Henry Glassie. The Potter’s Art. Philadelphia, Pa., and Bloomington and Indianapolis, Ind.: Material Culture and Indiana University Press, 1999. 149 pages; 76 bw and 25 color illustrations; bibliography, index. Photography and design by the author. $10.40 (softcover).
“It is good to be a potter. At work, the potter manages the transformation of nature, building culture while fulfilling the self, serving society, and patching the work together with pieces of clay that connect the past with the present, the useful with the beautiful, the material with the spiritual” (p. 116). In The Potter’s Art, Indiana University folklore professor Henry Glassie has given us simple explanations for complicated mechanisms that define the intersection of ceramic objects and human society from the potter’s point of view. This is a global story, enriching our view of the craftsman with portraits of dignity, nobility, and sincerity, and exposing the complexity of a simple, traditional utilitarian pot. Based on his wide-ranging fieldwork carried out over a lifetime of looking at pottery and talking to potters, Glassie’s treatise explores the nature of art and demonstrates the common links that join potters across diverse cultures.
Henry Glassie likes potters. He wants us to share his enthusiasm. And, frankly, it is hard to resist his passion in The Potter’s Art. In this slim volume, we meet a mix of potters from around the world: the Pals of Bangladesh who make kalshis (common utilitarian pots of all kinds) and murtis (images of the deities for worship); traditional stoneware potter Lars Andersson of Raus in Skåne, Sweden; the Meaders and Hewell families, figural stoneware potters of Georgia; Acoma, New Mexico, potters Lilly Salvador and Marvis and Wanda Aragon, who base their contemporary collectible pottery on ancient patterns and practices; the master potters and decorators of Kütahya, Turkey; the Tatebayashi family of Kakiemon potters in Arita, Japan; and the potters of yaki ware working in Hagi, Japan. This diversity is reflected in their wares, which have been carefully chosen to exhibit both sacred and secular goals, ranging from the Bangladeshis’ murtis to the Georgians’ face jugs.
For students just learning about ceramics, the insights presented here will likely be a revelation about goods that most people ignore. As Glassie notes, his “goal is to illustrate how common clay is made to carry value” (p. 19). For collectors who have loved these pots for years, his words are confirmation of long-held beliefs. Those readers who fall in between these extremes, however, will likely be struck by his narrow definition of value in clay. Glassie’s potters make things by hand in traditional forms and glazes; Glassie, the folklorist, values folk over fine, handmade over machine made. He explains that hand work takes time out from the “rush for modernity,” that “technological process divides people from the earth and separates the mind from the hands, reducing art to design” (pp. 54–56). Ergo, we will not find English shell-edge pearlware or Russel Wright’s famous American Modern dinnerware discussed in this book. But that should not keep us from embracing Glassie’s point of view, at least for the duration of his narrative. Indeed, readers who choose to follow along are rewarded by Glassie’s inspiring insights into pottery. The section on transformations, for example, is pure poetry. Here he rhapsodizes on pottery as it goes from wet to dry, soft to hard, dull to bright, and useless to useful.
On the central issue of his treatise, however, Glassie waffles. He explains that art is a cultural phenomenon in which the object’s value is defined by its integration into society, rather than its rarity or monetary value. “Art disturbs nature to embody values,” he writes, “the object’s worth lying in its ability to provoke and sustain argument” (p. 18). He cautions that this definition of art is not a market phenomenon; it is not defined as the part of the marketplace where art equals higher prices (or even the reverse, that high price equals art). He blames the market for skewing the production values of potters through the buyer’s misunderstanding of what art is: “Conditioned by ideas from art-appreciation classes so suffused with the idea of the pictorial that the craft of photography has been embraced as an art, and the art of pottery is still called a craft, today’s buyers want few churns and many face jugs” (p. 39). He laments that many potters shift from utilitarian ware to ornamental in order to see their work gain higher monetary value. In a modern society that uses plastics, machine-made ceramics, and metals for utilitarian purposes, we want our handmade pots to be decorative. Finally, he admonishes us to see things differently: “Where use meets beauty, where nature transforms into culture and individual and social goals are accomplished, where the human and numinous come into fusion, where objects are richest in value—there is the center of art” (p. 34).
On the other hand, he cherishes the ability of potters to pursue their art by adapting to new markets, for we are also shown how the execution and interpretation of selected wares have changed positively over time. For example, Glassie demonstrates how Acoma pots once used to carry water are now valued for the high prices they can attain in Santa Fe art galleries. Because of these shifts in value, the art of decoration is driven toward greater perfection. In Kütahya, Turkey, the number of ateliers (and pottery workers) actually increased during the twelve-year period that Glassie studied them, from the mid-1980s to the late 1990s, because the city’s art has gained global recognition. This new value gives the potters and decorators confidence in their skills and in themselves to carry forward in other aspects of their lives. Similarly, families of traditional stoneware potters continue to work in Georgia because buyers see art in their face jugs and are willing to pay prices that keep the potters in business.
Glassie would rather that the work of these potters was integrated into their societies as it had been in the old ways, but he’s willing to accept their current successes as an opportunity to meet and study them as living beings. If their work had been completely eclipsed by modern society, if they were no longer living and working as potters, he would have had only their historic wares at hand. He yearns for potters of the past, but welcomes the company of potters in the present. This is not a bad thing, although one wonders why Glassie, with all his passionate embrace of potters, has not taken to the wheel himself.
If you like pots, The Potter’s Art is a “feel good” book. After reading it you will feel good about the potters. You will feel good about their pots. And you will feel good about yourself for being able to appreciate it all. You might even learn a thing or two. All of which makes it a worthwhile book to read, despite its limited range of appreciation for the ceramic arts.
One final note regarding the origins of The Potter’s Art. The book is a revision and slight expansion of the fourth chapter of Material Culture, Glassie’s textbook study of material culture, a concept which he defines as the “place” where history and art connect.[1] For those who know this chapter entitled “The Potter’s Art,” the book The Potter’s Art will seem very familiar and may not need to occupy space on your shelf. On the other hand, those who are attracted to the study of pottery in the context of material culture studies may find that Material Culture is a more appropriate purchase than The Potter’s Art.
Ellen Paul Denker
Museum consultant and writer
Henry Glassie, Material Culture (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press), 1999.