Fruits of the Wheel

Ceramics, one of mankind's first arts, is having a renaissance after a century-long decline. Begun when a handful of ceramists retreated to their studios in self-conscious revolt against the standardization of machine-tooled objects, the renaissance is now in full swing from Manhattan's Greenwich Village to London's Chelsea, with thousands of potters pumping their wheels and smudging their smocks as they "throw" the wet spinning clay. One of the most indefatigable sponsors of the revival is Syracuse Museum of Fine Arts Director Anna Olmsted, who launched a series of national ceramic shows in 1932, this year invited entries from ten European countries, Canada and Hawaii. Some $3,200 in prizes was awarded by a jury headed by Painter-Ceramist Henry Varnum Poor, generally considered dean of modern U.S. potters. The show will travel to five more U.S. cities in the next year, last week was on view at Manhattan's Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The wide variety of shapes and textures demonstrated that modern potters have learned from modern art to create a host of effects the ancients never tried. Yet most of the wilder efforts, especially in sculpture, are wildly unsuccessful. Best are the potters, who respected pottery's traditional forms, but contributed here a new handling of glazes, there a new rough energy of texture.

Top practitioners:

P: Bernard Leach, 72, perhaps the most renowned potter living, would certainly have won a prize if England's entries had not arrived late and missed the judging. A onetime partner of the great potter Hamada, Leach was trained in Japan, considers himself a "sort of courier between East and West." His bottles in the exhibition came from his Cornwall studio, but, he says, "both show early Chinese influence. The pattern of the tall one was combed or scratched on. For my smaller bottle I used a red which is considered impossible--a new color." P:James Sheldon Carey, 47, keeps so busy teaching 100 ceramics students at the University of. Kansas that his own pottery has become almost a Sunday hobby. His heavily textured urn, a $100 prizewinner, is both modest and forceful, both earthy and alert looking. P: Italy's Giovan Battista Valentini, 27, gives "no special value" to his $250 prizewinner. "Like others I do, it is made the same way as in Homer's time." With its squared-off underside, made possible by stoneware's hard-baked solidity, the bowl has a look of energy held in suspension like a Chinese bronze.

In the introduction to the show's catalogue, Juror Poor ruefully concludes that U.S. potters are not yet up to their European contemporaries. Perhaps, he says, it is because Americans "contend with more automobiles, more radios and television, more chain stores and packaging, more of all the things that induce nervousness and discontent and dissipate the patience and oneness most necessary for a potter."

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