labour and on the extraordinary complexity of the made world around us. This anthology offers an ethnography of craft, surveying its shape-shifting identities in the context of progressive art and design through writings by artists and makers, and drawing on poetry, fiction, anthropology and sociology. Reflections on new technologies and materials, lost and found worlds of handwork and the politics of work all throw light on craft as process, product and ideology. Artists surveyed include Anni Albers, El Anatsui, Phyllida Barlow, Louise Bourgeois, Annie Cattrell, Richard Deacon, Sam Durant, Antje Ehmann, Harun Farocki, Lucio Fontana, Theaster Gates, Sabrina Geschwantner, Harmony Hammond, Brian Jungen, Henry Krokatsis, Ana Lupas, Enzo Mari, Ethel Mairet, Agnes Martin, Robert Morris, Simon Periton, Martin Puryear, Jessi Reaves, Hannah Ryggen, Bridget Riley, Lu Shengzhong, Troy Town Art Pottery, Francis Uprichard, Peter Voulkos, Edmund de Waal. Writers include Glenn Adamson, W. H. Auden, Elissa Auther, Reyner Banham, Jean Baudrillard, John Berger, Walter Benjamin, Michel de Certeau, Iftikhar Dadi, Martin Heidegger, Joan Key, Igor Kopytoff, Primo Levi, Sarat Marahraj, Karl Marx, Lev Manovich, William Morris, Sadie Plant, Rainer Maria Rilke, Jenni Sorkin, Richard Sennett, Julia Bryan- Wilson.

Craft /anglais

WHITECHAPEL GAL

Over the last two decades of the twentieth century, the Ceramic Arts Foundation (formerly the Institute for Ceramic History) presented International Ceramics Symposiums in New York, Toronto, London and Amsterdam, among other cities. In the course of that work, it fundamentally changed the approach of ceramics to the field's modern history, to scholarship, and to criticism. The first symposium was held in conjunction with the groundbreaking exhibition, A Century of Ceramics in the United States 1878-1978, in Syracuse, New York, and opened with a keynote address by Clement Greenberg. The most recent attracted 3,500 participants, 65 national delegations and involved an arts festival spanning 73 museums and galleries. Garth Clark, the CAF's founding director and a noted ceramics scholar, has selected these symposium essays from eminent voices in mainstream art and design as well as the finest specialty writers on ceramics, past and present.

Ceramic Millennium: Critical Writings on Ceramic History, Theory and Art

GREENBERG, Clement

MAYS, John Bentley

Tunick, Susan

SHADBOLT, DORIS

Lebow, Edward

Clemens, Justin

Dewald, Gabi

Foulem, Léopold

McTwigan, Michael

Pennings, Mark

Selvage, Nancy

Rawson, Philip

HAMILTON, DAVID

The Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design

Tony Birks was a prolific writer on art, particularly in British studio ceramics. This is the first publication to bring together his writings in a single volume.\nDuring the 1970s studio ceramic grew dramatically as a force on the international art scene. In Britain and America particularly, but also across Europe, practice flourished and powerful thinkers sought to define and describe what was happening. It was a dynamic and a controversial time, in which the nature of pottery showed itself capable of radical change. In the decades that followed this outburst, ceramic consolidated into a complex aesthetic and cultural discourse.\nTony Birks was at the heart of this new wave of activity. A consummate writer and an artist himself, he supported what had happened in previous decades to generate a Modern ceramic art, and he championed the new generation blossoming around him. His publications provided crucial support to a discipline barely served by mainstream art history and criticism. He wrote monographs on major established figures, but he also had an extraordinarily perceptive eye for new talent, which served to bring attention to vibrant young artists. A number of these went on to become leading forces on the international scene.\nThis book gathers together for the first time a comprehensive selection of Tony Birks's writing. A number of the essays are about the nature of ceramic practice, but the majority are about individual practitioners, among them are Bernard Leach, Lucie Rie, Hans Coper, Claudi Casanovas, Tony Hepburn, Andrew Lord, Ruth Duckworth and Takeshi Yasuda. Taken as a whole, the book is a window on the world of ceramic art at a crucial time in its growth - the issues and the personalities - opened for us by one of its most significant critical voices. The book also includes a catalogue of the ceramic works owned by Tony Birks that were gifted to the Sainsbury Centre at the University of East Anglia.

Encounters with Ceramic: The Writings of Tony Birks

BIRKS,Tony

Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts

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