Ceramic art and civilisation / by Paul Greenhalgh.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Greenhalgh, Paul, 1955 October 21- author.

Contributor:

George Clapp Vaillant Book Fund.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Pottery--History.

Pottery.

Civilization--History.

Civilization.

Genre:

History.

Physical Description:

512 pages : illustrations ; 29 cm

Place of Publication:

London ; New York : Bloomsbury Visual Arts, [2021]

Summary:

"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.

Contents:

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.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Local Notes:

Acquired for the Penn Libraries with assistance from the George Clapp Vaillant Book Fund.

Other Format:

Online version: Greenhalgh, Paul 1955 October 21- Ceramic art and civilisation.

ISBN:

9781474239707

1474239706

OCLC:

1154121008

Publisher Number:

99990663768