Ceramic art

• 1. Introduction

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  Ceramic art is one of humanity's oldest and most persistent creative traditions, stretching back to a time before agriculture, before cities, before writing. In Xianrendong Cave in Jiangxi province, China, pottery fragments have been found that date back 20,000 years. The people who made them were mobile foragers hunting and gathering during the Late Glacial Maximum. They were not farmers, not settlers, not builders of monuments. They were people on the move who still found reason to fire clay. And many of those early vessels show scorch marks, suggesting they were used for cooking.

  From that extraordinary beginning, ceramic art spread across nearly every culture on earth, taking forms as varied as the Terracotta Army of Qin Shi Huang, the delicate porcelain of the Song dynasty, the lusterware tiles of a mosque in Tunisia, and the tea bowls of a Kyoto family that has been working in the same tradition for centuries. Cultures including the Chinese, Cretan, Greek, Persian, Mayan, Japanese, and Korean developed especially distinctive traditions. Sometimes ceramic objects are the only artistic evidence left from a vanished civilization, as with the Nok culture of Africa, gone now for more than three thousand years.

  What makes ceramic art so persistent? What materials define it, and how have different cultures transformed a lump of clay into something that outlasts empires? Those are the questions this documentary will explore.

• 2. Clay and Fire

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  Porcelain is fired in a kiln to temperatures between 1200 and 1400 degrees Celsius. At those temperatures, the mineral mullite forms within the body of the piece, giving porcelain its characteristic toughness, translucence, and resonance. The word ceramics itself comes from the Greek keramikos, meaning pottery, rooted in keramos, meaning potter's clay. The basic principle has not changed since the earliest vessels: take clay or clay mixed with other minerals, shape it, subject it to heat.

  Earthenware sits at the simpler end of the spectrum. It has not been fired to vitrification and remains permeable to water. Terracotta is one form of it, a porous, clay-based ceramic used throughout history for flower pots, water pipes, bricks, and sculpture. Stoneware sits higher on the temperature scale, fired hot enough to become nonporous whether glazed or not. A European industry definition describes it as dense, impermeable, and hard enough to resist scratching by a steel point, yet more opaque than porcelain and usually coloured grey or brownish from impurities in the clay.

  Bone china occupies a distinctive place among porcelains. Developed by English potter Josiah Spode, it contains a minimum of 30 percent phosphate derived from animal bone, calculated as calcium phosphate. That composition gives it exceptional whiteness, translucency, and mechanical strength. From its development until the later part of the twentieth century, bone china production was almost exclusively English, concentrated in Stoke-on-Trent, with firms including Mintons, Coalport, Royal Crown Derby, Royal Doulton, Wedgwood, and Worcester all making it.

• 3. How Things Are Decorated

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  Slipware is identified by a primary decorating process in which slip, an aqueous suspension of clay and minerals including quartz, feldspar, and mica, is placed onto leather-hard clay before firing. That coating, known as an engobe, can improve the surface, mask an inferior colour, or serve purely decorative ends. A technique called sgraffito involves scratching through a layer of coloured slip to reveal a different colour or the base body underneath, and multiple layers can be built up and scratched back while the pot is still unfired.

  China painting, also called porcelain painting, decorates glazed objects after the clay body has already been fired into a hard porous biscuit. Underglaze decoration goes on first, followed by ceramic glaze, and then overglaze painting is applied and fired again at a lower temperature to bond the paint with the glaze. Decoration can be applied by brush, stencil, transfer printing, lithography, or screen printing.

  Burnishing is a finishing technique, often applied to earthenware, in which a hard smooth object, most often a stone, is rubbed across the clay surface. The rubbing aligns clay particles, producing a smooth finish and improving a vessel's capacity to store food or water. Multiple passes with oil applied between them can produce surfaces refined enough for further embellishment. Terra sigillata, a watery refined slip, is used to facilitate this burnishing and to promote carbon smoke effects in both primitive low-temperature firing and unglazed Raku firing.

• 4. Walls of Fired Clay

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  The earliest evidence of glazed brick comes from the Elamite Temple at Chogha Zanbil, dated to the 13th century BCE. Mesopotamian craftsmen were later imported to work on the palaces of the Persian Empire, including Persepolis, and the tradition of using coloured and painted glazed bricks spread through much of the Islamic world after the Islamic conquest of Persia. The most famous Mesopotamian example is the Ishtar Gate of Babylon, built around 575 BCE, now partly reconstructed in Berlin.

  In Tunisia, the upper part of the mihrab wall in the Mosque of Uqba, also known as the Great Mosque of Kairouan, is adorned with polychrome and monochrome lusterware tiles. Those tiles date from 862 to 863 and were most probably imported from Mesopotamia. Under the Ottoman Empire in the 16th and 17th centuries, the tradition reached one of its peaks in the Iznik pottery of Turkey. The Sultan Ahmed Mosque in Istanbul, built between 1609 and 1616, contains 20,000 tiles. Tiles were used extensively throughout the Topkapi Palace as well, which was commenced in 1459.

  In the Iberian Peninsula and Portugal, the Azulejo tradition produced extremely large painted tile scenes by the Baroque period, typically in blue and white. Delftware tiles from the Netherlands, each carrying a painted design covering only a single small tile, were widely exported across Northern Europe from the 16th century onward. Several 18th-century royal palaces had porcelain rooms with walls entirely covered in porcelain; surviving examples include rooms at Capodimonte in Naples, the Royal Palace of Madrid, and the nearby Royal Palace of Aranjuez.

• 5. China, Japan, Korea

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  Some experts believe the first true porcelain was made in the province of Zhejiang in China during the Eastern Han period, with shards from archaeological kiln sites showing estimated firing temperatures ranging from 1260 to 1300 degrees Celsius. The Imperial porcelain of the Song dynasty, spanning 960 to 1279, featuring very subtle decoration shallowly carved by knife in the clay, is regarded by many authorities as the peak of Chinese ceramics. Chinese emperors gave ceramics as diplomatic gifts on a lavish scale, and that practice aided the development of related traditions in Japan and Korea.

  Japanese pottery dates to around the 11th millennium BCE. Jomon ware emerged in the 6th millennium BCE, the plainer Yayoi style appeared around the 4th century BCE, and the potter's wheel arrived in the 3rd or 4th centuries CE, probably brought from China via the Korean peninsula. Japanese overlord Toyotomi Hideyoshi's attempts to conquer China in the 1590s were known as the Ceramic Wars, and the abduction of Korean potters appears to have been a major cause. One of those potters, Yi Sam-pyeong, discovered the raw material for porcelain at Arita and produced the first true porcelain in Japan. In 1971 the Kakiemon ware tradition was declared an important intangible cultural treasure by the Japanese government.

  Korean pottery traces a continuous tradition from simple earthenware dating to around 8000 BCE. The celadon Goryeo ware from the Goryeo dynasty, spanning 918 to 1392, and the early Joseon white porcelain of the following dynasty are generally regarded as the finest achievements of Korean ceramics.

• 6. European Porcelain

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  Until the 16th century, small quantities of expensive Chinese porcelain were imported into Europe. None of the attempts to replicate it succeeded until a recipe for hard-paste porcelain was devised at the Meissen factory in Dresden shortly after 1710; it was on sale by 1713. In 1712, many of the elaborate Chinese manufacturing secrets were revealed across Europe by the French Jesuit father Francois Xavier d'Entrecolles, published in the Lettres edifiantes et curieuses de Chine par des missionnaires jesuites. Within decades, factories opened at Nymphenburg in Bavaria in 1754, at Capodimonte in Naples in 1743, and in many other locations, often financed by local rulers.

  The Meissen modeler Johann Joachim Kaendler and Franz Anton Bustelli of Nymphenburg are regarded as perhaps the most outstanding ceramic artists of that early European porcelain period. Both trained as sculptors and produced models from which moulds were taken. Porcelain was well suited to the energetic Rococo curves fashionable at the time, and European figures, almost entirely secular, were soon brightly painted, often in groups with a modelled setting and a strong narrative element.

  By the end of the 18th century, owning porcelain tableware and decorative objects had become expected among the prosperous middle classes of Europe. Josiah Wedgwood, working from Stoke-on-Trent in North Staffordshire, industrialized pottery manufacture and developed the jasperware that imitated the effects of Ancient Roman carved gemstone cameos like the Gemma Augustea. The perfection of underglaze transfer printing, widely credited to Josiah Spode the first, eventually replaced hand-painting for complex designs across most of the world's decorated pottery. The development of machine-made thinner printing papers around 1804 allowed engravers a much wider variety of tonal techniques.

• 7. The Americas and Africa

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  The oldest ceramics in the Americas date from 5,000 to 6,000 years ago, found along the Pacific coast of Ecuador at Valdivia and Puerto Hormiga, and in the San Jacinto Valley of Colombia. Objects from 3,800 to 4,000 years old have been discovered in Peru. In the United States, the oldest pottery dates to 2500 BCE, found in the Timucuan Ecological and Historic Preserve in Jacksonville, Florida.

  The Moche cultures, which flourished on the northern coast of modern Peru, produced modelled clay sculptures decorated with fine lines of red on a beige background. Their pottery stands out for its huacos portrait vases, depicting human faces expressing happiness, sadness, anger, and melancholy, as well as complicated drawings of wars, human sacrifices, and celebrations. The Maya ceramics tradition flourished during the Maya Classic Period, the 2nd to 10th century. Work from the southern Belize site of Lubaantun was prized enough that specimens have been found at distant Maya sites in Honduras and Guatemala.

  In Sub-Saharan Africa, pottery appears to have been independently developed during the 10th millennium BC, with findings dating to at least 9,400 BC from central Mali. The figurines of the ancient Nok culture of northern Nigeria, which can be dated as early as 500 BCE and as late as 200 CE, are coil-built figures typically depicting heads with triangular eyes, varied facial expressions, and intricate hairstyles. Ladi Kwali, a Nigerian potter working in the Gwari tradition, made large pots decorated with incised patterns, creating work that blended traditional African methods with western studio pottery. Magdalene Odundo, a Kenyan-born British studio potter, produces hand-built and burnished ceramics in a line that connects to the same ancient burnishing tradition.

• 8. The Studio Tradition

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  Studio pottery as a recognized movement took shape in Britain partly in reaction to Victorian excess. In the early twentieth century, the Arts and Crafts movement emphasized traditional non-industrial production techniques, faithfulness to material, the skills of the individual maker, attention to utility, and an absence of excessive decoration. Bernard Leach, who lived from 1887 to 1979, established a style influenced by Far-Eastern and medieval English forms, turning to stoneware fired at high temperatures in large oil- or wood-burning kilns.

  Lucie Rie, an Austrian refugee who lived from 1902 to 1995, has been regarded as a modernist who experimented with new glaze effects on often brightly coloured bowls and bottles. Hans Coper, living from 1920 to 1981, produced non-functional, sculptural, and unglazed pieces. After the Second World War, studio pottery in Britain was encouraged both by the wartime ban on decorating manufactured pottery and by the modernist spirit of the Festival of Britain. Elizabeth Fritsch, born in 1940, studied under Hans Coper at the Royal College of Art from 1968 to 1971 and developed a hand-built flattened coil technique in stoneware, smoothed into accurately profiled forms and painted with dry matt slips in colours unusual for ceramics.

  In the United States, Beatrice Wood developed a unique luster-glaze technique and remained active from the 1930s until her death in 1998 at 105 years old. In Japan, the Mingei folk movement, led by Shoji Hamada, Kawai Kajiro, and others, studied traditional methods to preserve native wares in danger of disappearing. In Kyoto, the Raku family continued to produce the rough tea bowls that had long delighted connoisseurs, while at Mino, potters worked to reconstruct the classic formulas of Momoyama-era Seto-type tea wares.