Wright Auction

  • Auctions
      • Auctions
      • Upcoming
      • Past
      • Publications
      • Catalogs
      • Books
      • Upcoming Auctions
        • Post War & Contemporary Art
        • American Design
        • 20|21 Art: Chicago Edition
        • Important Italian Glass
        • Photographs from the Polaroid Collection
  • Artists & Designers
      • Artists & Designers
      • VIEW ALL
      • Featured Artists & Designers
        • Louis Sullivan
        • Märta Måås-Fjetterström
        • George Nakashima
        • Paul Evans
        • John Dickinson
        • Leo Amino
  • Buying & Selling
      • Buying
      • Bidding
      • Shipping
      • Payment
      • Terms of Sale
      • Selling
      • Sell With Wright
      • Private Sales
      • Trusts, Estates & Appraisals
      • Free Evaluations
      • Submit Your Items Now
  • Contact
      • Information
      • About Wright
      • Contact Us
      • NYC Gallery
      • Opportunities
      • Send Feedback
      • Sign Up For Emails
      • Sign up for auction alerts & news!
log in

Artists & Designers (0)

No Results

Upcoming Items (0)

No Results

Past Items (0)

No Results

Resources (4)

  • View our Auctions

  • About Us

  • Looking to consign an item? We offer Free Evaluations

  • Have another question? Contact us

A Quiet Revolution:
The Ceramics of
Toshiko Takaezu
13 April 2023 / 11 am et

Information View Lots View Catalog

Rago, Wright, and LAMA are proud to present A Quiet Revolution: The Ceramics of Toshiko Takaezu. Featuring more than 60 works by the singular artist, this auction celebrates Takaezu's enduring vision and ability to harmonize multiple influences into uniquely empowered forms. Gathered over the course of two decades by dedicated collectors in Takaezu's home state of Hawai'i, the collection is comprised predominantly of Takaezu's “closed forms,” vessel-like works that Takaezu created throughout her career and ranged from the palm-sized to monumental. As interest in Takaezu and her legacy continues to grow, A Quiet Revolution affords a significant opportunity to consider how she shaped—and continues to shape—approaches not just to ceramics, but to art. 

Toshiko Takaezu  Untitled (with rattle)  $85,680  

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

Toshiko Takaezu with Lot 126


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.

To me an artist is someone quite special. You are not an artist simply because you paint or sculpt or make pots that cannot be used. An artist is a poet in his or her own medium. And when an artist produces a good piece, that work has mystery, an unsaid quality; it is alive.

Toshiko Takaezu

Toshiko Takaezu  Moon  $541,800  

TOSHIKO TAKAEZU, Untitled (with rattle) | Wright20.com

Toshiko Takaezu

Untitled (with rattle)

estimate: $12,000–18,000

result: $44,100

TOSHIKO TAKAEZU, Untitled (with rattle) | Wright20.com

Toshiko Takaezu

Untitled (with rattle)

estimate: $12,000–18,000

result: $60,480

TOSHIKO TAKAEZU, Untitled (with rattle) | Wright20.com

Toshiko Takaezu

Untitled (with rattle)

estimate: $15,000–20,000

result: $32,760

TOSHIKO TAKAEZU, Vase | Wright20.com

Toshiko Takaezu

Vase

estimate: $4,000–6,000

result: $3,276

TOSHIKO TAKAEZU, Untitled (with rattle) | Wright20.com

Toshiko Takaezu

Untitled (with rattle)

estimate: $10,000–15,000

result: $32,760

TOSHIKO TAKAEZU, Pink Lady (with rattle) | Wright20.com

Toshiko Takaezu

Pink Lady (with rattle)

estimate: $15,000–20,000

result: $60,480

TOSHIKO TAKAEZU, Untitled (from the Ocean Edge series) | Wright20.com

Toshiko Takaezu

Untitled (from the Ocean Edge series)

estimate: $4,000–6,000

result: $17,640

TOSHIKO TAKAEZU, Untitled | Wright20.com

Toshiko Takaezu

Untitled

estimate: $12,000–18,000

result: $35,280

Toshiko Takaezu

1922 – 2011


Toshiko Takaezu, distinguished American ceramic artist and teacher, was born in Hawaii in 1922. She is celebrated as a driving force in the development of the modern ceramic art philosophy that seeks to elevate the product of a potter’s craft from utilitarian vessel to fine art.

The sixth of eleven children, Toshiko Takaezu (pronounced Toe-SHEE-ko Taka-YAY-zoo) was the daughter of Japanese immigrants who emigrated from Okinawa to Pekeekeo, Hawaii. Her art training began in the early 1940s with Saturday painting classes at the Honolulu Academy of Arts. During these early years, she worked with commercial ceramic firms producing press mold pieces. It was through this work that she met Claude Horan, founder of the ceramics program at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. At Horan’s encouragement, Takaezu enrolled at the University – the first step in her formal artistic training.

In 1951, Takaezu was accepted to the prestigious Cranbrook Academy of the Arts in Bloomfield Hills, MI. In her third year, she accepted the position of teaching assistant to Finnish ceramic artist Maija Grotell. An excellent teacher with a knack for experimenting with glazes, Grotell had a profound influence on Takaezu’s work and encouraged her to find her own voice as an artist. After graduating, she went abroad in 1955 to explore her Japanese heritage, including the study of the tea ceremony and Zen Buddhism. While there, she studied the techniques and aesthetics of renowned artists Toyo Kaneshige and Yagi Kazuo, among others.

Takaezu’s clay pots evolved from functional vessels to abstract sculptural “forms” (as she called her works). An affinity for painting led the artist to create her first “closed form” works, as these vessels provided a larger surface on which to apply glaze. This became her signature: vessels with nearly closed-off tops, just open enough to allow gasses to escape during the firing process. Takaezu also began to add “rattles” to her pieces while they were still wet on the wheel before enclosing them completely. She would wrap each in a bit of newspaper first, which she thought of as “sending a message” to the inner space of the piece as she dropped it in. After the piece was fired, and one picked it up, it was Takaezu’s intention to give the handler an unexpected sensory experience.

Throughout her career, Takaezu continued to experiment. She threw squat ball-shaped vessels that she called “moon pots”; vertical forms, and ceramic “tree trunks”. In many of her later works, the artist closed the top of her vessels, removing the vent from view by placing it at the bottom of the form. Takaezu also experimented with the application of glazes, brushing free-hand and creating layers by employing a drip or spray method while she moved around the piece, producing painterly, abstract and serendipitous results. Further, she embraced the element of chance in the firing and believed her kiln was an important influence in the creation of the work, with a will or mind of its own that she couldn’t control and even liked to be surprised by.

Takaezu was a renowned teacher who worked in academia throughout her life, at Cranbrook Academy in Michigan, the University of Wisconsin, the Cleveland Institute of Art, and Princeton University, where she taught until her retirement in 1992. She approached art as she approached life, with a reverence for the natural world. For her, the practice of creating clay vessels was closely tied to everyday life: “In my life I see no difference between making pots, cooking, and growing vegetables,” Takaezu once said, “They are all so related… I get so much joy from working in clay, and it gives me many answers in my life.”

Toshiko Takaezu  Double-spout bottle  $8,820  

Toshiko Takaezu  Untitled (with rattle)  $40,320  

A Quiet Revolution:

The Ceramics of Toshiko Takaezu

Preview / New York
5 – 13 April 2023
10 am – 5 pm

Auction / Lambertville
13 April 2023
11 am eastern

For additional information
info@ragoarts.com
609 397 9374

Toshiko Takaezu  Untitled (with rattle)  $18,900  

Sign up for auction alerts & news!
  • Upcoming Auctions
  • Artist & Designers
  • Sell with Wright
  • Contact

© Rago Wright, LLC 2025


  • Cookie Policy
  • Cookie Settings
  • CA Privacy Notice

  • Terms of Sale
  • Privacy Policy
  • Do Not Sell My Personal Information
  • SMS Policy

  • Accessibility Widget

A network of independent auction houses

0

List price does not include shipping or sales tax; sales tax will be calculated based on your shipping address.

If you have any further questions, please contact us at 312 563 0020 or sales@wright20.com

Please note items will remain in your cart for 24 hours and are subject to availability.