Ceramic Art and Civilisation
Event Details
A talk by Paul Greenhalgh.
Internationally renowned historian of art, design and the decorative arts, and previous Head of Research at the V&A Museum, London, Paul Greenhalgh, joined the HENI Art Club via Zoom to give an interactive talk on the history of ceramics, from Ancient Greece to the present day.
As a core craft technology, pottery has underpinned domesticity, business, religion, recreation, architecture, and art for millennia. Indeed, the history of ceramics parallels the development of human society. Paul will have a selection of modern and ancient pots in situ, giving spectators a rare opportunity to see these works up close.
A book of the same name, Ceramic Art and Civilisation, published by Bloomsbury in 2020, is available to read in our eBook library and to purchase at a 25% discount from the print bookshop.
This fascinating and very human history traces the story of ceramic art and industry from the Ancient Greeks to the Romans and the medieval world; Islamic ceramic cultures and their influence on the Italian Renaissance; Chinese and European porcelain production; modernity and Art Nouveau; the rise of the studio potter, Art Deco, International Style and Mid-Century Modern, and finally, the contemporary explosion of ceramic making and the postmodern potter. Interwoven in this journey through time and place is the story of the pots themselves, the culture of the ceramics, and their character and meaning.
Ceramics have had a presence in virtually every country and historical period, and have worked as a commodity servicing every social class. They are omnipresent: a ubiquitous art. Ceramic culture is a clear, unique, definable thing, and has an internal logic that holds it together through millennia. Hence ceramics is the most peculiar and extraordinary of all the arts. At once cheap, expensive, elite, plebeian, high-tech, low-tech, exotic, eccentric, comic, tragic, spiritual, and secular, it has revealed itself to be as fluid as the mud it is made from.
Organiser: HENI Art Club
Event Type: Live
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