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Ceramic’s Hidden Secrets: One Of The Oldest Forms Of Art In Human Record | Perspective

Mar 22, 2024
the paper was light gold in medieval times I want tobacco sugar that everything we thought we knew about the world could turn out to be completely wrong are windows to the

secrets

of the past

ceramic

s are often used as an indicator of

human

civilization how sophisticated a The culture can often be told and seen from the sophistication of its pottery. They reveal details of a time and place like no other artifact. The ancient Mayan pieces have many

secrets

. There are many more questions and there are answers. They were some of the most valuable treasures of their time, only occasionally some pieces of porcelain reached the shores and were then treated like this extraordinary and precious substance.
ceramic s hidden secrets one of the oldest forms of art in human record perspective
They really hadn't seen anything like it before, but secrets are not revealed. They should be unlocked when you know. Its secrets become much more interesting It's up to the museum curators to unlock the secrets of the exhibit Industrial espionage Bribery and corruption The best kind This beautiful painted plate dates back to the ancient Mayan civilization in Guatemala in the 1st century AD. It was considered a beautiful piece of Mayan pottery until the hieroglyphs surrounding the rim were deciphered. Only then did it come to life with meaning. This is with the yellow. Sue Jeffries is a curator at the Gardner Museum of Ceramic Art in Toronto, Canada, and it was there that it was made. the surprising discovery.
ceramic s hidden secrets one of the oldest forms of art in human record perspective

More Interesting Facts About,

ceramic s hidden secrets one of the oldest forms of art in human record perspective...

The ancient Mayan pieces have many secrets and it is very, very interesting and one of our great pieces is a beautiful Mayan plate that has writing around it. We discovered that we thought it really talked about the origins of the Mayan people, the mythology and their beliefs, but when it was deciphered it was a big surprise to everyone that it said that this dish was used for venison tamales. I all laughed and laughed because that's what you'd expect to see today, so it's not exactly what we expected to hear. and that's where research is so important after the discovery about what the Mayan hieroglyphs were telling us, of course, that opens up a whole new area of ​​discovery and there are other pieces in the collection where you see figures on the vases handing out tamales to important real visitors. so once you discover a secret, it just leads you to the desire to know more about these pieces and then you discover more and more secrets, there are many more questions and there are answers, like the power of

ceramic

s, one of the

oldest

forms

known. of art and the

human

record

, as the clay in each object is unique to the place where it was made, scientists can determine where it came from because the decoration of each object reflects the culture that created it, we learn about the society that lived in that soil, therefore, each piece of pottery acts as a fingerprint of a particular time and place.
ceramic s hidden secrets one of the oldest forms of art in human record perspective
It is up to the archaeologist or researcher to unlock the clues

hidden

within each object and the fact that most ceramics have survived the ages gives them a special status in the eyes of historians. being halfway between life and art in many periods and reflects a lot of what people believed and tells us how they dressed, how they looked, if they tattooed their bodies, what type of rituals they used, what type of dance they did, hierarchies , language, there are so many stories in every piece of pottery that they become absolutely vital to archaeologists and, in the case of the ancient Americas, because so many things were destroyed when the Spanish came to the Americas, that is what we are left with as evidence of these ancient civilizations and of course Unlike wood and textiles, which tend to disintegrate in certain climates, ceramics can break but can usually always be joined together, so it is a very important

record

.
ceramic s hidden secrets one of the oldest forms of art in human record perspective
Pottery is often used as an indicator of human civilization if you think about archaeologists when they search. For example, ancient man, when you take a look at Neolithic man, when they start combining fire and clay and making primitive pottery, it's pretty crude, but it's wonderful that they're doing it first, they can use these things for cooking and also. store things, so it's a really key moment in technology and human development and then as things progress, clay is used in many different ways. The ancient Sumerians used clay tablets as a way to mark their first writing, so all of our early writing is engraved on pottery.
From then on we go step by step from the development of glazes to the development of colors things become They become more and more sophisticated as society becomes sophisticated and it's a wonderful way to be able to see things how sophisticated a culture is you can often tell and seen from the sophistication of its pottery maybe that says a lot about us today in day, isn't it? When you think about I don't know, plastic and aluminum foil are now used instead of ceramic. I know I wonder what people will think in the future. What is certain is that the discovery of ceramics occurred independently in different parts of the world.
The first evidence of fired clay is this small female figure found in ancient Czechoslovakia dating from approximately 25,000 years ago. Its discovery is surprising because it predates the first ceramic vessels. Found approximately 14,000 years ago, the origins of pottery are difficult because with each new excavation the evidence always changes and the Middle East certainly has a very, very old ceramic tradition, as does Japan and in our collections our

oldest

pieces date back to from approximately 3000 BC. C. of Ecuador. Many people think that they lined a basket with clay and then left it too close to the fire, fired it and glazed it and then it was able to hold water.
That is one of the beliefs about the origins of clay. Clay is a special type of soil found all over the world. It is easily worked when wet, can harden with exposure to heat and become waterproof with the addition of glaze. There are many different types of clay and the way we talk about clay in the gardener is really low heat and high heat, low heat. Clay is usually called earthenware and it will only be fired up to a certain temperature and then it will be melted and then we have high firing clays like porcelains and stoneware and they will be fired at a much higher temperature and then there is everything in between.
Clay actually varies. because of the geology of the area it's taken from, so there will be trace elements of minerals that can color the clay and can do all kinds of different things in the firing clay, it's unique because it has such a wonderful viscous nature that it's so tactile. Clay is very plastic, it remembers what you say to it with your hands, but it is still easily manipulated in a way that wood and stone are not. It can be changed. Can you reply. He can tell you things that every artist I've ever talked to tells me. how much they learn from the clay itself clay is constantly changing.
What I loved when I first encountered clay was the extreme plasticity of the material with a drawing one is used to using an eraser to erase mistakes and with clay you just need to run your thumb over the area and you have a sheet of blank clay again and you can work it again and also the touch, the sensation of working with a kind of soft, pasty substance, is pleasant, there is no massage involved in the work. clay, every tool, whether fingers or pieces of wood or metal, that you apply to the material creates a totally different surface texture and the immediacy of the joke and nervous energy translates into the material very directly, clay does not. has done. changed over the centuries, that's the interesting thing: we can buy our clay instead of mining it ourselves and we can have electricity for our wheels, but in terms of actual techniques and the material, they are as they always have been and the chemical composition of fired clay.
It is an invaluable research tool because it acts as a snapshot of a time and place, meaning that a single piece of broken pottery can unlock a world of

hidden

secrets. Siobhan Boyd is an archaeologist who specializes in the ancient Americas. This little piece I probably got from Mexico is broken and because it's broken we can learn more scientifically about it. Often the clay is mixed with something called temper and if it's from a shell source, we can determine, maybe what shell was used and therefore where it came from and something like that. That would be important for pieces that were not excavated by archaeologists.
By looking at the different contents, we can determine where that piece came from. We can find out when someone was buried if a piece of pottery was buried with them by doing a thermoluminescence testing technique in which we take a small portion of the pottery and can tell the last time it was fired over time. Everything from a crystalline form, like ceramic, absorbs radiation and the longer it's exposed to that radiation, the more it has now when you cook something or when you cook it in an oven, it kind of resets that absorption to zero, it kind of resets it to zero. it starts from the beginning again, so using thermoluminescence, when you take a piece of ceramic and you put it in this machine, then it tells you how much radiation is in that piece, you can go back and find out when it was last fired, you just need a small amount, but you have to remove some of that ceramic and then reset it and see how much energy it emits and that's the way you can tell how old an object is and then if we find other ceramics that fit that same style or the same shape or the same color, we know that those pieces are within that same time period and therefore we can then use the pottery we find to be able to date a burial or date the time period in which a temple was built.
What is particularly special about the Gardner Museum is its specialty itself, as it is a museum dedicated solely to ceramics and there. There are very few of these museums in the world, founded more than 20 years ago through the passion of Toronto philanthropists George and Helen Gardner, who collected ceramics. The Gardner Museum has been described as a jewel box of ceramic treasures. Within these walls there are many secrets to discover. his collection of antique vessels and decorative porcelain the philosophy behind the Gardner collection is very interesting because it is based on a private collection and a private collection that is in fact very idiosyncratic when they were collecting ceramics they decided not to try to make a collection that looked like in ceramics from the beginning of time until now with a kind of small piece that represents each different era and each different civilization.
Instead, they focused on great moments in ceramic art. It reflects the tastes and passions of collectors, but also reflects great moments in the history of ceramics. and in particular great moments of ceramic technology and the development of technology, so in essence what the gardening museum is is a collection of collections, it has many different, very specific areas, that have been compiled in depth From the earliest civilizations to modern times, there are many interesting and revealing secrets to learn by researching ceramic art through the ages. When we return, we'll reveal more secrets of ancient American potters and go behind the scenes at the Gardener to witness the detective work involved in restoring and preserving pottery.
This small female clay figure. It was originally found in an ancient funerary tomb in Ecuador. It is approximately two thousand years old. According to scientists, it is a time machine, a window that reveals the history, culture and rituals of an ancient civilization, as are almost all the elements of the Gardner Museum. in Toronto, Canada, a showcase for the world of ceramic arts, but the museum is also dedicated to restoration and conservation and it is here, beneath the exhibition floors, that the most intriguing work occurs. It is very much a conservation process. The first thing you would have to do would be to put in your detective hat, how old is it?, where did it come from?, and what kind of materials is it actually built with.
What kinds of things are you seeing that are disturbing the piece? Does it have a kind of metallic sound if you touch it that can tell you about previous repairs? Damage, things like that. It is wonderful. I mean, there is a dialogue between the patient and the doctor and science intervenes not only to help reveal the problem. origins of a ceramic object, but also to help determine its authenticity, forgeries and forgeries are an occurrence and it is a problem that can happen and the people who are usually responsible for doing so are the people who are trying to sell them as real pieces.
What I have here is from our educational collection, it is from Colima, Mexico, so it is from a region where many of our pieces come from, from Western Mexico. This is a container with a two-headed dog effigy and is supposed to represent a dog found in mexico maybe a chihuahua or another type called a sholowitz quintly which is a hairless dog that was often depicted on old ceramics and this is a reproduction so it is not passed off as a fake, it was not sold to us as if it were a genuine piece,but it was made to look like. like some of our pieces and this is similar in the way some fakes and fakes would be made if you look at the little black marks on this piece in the past people just thought it was decoration it was black paint or something but recently I have noticed that the black flecks on our pieces from Western Mexico are actually manganese oxides that leach into the pottery from being buried underground for a long period of time in fakes or copies, it is actually paint, so with Just look not too deeply at the piece, but by looking at them under a microscope you can immediately tell if black spots have been added to a piece.
Sometimes they even take real pieces and think that by adding the black dots people would buy them more regularly. It is important to observe the Mayan culture, we have many cylindrical vessels that we call cocoa vessels and cocoa eschocolate or cocoa. We actually get the English word coco from the Yucatecan Mayan word which is cocoa. These pieces have hieroglyphic writing around the top edge and say things like this container was used to serve cocoa. Now people over the years don't always necessarily believe everything. You read, so what they did is they found a container with a lid a couple of years ago in a place called Rio Azul and they took the lid off and inside they found some residue, they found something called theobromine and caffeine and those are the two main ingredients in chocolate. , so it kind of proved that the container was in fact used for chocolate.
Archaeologists use ceramic innovations to measure the complexity of the civilization in question. A closer look at selected objects from the ancient Americas reveals a technically sophisticated use of clay, these are our oldest pieces we have in the museum and we can learn a lot about the technology these people use to make their pieces based on their pottery. It's quite sophisticated. Some interesting things to learn about some of these pieces in our exhibit are the ones from the Mayan area that maybe have something we call Mayan blue, it's a specific color for years, scientists can figure out how they made this blue color, they tried to reproduce it, they would get the right color but it would fade over the years whereas You look at some of our pieces and they are about 1500 years old and they still have that bright blue color so I think it took them about 50 years to figure out how Mayan blue was made and it is a combination of an indigo plant extract. mixed with fine white clay and then heated several times to make that color permanent.
If you were to look at our pieces from Western Mexico, some of them have a high shine and we call them burnished garments. What they basically did is they would have taken a piece, made it with a sort of slab technique, they wouldn't have used the potter's wheel, they would have let it dry to a leather heart state and then they would have picked up something smooth like a river pebble. and I took that pebble and ran it over the entire piece to create a high shine and that high shine would have helped make the piece less permeable to water just by having that sophistication and that knowledge knowing that by rubbing the smooth river pebble over it would line up. clay particles and make it more resistant to water.
I find it amazing, especially if you're digging somewhere and you're pulling something out of the ground that hasn't been looked at or seen in 2000 years and they still maintain that high shine. or maybe they have a very bright color, so here I have a reproduction of a musical instrument that comes from Peru, it is the salinar whistler glass and it is very similar to one that we have in our collection and this is actually a water whistle. instrument, so if I fill it with water on one side, it's made of clay and it's meant to be a reproduction, it's not meant to be fake, I fill one side with water and then I can take the piece and tilt it back. and forward, so if I tilt it forward it makes a sound and we think it was probably used to imitate the sound of an animal.
I can change the sound and again maybe crickets or frogs and maybe it's supposed to imitate the animal it represents here. There are also holes in the cheeks, ears and chin, if we cover them and tilt it forward again it changes the sound so this could have been something to help them with hunting to call an animal or it could have been used for some. type of ritual or celebration some type of purpose like that we don't know for sure, but this is a mold made piece, just like the piece we have in our collection, which dates back approximately 2500 years, many objects in this museum are mysteries To solve, for example, the history of this two-thousand-year-old clay figure is largely unknown, so Wilson's job is to play detective and see what clues this ancient Ecuadorian lady can reveal to learn more about her and this particular piece I'm looking at.
It has two holes in the collarbone just below the necklace and those are very interesting sometimes in the case of antique American pieces, the holes were drilled to kill the spirit of the vessel before being placed in a tomb. You're not going to start filling this out. hole, it's part of the story of the piece, it's uh, it's something interesting about it, you know, she had multiple strands of necklaces, she had a fabulous ring in her nose, she was wearing a turban, a women's turban that almost looks like a helmet that she would have. it has a very bright color in a sort of orange ocher, yellow and green red that appears as traces of pink, the feet have fallen off, been repaired or assembled for sale and additional chipping can be seen on the bottom around the loss of foot material replacing it with some type of material will not look as good will not improve the history of the piece will not improve its appearance, it looks great as is, but we would put the top of the head back on so it fits tell the whole story.
This piece has been very carefully preserved in a tomb for almost 2000 years and has passed through many fingers over the last 50 and from what I can see, someone obviously found the pieces and put them together probably in the second half of the 20th century because I can say that because of the glues that were used, but in a tomb the various means, the material of the tomb, even if it was originally a cavity, could have been displaced due to an earthquake due to tomb looting, something like that, so the Things that came out of them were often in pieces, but of course the local people, who are very kind, usually put them together and I've seen mismatched pieces with, you know, different handles placed on various pieces. just to make a candle if I want to show you this knife here's the original and here's glue and you can see it looks like carpenter's glue it's everywhere and it's removing a lot of the original material so this kind of what you would remove completely , there's also another problem: the back of this turbine on this head, for example, someone had tape all over it and you want to get rid of all the adhesive backing that was here, not only does it get saturated. the surface there and make this horrible tape line, but it's just not a big deal to have those kinds of chemicals and 20th century chemicals on the surface of this piece doing something like that, we'll largely eliminate this that I've chosen.
I use acetone and if I do this very carefully look at how it saturates the piece, you can see that little cloud that is evaporating very quickly because acetone is very volatile, it evaporates very quickly and I'm taking off a little bit of stuff on my stick it there, I'll blow it. I'm getting rid of a lot of this adhesive and hopefully minimizing how much is removed from the actual object. Let's see if I can get a good piece here and you'll see, it will probably be a full day before it dries completely to look, for example, like this area here, but there is an ongoing debate about how an item should be restored to better present your story to the public.
It is very rare to find a piece in such good condition when thrown away. We pull it out of the ground, usually as an archaeologist I'm used to finding pieces and fragments and then if there is a significant story behind that piece they will be restored to what they could have been, nowadays people are looking to restore the piece but without adding anything to it, whereas in the past I know it was like making it look new again, filling in those blank spaces, continuing the image that's painted on it today, I think people are moving away from that because They don't want to give the audience a false impression of what the piece really is because they could be wrong.
When you look at a piece, you really have to justify what you're going to do with it there. It should be a good reason to complete the missing pieces so that the piece is respected and the original looks as it should and just as different civilizations evolved, so did the art of ceramics. Then we cross oceans and move forward in time to explore. the secrets behind the technical innovations that changed the face of this art form and led to a ceramics revolution in Europe and, if you like, it is the equivalent of finding the secret of plastic today, but despite all best intentions, the secret came to light and happened thanks to industrial espionage, bribery and corruption, the best kind, this ceramic bowl was made in China during the Tang Dynasty in the 9th century, it is one of the first examples of true porcelain, bright white, translucent and very strong, a miraculous substance for all who saw it for the first time.
Time, the invention of hard porcelain is China's greatest contribution to world ceramics, but it would be almost 900 years before Europeans learned the secret of china clay. This porcelain represents a fingerprint of an era and opens a window into the history, culture and rituals of past civilizations and the role of the gardner museum in toronto canada is to discover the secrets within these objects and share them with us curator meredith chilton specializes in European ceramics from the Italian Renaissance era to the 19th century, one of the most important advances in the history of ceramics was the first introduction of porcelain that occurred in China in approximately the 8th or 9th century AD. and the reason this is important is that it is a completely new material that could hold boiling water without cracking or breaking, so there is a parallel development in the use of boiling tea in teapots and small teacups with the development of porcelain in the 17th and 18th centuries, large quantities of porcelain objects were imported into Europe from China by Portuguese, British and Dutch merchants, they were considered so precious, so valuable.
It was called white gold, but European attempts to reproduce it would remain elusive for more than a century. Porcelain was really prized by Europeans because it was rare and precious when it first arrived in Europe. I think you have to imagine, for example, the Elizabethan period in England. When there is very little trade with the Far East, only occasionally did some pieces of porcelain reach the coasts and then they were treated as this extraordinary and precious substance. They hadn't really seen anything like it before it was translucent, it was brilliantly white, it was often painted with exquisite underglaze blues, consequently, Europeans were very interested in developing their own porcelains because it was a radically new material, it was the plastic, if you will, from the time and they didn't know how to do it and they struggled to try to do it. material without knowing what its ingredients were at the end of the 14th century a new type of white tin-glazed earthenware appeared in Italy known as maolica originally an Islamic invention it was an attempt to imitate the pure white luster of porcelain this technique of tin-glazed ceramics It was actually created because they wanted to imitate they had seen Chinese porcelain and couldn't produce it and they wanted that white background that gives such a beautiful canvas to paint.
Maolica pottery reached its peak during the Italian Renaissance in the 15th and 16th centuries and reflected a new artistic style and bold, at the same time that Columbus discovered the new world. Really wonderful things were happening in Italy in the world of ceramic history. Their color technology was exploding from very simple origins such as the use of lead glazes tinted with some colors. then suddenly they can control and use colors of yellow, orange, even reds, which are very difficult, beautiful blues, greens and use these colors on the ceramic surfaces almost like canvases to create beautiful pieces of paint on the plates , the Renaissance ceramic decorator or painter. was really one of the most skillful in the history of ceramics, I mean, they could really paint on this very difficult surface because the tin glaze tends to absorb the colors, like blotting paper, and you can spread them out to get a line sharp and A really beautiful image was very, very difficult.
What is also very special about this pottery is that it has not faded at all. The colors seen in Italian Renaissance Majorica are exactly thosethe same as when they came out of the oven for the first time in the 16th century. and this is because the artists used metallic oxides which they painted on the surface of the enamel and the oxides and enamel then fused together during the firing process and now they cannot be separated or faded at all, so you are seeing the original . Bright color A convincing imitation of Chinese porcelain known as soft-paste porcelain was developed at the Medici court in Florence in the late 16th century, but it would be another century before the secret of true rhythm porcelain was discovered and manufactured hard. mice and gallery in the Gardner museum and this porcelain represents the first hard-beaten porcelain made in Europe a great moment in the history of ceramics this prestigious honor belongs to the Germans it happened in Micen in Saxony and had a profound effect on the entire European ceramic industry The secret of hard-paced Chinese porcelain or true porcelain was deciphered in Europe in the year 1709 by a young man named Johann Friedrich Berker and he is a fascinating character because he was an alchemist who undertook the task of finding the secret of make gold he never discovered how to make gold but he did discover how to make porcelain the first person to get his hands on the secret was in fact the patron of buttga his name was augustus the strong and he was elector of saxony and the The king of Poland Augustus the strong He imprisoned Burka in a tower on the banks of the Elb River and told him that he had to make porcelain and when this was discovered Porcin founded the Micen factory in 1710.
This is the first factory in Europe that makes porcelain at a fast pace and now we are sitting here in the garden museum gallery showing mice and porcelain, some of the earliest pieces of the factory's production are here and even its great moments of glory in the 1730s and 1740s when they made brightly colored backgrounds such as the yellow backgrounds so well known from this museum and others that plagued all of europe, but it should come as no surprise that the mystery of porcelain production became europe's worst kept secret when there is a will there is a way and it was not long before another enterprising official established his own porcelain factory Augusta Strong considered the discovery of porcelain so important that she established the Micen factory on an impregnable and inaccessible steep rock in a castle that she wanted to keep secret and if you want, it is the equivalent of finding the secret of plastic today.
This was a remarkable thing, but despite all her best intentions, the secret came to light and it happened because of industrial espionage, bribery and corruption, the best kind the Vienna ambassador was involved in. This and attracted with the promise of untold riches important workers of the Micen factory to come to Vienna, which they did in 1719, so the second poison factory, that of Claudius Inocentius du Pacquiao, was established by imperial privilege in 1718 and began production shortly after. The Gardner museum is particularly blessed because not only does it have a very important collection of mice and porcelain, but it also has one of the most important collections of dupakio, so here that small factory is extremely well represented, you can also see how different they are the two factories.
They are in their sense of style and also palette one of the most interesting pieces in the mycen collection. It is a small bowl that may seem really insignificant when you first look at it, but in fact it was one of the very special secrets and great discoveries. that we had here in this museum, this bowl was probably used for discarded tea leaves, but in fact it has a much more important history, it has two scenes showing people dressed in northern looking costumes on one side and on the other side . a couple of people holding animals and a large amount of vegetables and fruits.
It's like nothing I've ever seen painted on a piece of mycen and I was very intrigued when I first saw it and over several years in libraries in Europe every time I was there I would take a look and see if I could find the etchings that inspired the artist to do the scene, I had no luck, but it happened that one day I was in the university library here in Toronto, which is right down the street from the museum looking at a book of 18th century costumes and when I turned it over I found the scene and I screamed when I found it and it said it's really amazing because not only was it exactly like the scene in the bowl but on this at the top of the engraving there was a scroll and it said new amsterdam new york and then I turned to the next page and there was a scene from this painting in this bowl and in the sky it said davis strait hudson bay hudson bay of course that great area in northern canada and also the name of the company of the hudson bay, which was established very early as a trading post between North America and England and here we have it, I realized as I was sitting there in the library that we actually had the first examples of North American scenes painted in the European bosom here in this museum, so from a small, insignificant bowl it became a treasure for all of North America.
Porcelain was not only used to make plates and tea sets. The production of porcelain figures elevated the art form. Some of the greatest ceramic modelers of the 18th century are represented in this collection of Comedy Dellarte figures. Comedy was a popular form of Italian improvisational theater best known for the famous harlequin character in my hands. i got one of the icons from the gardner museum, perhaps our best known piece, it's called the harlequin salute and you can see it bows to greet you and it was made in the micen factory around 1740 by the great johann joachim kendler. the greatest master modeler who was the great rival of the colorist's herald these figures were probably used to decorate the dessert table in the 18th century and replaced the use of sculpted sugar and they were wonderful, they were permanent, they did not have to be broken.
They could then be colored brilliantly and, of course, were extraordinarily expressive and mainly decorative. These whimsical porcelain figures also acted as a mirror to the social wastelands of the 18th century in a humorous and often scandalous way. These small porcelain sculptures may not seem very important, but in fact, when you know their secrets they become much more interesting, especially when we can interpret their costumes and their gestures. Here you have a couple of figures also made of mice and also candles and you can see a harlequin here and a woman on the other side. Well, it looks like they're having fun, and they are, but I'm going to interpret their gestures.
It was only through research that we found the language of gestures, as well as the language of disguise, that somehow unlocked the secret. of these porcelain sculptures so that we can understand them now as they were understood in the 18th century so here you have harlequin and you can see that he has his hand placed on the hat that rests on the knees of the lady well in the 18th century the knee was a area that you just didn't touch, especially if you were a man, in fact you never showed it, you were more likely to show your chest, but never your knee, so this is a very open and sexual gesture, in fact, when he is putting his hand maybe on a hat but it's still on his knee and what else is he doing?
She's showing him a sausage, well I don't need to go into that, it's very explicit and she's not exactly saying no, you can see she's coquettishly reaching out with her hand as if to take off his mask and reveal him for the scoundrel he is and so does it. he's going to slap his slapstick as if to say go away so you can see the naughty tricks being carried out in this for the people watching this at the table this might remind them of a comedy de larte performance that had just taken place before dinner you could also get them to talk about maybe a little scandal that was going on at the time would certainly make them smile and it was a good sex joke (porcelain was really the purview of princes in the 18th century).
It was considered so special and so precious that many princes had their own private porcelain factories. It was in a way an expression of the time itself. Now this changes in the 19th century because porcelain is now sought after and sought after by the middle classes and to achieve this new bodies such as Chinese porcelain are developed, which are much easier to produce, have been mass produced and are less expensive and made to measure. As we move into the 20th century, porcelain and bone china are made for functional use but are also transformed by contemporary artists into truly wonderful new and creative ideas, in the same way that a clay pot can reveal secrets about culture and Rituals from an ancient civilization or a porcelain figurine from the 18th century may reflect the politics of the time.
This huge clay relief sculpture tells a detailed story about more modern events. This battle is a drama. It is a fabulous epic story full of rich anecdotes. and the details, so my idea was to tell the story in sculpted images. When we return, we will explore how modern ceramic art draws on examples from the past while also looking to the future. These ceramic sculptures were created in 1956, but they were made to be seen. a bit like these that were made in Italy sometime in the sixteenth century, but if you look closely you'll see something else in the negative space between the containers, there's an outline of a girl and boy facing each other.
Modern artists continue to push the envelope of this medium is one of the ways in which ceramics reflect the culture of our time. You can find many notable contemporary pieces at the Gardner Museum, which showcases major movements in the history of ceramics. Ceramics is not a dead art. Some of the most interesting pieces are being created today. and I felt that those pieces had so much relevance to our historical collections and I felt that they could enliven the historical collections and the historical collections enliven our contemporary pieces and typically contemporary is seen in a museum or gallery on its own and I wanted to integrate it as part of a ceramic continuum, so contemporary artists are very aware of the history of ceramics and often draw on it in very fun ways because it is an art form where the earth becomes art.
Ceramics are a perfect snapshot of time, place and culture that has made them extremely useful to archaeologists and continues to make the medium popular among ceramic artists today. Contemporary art can be divided into three categories: sculptural, functional and conceptual, but that can also be misleading because you can see beautiful pieces like Steve's. Heinemann Double Black Bowl, which is theoretically functional because it's a bowl, but it's very, very sculptural, intentional and conceptual. Contemporary artists like to challenge the limitations of clay both technically and philosophically, this means that our culture and technology are reflected in the work of modern artists.
Then you have Adrian Sacks, a California artist who worked at Sev in France, which is famous for its 18th century collections, and he riffs on this. It makes a very classic looking torso and the name of the piece is called Apostrophe Nile Denial. about the West Nile disease that he thought he had and was in the hospital for for a couple of days, so you have these planes that they were used in Los Angeles with pesticides to get rid of various pests and then you have these Rococo mangoes and their imitation Rococo and Fake Silver, in other words, fake and very lush and fun, but of course Adrian took that from his time in Sev and with a California type feel and we have an artist named Karen Dahl who made these Trump Loy pieces that look exactly. as something else, you can find examples of trompoy in the 18th century, so everyone thinks the cards are real, they think the rope is real, they think the piece of wood is real, but it's all clay.
The basic materials haven't changed much since then. People started making things with clay, but the types of objects that were made have changed a lot, especially in the second half of the 20th century. The big push for modern and contemporary ceramics certainly came at the beginning of this century and then after the Second World War in North America and the United States there was a real rethinking of ceramics and there was a kind of explosion of new ideas. Some of the most important ceramic artists of the 20th century are represented in the gardener's contemporary gallery. An important figure in this movement was a sculptor named Peter Volkas who in the 1950s started an influential ceramics program at the Otis Institute in Los Angeles.
Peter Volkas is a highly respected American ceramic artist and led a movement that was based on Expressionist painting. It abstracts an idea that you could take something as a container and suddenly it explodes and has no functional form. He was a beautiful potter. He did absolutely exquisite things, but that wasn't enough for him. He wanted to take ceramics to another realm. He started tomaking what we call large piles of clay again based on a fairly conventional shape but with an explosion of gouging, tearing and cutting, and these exciting shapes meant a lot to other artists who worked with him, such as john mason and paul soldner, and created a atmosphere that led people to They think they could reinterpret ceramics.
Funk art was another exciting period in the history of ceramics. There were these wonderful ceramic artists like Bob Arneson, Marilyn Levine, David Gilhooley and they resented the kind of honor that was given to the beautiful Chinese ceramic vase. They found it uninteresting. and they wanted to make fun of it and they wanted people to reconsider clay's position that it could do something more and so they set out on this mission to revitalize clay and it had a parallel with the pop art movement in addition to these iconic examples of contemporary ceramics , The Gardener showcases different artists who continue to push the boundaries of ceramics today.
One area of ​​ceramics that is very interesting at the moment is sculptural pieces and we invited Paul Day to bring his Battle of Britain exhibition to Toronto. an English artist known for his enormous high relief sculptures completely formed in terracotta clay. The tradition of high and low relief is ancient, but its ability to convey a sense of humanity is timeless. The day reflects modern urban life in the sculptures of it. My main subject is Urban scenes of contemporary life and relief allow me to capture an element of time because you have to walk past the sculpture, there is a change of shapes, which is the same change that happens when you walk through a city, everything It is in a kind of poetics. sliding movement that gives me a feeling of well-being and harmony walking through the worlds rotating around me things move and slide and I have this feeling of space, shape and distance, etc. and relief sculpture allows me to add that component of time and movement into a static image the battle of britain monument is the first public commission of the day in its home country the battle of britain is like this mythical thing all the films we saw when we were children also portrayed the second world war these the planes the Dabble in life in London at that time, so my idea was to tell the story in sculptures in sculpted images and for me it was the human drama that was important and what The human drama was not just the pilots going up and downing planes, but also the people who worked in the factories putting gunpowder into the projectiles, the families sheltering in the backyard under a pile of dirt and some corrugated iron, was a really rich tapestry of events, so I've tried to honor everyone involved and really celebrate the work that was being done, not proclaim victory over Nazi Germany throughout history.
I think all people were equal in many ways and it is an emotional power that his work has, it is evocative, as we see. The human faces there show pain, fear, happiness and humor, and I think he has captured something that is totally universal. We do not rely on and imbue visual artifacts to make sense of the world as prehistoric people would have done. Whether they have sacred or iconic status, we treat them as purely images in some ways, so I'm looking for a way to create images that have some kind of universal link to other people that can also show meaning where most of us don't see. . any meaning or value in things that are too often overlooked, a universal medium, clay has provided the basis for functional and decorative ceramic items in cultures around the world from ancient times to the present day.
Ceramics remain a versatile art form with the power to reflect. the richness of human history and reveals many fascinating secrets. I think ceramics tell you a lot about the people who made the pieces and the culture in which they lived. If you start looking at pieces with that in mind, you'll make incredible discoveries, maybe discoveries that other people haven't even seen, you'll understand things about how people wore the traditions or rituals they held dear, you'll discover an enormous amount of things that interested them, what exciting things were happening at that time, because they are parallel. life always gives you ideas about the people who made them

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