Front cover image for Ceramic, art and civilisation

Ceramic, art and civilisation

Paul Greenhalgh (Author)
"In his major new history, Paul Greenhalgh tells the story of ceramics as a story of human civilisation, from the Ancient Greeks 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. 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, plebian, 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. Ceramics are the very stuff of how civilized life was, and is, led. This then is the story of human society's most surprising core causes and effects"-- Provided by publisher
Print Book, English, 2021
Bloomsbury Visual Arts, London, 2021
History
512 pages : illustrations ; 29 cm
9781474239707, 1474239706
1154121008
Prologue : a history in shards
What ceramic is
The value of the Greek potter
Rome and the arrival of the medieval world
Renaissances of tin
The enlightened reign of white
The natural and the individual : lead, slip, stone, salt
The acceleration of style and the arrival of the modern
The studio arrives
The creative explosion
Postscript : Attica to California