119: TOSHIKO TAKAEZU, Untitled < A Quiet Revolution: The Ceramics of Toshiko Takaezu, 13 April 2023 < Auctions

Secret Spaces

On the Forms of Toshiko Takaezu

There is no tragedy in my work /
the potter said, only moments /
of dreaming, criss-crossed like /
timbers in a barn

—Leila Philip, "Black Bowl Dreaming," from Toshiko Takaezu: Earth in Bloom

In a 2009 interview given one day before her 87th birthday, Toshiko Takaezu noted that she sometimes felt the desire to “jump in” to her monumental forms as they took shape in her hands. “You felt that you had to go in,” she said, and then, laughing: “I didn’t though.” Stated so plainly and cheerfully by the artist, this simple tension—between inside and outside, self and work, curiosity and restraint—offers a glimpse of the forces animating Takaezu’s career of more than five decades, in which she produced a remarkable and innovative body of ceramic work that quietly transcends straightforward categorization.

Of the more than sixty works featured in A Quiet Revolution: The Ceramics of Toshiko Takaezu, the vast majority are iterations of the artist’s “closed forms,” for which she is most well-known and which scholar Glenn Adamson has described as “best understood as sculptures, or perhaps as paintings-in-the-round.” Gathered over the course of two decades by dedicated collectors residing in Takaezu’s home state of Hawai’i, this present selection invites renewed contemplation—for seasoned devotees and newcomers alike—of the spaces, seen and unseen, that Takaezu has brought into being through her unique powers of synthesis.

“It is between the seeming contradictions of simplicity and complexity that the mysterious essence of all ceramic art is centered,” wrote Garth Clark in American Potters: The Work of Twenty Modern Masters. Published in 1981, the volume counts Takaezu among the giants of modern ceramic art, among them Ken Price, Paul Soldner, Beatrice Wood, Betty Woodman, and, of course, Peter Voulkos. In his introduction, Clark recalls that Lucio Fontana also worked extensively in ceramics, drawing a parallel between Fontana’s infamous disruption of surface and the aggressive slapping, heaping, hacking, and slashing with which Voulkos disrupted the entire trajectory of ceramics.

It is between the seeming contradictions of simplicity and complexity that the mysterious essence of all ceramic art is centered...

Working in the same era, Takaezu’s engagement with that “mysterious essence of all ceramic art” was quite different. As a teenager, she worked at the Hawai’i Potters Guild before studying painting at the Honolulu Academy of Arts and ceramics at the University of Hawai’i, and eventually enrolling at the Cranbrook Academy of Art from 1951 to 1954. There, Takaezu studied with Finnish-American artist Maija Grotell, sometimes described as the “mother of American ceramics,” who had a profound influence on her approach to creative expression. Grotell helped ingrain the significance of the artist’s identity and self-expression to their practice, and Takaezu has famously said, “Hawai’i was where I learned technique; Cranbrook was where I found myself.”

After graduating, in 1955, Takaezu traveled to her ancestral homeland of Japan where she studied and absorbed its culture, not least through tea ceremonies, Zen Buddhism, and traditional pottery. By the late 1950s, she had arrived at the form that would captivate her, and many others, for decades to come: the vessel of vastly varying proportions—impossibly bulbous or resolutely stout, imposing and monumental or nearly miniature—with a relatively imperceptible opening at the top.

Darrel Sewell refers to these minute apertures of Takaezu’s forms as “a vestigial reminder of their functional origin.” In this way, the works are certainly not open nor are they completely closed. Fully embodying the serenity and simplicity of the potter’s vessel, they nonetheless rebel against any expectation of usefulness. And while indisputably three-dimensional objects, their surfaces have been rendered with a painter’s care for the canvas. Nodding to Takaezu’s merging of Eastern tradition and Western Modernism, Clark notes that her treatment of glaze shows “a carefully resolved union of the understatement characteristic of [Asian] watercolor landscapes and the aggressive gesture of Abstract Expressionist painting.”

If Voulkos, also channeling such Abstract Expressionist gestures, disrupted both clay and precedent through wrenching and tearing, then Takaezu disrupted through harmonizing disparate influences and creating space to hold the unknown. “Her work is finally an exploration of the privacy of space,” wrote Clark, “space that in her pots is as much guarded as it is enclosed.” Echoing this sentiment, Peter Held writes, “The poetry of [their] outside evokes the mystery of the inside. Their dark interiors remain a secret space.”

What miracles can transpire in secret spaces? Many of the forms in A Quiet Revolution harbor small bits of fired clay, allowing the work to extend into the auditory realm as a rattle of sorts. In the aforementioned interview, Takaezu recalls writing—she does not specify what—inside some of the forms: “Nobody could see it,” she said, “unless they break it.”

What miracles can transpire in secret spaces?

By all accounts, Takaezu’s goal was not to confound, mystify, or frustrate. She simply continued to make—“I need to do the work,” she once said, “The process of the work helps me.” Working continuously from her Quakertown, NJ, home and studio from 1975 onward she generously shared her mentorship, growing a devoted community alongside her beloved garden. Her brilliance, on full display in A Quiet Revolution, was to contain mystery without fetishizing it, channeling self and world—“moments of dreaming”—into singular, self-contained forms that crisscross time and space like so many timbers in a barn.