Items25The creator’s order
  1. 1George E. OhrGeorge E. OhrThe self-styled Mad Potter of Biloxi threw vessels with walls as thin as eggshell and then crumpled, pinched, twisted and folded them while the clay was still wet, so a vase looks as if it has been squeezed in a fist. Few collectors understood it in the 1890s, and Ohr stored thousands of pots in…0i
  2. 2Pablo PicassoPablo PicassoBorn 25 Oct 1881From 1947 Picasso spent years at the Madoura pottery in Vallauris, run by Suzanne and Georges Ramié, and made thousands of pieces there. His approach was to treat a pot as a body: a jug becomes a woman by pinching in a waist, a vase sprouts a bird's head, a plate turns into a bullring or a face.…0i
  3. 3RosanjinRosanjinBorn 23 Mar 1883Rosanjin was a cook and restaurateur before he was a potter, and he made dishes to frame food. At his Hoshigaoka Saryo club in Tokyo in the 1920s he served on ceramics he designed after old Oribe, Shino and Kutani wares: square plates with green glaze poured across one corner, leaf-shaped dishes,…0i
  4. 4Bernard LeachBernard LeachBorn 5 Jan 1887Leach's ideal was the humble, useful pot, thrown quickly and well and fired in a wood-burning climbing kiln, with sturdy forms and quiet glazes such as tenmoku and celadon. He learned in Japan alongside friends of the mingei folk-craft movement, then founded the Leach Pottery at St Ives in 1920…0i
  5. 5Maria MartinezMaria MartinezMartinez coiled her pots by hand, without a wheel, at San Ildefonso Pueblo in New Mexico, then polished them with smooth stones until they shone. Around 1919 she and her husband Julian developed black-on-black ware: Julian painted designs in a matte slip on the burnished surface, and smothering the…0i
  6. 6Kawai KanjirōKawai KanjirōA founder of the mingei folk-craft movement with Yanagi Sōetsu and Shoji Hamada, Kawai began with refined copies of Chinese and Korean glazes, then grew freer and stranger. His later pieces, made at the home and climbing kiln in Kyoto that is now his memorial museum, are thick-walled, press-moulded…0i
  7. 7Beatrice WoodBeatrice WoodBorn 3 Mar 1893Wood took up pottery in her forties after a youth among the Dada artists of New York, and became famous for lustre glazes: iridescent surfaces in gold, copper and violet that change colour as you walk round a bowl or chalice. She admitted her throwing was wobbly and turned that into charm,…0i
  8. 8Shōji HamadaShōji HamadaHamada decorated with gestures. His best-known trick was to pour a ladle of glaze across a bowl in one sweep, a pattern taking about 15 seconds, and when asked whether that was too quick for the price he said it had taken 60 years and 15 seconds. He settled in the pottery village of Mashiko, worked…0i
  9. 9Clarice CliffClarice CliffBorn 20 Jan 1899Cliff's Bizarre ware, launched in 1927 at the Wilkinson factory in Stoke-on-Trent, put Art Deco on the tea table: thick blocks of orange, yellow and green, crocuses and stylised cottages, and angular shapes such as the Conical sugar sifter and the flat-sided Stamford teapot. She started as an…0i
  10. 10Michael CardewMichael CardewCardew made slipware for ordinary kitchens at Winchcombe in the Cotswolds, generous jugs and dishes trailed with honey-coloured slip, and then moved to West Africa and switched to high-fired stoneware. As the colonial government's pottery officer he founded the Abuja Pottery Training Centre in…0i