Gitter-Yelen Ceramics Catalogue

NEW FORMS, NEW VOICES

NEW FORMS, NEW VOICES Japanese Ceramics from the Gitter-Yelen Collection

Japanese Ceramics from the Gitter-Yelen Collection

NEW FORMS, NEW VOICES Japanese Ceramics from the Gitter-Yelen Collection

Joe Earle New Orleans Museum of Art

New Forms, New Voices: Japanese Ceramics from the Gitter-Yelen Collection is published in conjunction with an exhibition of the same title presented by the New Orleans Museum of Art, November 4, 2017 to April, 8, 2018. Š New Orleans Museum of Art. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without written permission from the New Orleans Museum of Art, 1 Collins Diboll Circle, City Park, New Orleans, Louisiana, 70124.

Every effort has been made to acknowledge correct copyright of images where applicable. Any errors or omissions are unintentional.

Please notify NOMA’s Publications Department, who will arrange for corrections to appear in any reprints or online editions.

ISBN 978-0-89494-002-6 Publisher: New Orleans Museum of Art, 2017 Exhibition curator: Joe Earle Graphic designer: Mary Degnan Copy editor: David Johnson Photography: Roman Alokhin, Sesthasak Boonchai, and Richard Goodbody Printer: Printed in Korea through Four Colour Print Group, Louisville, Kentucky

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TABLE OF CONTENTS Foreword. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 Susan M. Taylor, The Montine McDaniel Freeman Director, New Orleans Museum of Art

Memoirs of a Collecting Couple . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 Joe Earle with Kurt Gitter and Alice Yelen Gitter

New Forms, New Voices: Japanese Ceramics from the Gitter-Yelen Collection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 Joe Earle

Inspired by Ancient Kilns . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 Hewn from the Earth, Inspired by Nature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42

FRONT AND BACK COVER Satoshi Kino Fall Wind 16-32, 2016 See page 71.

FRONTISPIECE Machiko Ogawa Lunar Fragment-1, 2014 See page 50.

TITLE PAGE Takuo Nakamura Vessel That Is Not a Vessel, 2016 See page 98.

ENDPAPER Ryuichi Kakurezaki Fish Bowl in Shigaraki Style 1999–2000 See page 24.

Masters of Porcelain . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62 Embracing the Avant-Garde . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78 A Love of Decoration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90

Japanese Ceramics from the Gitter-Yelen Collection

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FOREWORD SUSAN M. TAYLOR, The Montine McDaniel Freeman Director, New Orleans Museum of Art The collection of Dr. Kurt A. Gitter and Alice Yelen Gitter presented in New Forms, New Voices illuminates significant aspects of the most recent chapter in the long history of Japanese ceramics. Well-known collectors of both Japanese Edo-period painting and self-taught art from the American South, Kurt and Alice have also created an important and distinctive collection of modern and contemporary Japanese ceramics.

The collection is one manifestation of Kurt and Alice’s long love affair with Japan, its culture and its people. As the interview in the pages that follow reveal, it was, remarkably, their experience of collecting self-taught art from the American South that most informed the creation of this group of modern and contemporary Japanese ceramics. In both fields they forged lasting relationships with artists, visiting them in their studios and homes. These long-standing relationships and their in-depth knowledge of each artist’s work have informed all of their acquisitions.

Kurt has been actively engaged with NOMA as a donor and member of the Board of Trustees for over forty years. Alice, a distinguished museum educator, became an important voice in the field of self-taught art, curating a number of significant NOMA exhibitions. Kurt and my predecessor, John Bullard, worked together to build NOMA’s fine collection of Edo-period painting, and both he and Alice continue to be advocates and supporters of the arts at NOMA today.

It is a great honor for NOMA to present this beautiful collection and the accompanying catalogue. We are grateful to guest curator Joe Earle for his thoughtful selection of objects and the insightful interview and essays which grace the pages that follow. Lisa Rotondo-McCord, has, as always, ably shepherded this project from concept to completion. The catalogue, thoughtfully designed

by Mary Degnan and edited by David Johnson, features beautiful photography by Seth Boonchai and Roman Alokhin. Thanks also to Laura Povinelli, who handled the image rights, Elizabeth Bahls, Registrar for Exhibitions and Loans, and Jennifer Ickes, Chief Registrar. Our talented installation team is responsible for the elegant design of the galleries.

Ultimately, however, our greatest thanks go to the collectors, Kurt and Alice, who have not only created this remarkable collection, but also so graciously shared it with the public ensuring that new audiences will come to know and appreciate this important body of work.

Japanese Ceramics from the Gitter-Yelen Collection

OPPOSITE PAGE Shiro Tsujimura Large Jar, 2008 19 5⁄8 × 17 3⁄4 in. © Shiro Tsujimura

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MEMORIES OF A COLLECTING COUPLE JOE EARLE

In March 2017, on the morning of his eightieth birthday, I sat down with Kurt Gitter and his wife Alice during a New York blizzard and talked to them about their experiences collecting Japanese ceramic art. In between their fielding many telephone greetings from friends and family, a fascinating narrative unfolded.

Kurt: I was an undergraduate at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, where they happened to have a reasonably good art history department. I don’t even know why, but I took almost every undergraduate course in art history.

I remember taking pre-classical, classical, Greek and Roman, modern, and impressionism. My friends all thought I was taking the course because it was much easier than embryology or anatomy, but the fact is I really enjoyed it.

My family collected various forms of American and European art and is supposed to have owned a Tintoretto painting that they had to give up to get out of Austria in 1938. We never got it back, and none of us were able to document it.

In 1958 I started medical school in New York City and I used to go to galleries on the weekend and that continued during my internship. I met Philip Pearlstein, now 92, a well-known American figurative painter who shows at the Betty Cuningham Gallery here in New York and has had a very successful career.

When I first met him, he was living in SoHo in a loft with his wife, Dorothy, and young son, William (now an art lawyer), along with Andy Warhol. They had studied together in Pittsburgh, where they both grew up. Andy and Philip came to New York at the same time when they were both 18 or 19 years old. Anyway, I bought a painting of Philip’s that I saw in Art News or Art in America, one of those magazines. It was a landscape he’d done of a mountain in Italy that had a little bit of abstract expressionism and a little bit of figurativeness. It was a lovely painting. I made a deal with him for four hundred dollars, payable over four years. He was broke, and I was broke, and it was wonderful.

Ceramics displayed in the home of Dr. Kurt Gitter and Alice Yelen Gitter in New Orleans

Japanese Ceramics from the Gitter-Yelen Collection

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MEMORIES OF A COLLECTING COUPLE Philip introduced me to contemporary art in a way that was quite spectacular.

On Friday nights I used to go with him to the Artists Club down in the Village, founded by Philip Pavia, and hear artists speak out, like Ad Reinhardt or Franz Kline. Other people would get up and speak for an hour, and then there’d be questions. And then we’d go to the Cedar Bar and drink. And I met all of these important painters of the time, like Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline and Robert Motherwell, as well as critics like Irving Sandler. I’d go often to all the contemporary galleries. None of the artists were rich, and none of the people going to those meetings were rich. I bought art by artists such as Richard Stankiewicz, Joe Stefanelli, and Alex Katz, for peanuts: a hundred, two hundred, three hundred dollars. I went to Jasper Johns’s first show and a lot of other first shows.

In 1963, after my internship, I was drafted to Japan. I spent two years with the United States Air Force at Itazuke Air Base, down on Kyushu in western Japan, and started traveling around and learning a little bit about Japanese life and culture, which I immediately loved, and still do. One of my friends once said that had I not been drafted and just gone with what I knew about American art, I would have built one of the great contemporary art collections in America. But once I was in Japan, I started looking at things there. I lived with my young family in a lovely pure Japanese house facing the Japan Sea, with an ofuro (Japanese tub) and tatami mats. We lived off-base, which wasn’t at all common for U.S. military personnel, in the small rice-growing village of Saitozaki, across Hakata Bay from Fukuoka, about fifteen miles from Itazuke.

I had a car too. It was a fabulous experience. I was living with Japanese people, not with Americans. So I had to learn a little bit of the language, but the first thing I had to do was get some heaters because it was freezing in there!

Probably the first Japanese pot I ever encountered was something upon which I ate a meal. There was a very handsome local folk pottery called Koishiwara that’s pretty well known today. I still have some of it. I immediately started eating Japanese food, which the other American officers didn’t do, they just used the Officers’ Club where a martini was twenty cents or a dime.

Before long I went down to southern Kyushu and saw some of the Korean influences on Japanese pottery, but the most important thing I bought at that time was a very fine haniwa (6th–7th-century earthenware tomb guardian) which I still own. When I got married to my first wife, I’d bought the

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Miserere et Guerre print series by the French artist Georges Rouault for $1,500 from the dealer Peter Deitch. I sold it back to him for $5,000 and bought the haniwa. Of course, today it’s worth a fair amount of money, but the Roualt prints are worth about ten times more. Regardless, I’ve enjoyed the haniwa all these years. After a bit I started going around to Kyoto and Tokyo, visiting actual dealers and art shops, and started to learn a little bit. So my real collecting actually began while I was in Japan, but it was minimal and most of what I bought turned out not to be the real thing. I didn’t know anything, so I had a lot to study and there was very little written in English at the time.

In 1969 (the same year that I moved to New Orleans), when I’d finished my medical training and was already in practice, I was invited back to Japan to give some medical lectures. I had a little money by then; I was ready to be a buyer, and after almost half a century I still am. For most of that time I was mainly collecting Japanese paintings but I was always interested in ceramics, not necessarily contemporary work but objects like stoneware from the “Six Old Kilns” (including Echizen and Shigaraki, p. 23) or much earlier wares like Haji (p. 22). I didn’t have huge quantities, but I had good individual pieces. Then over the last ten or fifteen years, as it became more difficult to acquire paintings that were better than what I already had, we started taking a greater interest in ceramics and meeting some of the artists, which was wonderful for us. We visited Ryuichi Kakurezaki in his home in Okayama, spent a day and a half there with him, saw all of his work in his warehouse, and he was very, very cordial and very, very nice.

People told me he would never sell anything to us, but he did and he took us out for dinner at a local restaurant where everything was served on his pottery.

Alice: Kurt saw them come out with a huge, highly textured, magnificent sushi platter, and he looked at me. He said, “I want one of those,” and now a similar one is in our collection (p. 24). Later, as we were walking past the Kakurezaki family’s living quarters, Kurt noticed a beautiful large pot outside.

After he’d seen everything else in the kura (detached storehouse) and elsewhere in the storage and in the kiln, he said, “I’d really like to have that, Kakurezakisan,” but Kakurezaki said, “Oh, no, I’m so sorry. That’s for my fish.” We looked and there really were fish swimming in it. But then when we got back to New Orleans, we found that he’d sent the fish bowl, at his expense, along with the things we’d actually ordered from him (p. 25 and endpaper).

Japanese Ceramics from the Gitter-Yelen Collection

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MEMORIES OF A COLLECTING COUPLE We had a similar experience when we organized a trip for a group of New Orleans Museum of Art patrons in 2000. At the time, New York ceramic dealer Joan Mirviss was living in Tokyo with her husband Bob Levine, who was working as a corporate lawyer. Joan put up a beautiful show for us. After we’d looked at the show and had drinks, we approached a table set up with food.

Nobody had bought anything yet, but in the center of the table was a bowl by Harado that had grapes in it. Kurt said, “Joan, I’d really like to have that bowl.”

Joan said, “Take the grapes out.” So Kurt took the grapes out and looked at the bowl and now it’s in our living room. My point is that Kurt chooses from what he sees, not only what people show him. He works from within himself.

An important part of our collecting is that we really both like the artists. A lot of them are lovely people and we enjoy talking with them about their art and process. Kurt’s been very consistent in maintaining relationships with them.

And they like him. They respond very positively.

Kurt and Alice with their daughter Manya-Jean in Japan, 1997

Kurt: They like you too! We took Kakurezaki out for a great steak dinner here in New York when he had a show with Joan Mirviss and he loved it. He’s a handsome man, and looks ten years younger than he is. He’s got great joie de vivre, and his English isn’t bad.

Alice and I were married in 1986. I hadn’t collected anything other than Japanese art for many years but early in 1988 Bill Fagaly at the New Orleans Museum of Art organized an exhibition of Sister Gertrude Morgan, a preacher and selftaught artist from New Orleans. We both went to see that show and we loved it. I don’t know why it impacted us so much, but it was very, very appealing. Perhaps it looked a little bit like German Expressionism. Anyway, beginning in 1988 we started to rapidly collect a lot of work by self-taught artists. We ended up buying fifty pieces by Sister Gertrude Morgan from one collector. That started a whole process of learning, travel, meeting self-taught artists, and collecting their work, until about 1995. We have a major collection which has been shown in museums in Louisiana, Alabama, North Carolina, and Massachusetts.

Alice: At the time I was working on a different exhibition at the New Orleans Museum of Art. There were a lot of luncheons and programs that Kurt was joining me for, and we often found ourselves sitting in a particular gallery where we were surrounded by Sister Morgan’s work. We just both fell in love with her imagery and that started a lifestyle of getting into our Toyota farm truck and spending

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all of our weekends going to meet artists, just driving to wherever they were in little rural places in Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Texas, Arkansas. We slept near wherever the artists lived, in incredibly crazy places, because we were both working and so very time-conscious.

We had a big open truck and whatever we’d buy, we’d put in the truck. We didn’t even know how to use the tarp to properly protect the art, but we learned.

Kurt: Now I’m sure you want to know what the connection is between selftaught art and Japanese art. Of course they’re separate things, but they’re both beautiful and they coexist very nicely, as you can see in our home. As far as Japanese contemporary ceramics, there’s nobody that doesn’t love them.

They’re so accessible and they fit in any milieu. But perhaps the thing that most totally drove us in those years was the experience of meeting artists, starting with self-taught American artists: not only did we collect their work but they also became part of our lives, they would come to Louisiana to stay with us at our farm or in New Orleans. A similar thing happened later with Japanese ceramic artists. We loved talking to them about their art, observing them in their studios. It was something we absolutely enjoyed, except it was at a different level, in the Japanese landscape and culture that we already knew and adored.

I don’t remember how we first met Machiko Ogawa, but I do remember her inviting us to her beautiful home in Atami, up on top of a mountain with a view over the Pacific Ocean. She spent years in Africa with her husband who was a professional anthropologist and she’s a very soulful person. We all just hit it off, and she spoke French, so Alice could communicate with her a bit about certain things. I just loved being with her. She introduced me to her dealers in Tokyo, where she had an exhibition and we bought a few things there. When we visit Tokyo, she comes in from Atami and spends the day with us to have lunch and talk.

Very nice.

We also met Machiko Ogawa in Kyoto when she had a show there with Shibunkaku and we had dinner and invited a few of the people whose work is in this catalogue, including Eiko Kishi and Kazuo Takiguchi, two other artists we love. We have just one great piece by Kishi (p. 103). We met her often but we didn’t buy, just kept meeting her at a temple or wherever or for lunch or for dinner. We simply enjoyed the process of talking to her and it was a long time before we finally made a purchase, in 2011. So, it’s not all about what you’re going to buy or not buy.

Japanese Ceramics from the Gitter-Yelen Collection

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Sueharu Fukami, Sky III-I, 2002, 19 × 41 in. © Sueharu Fukami

Kurt with Sueharu Fukami in New York City, 2005

Alice: Absolutely. For me, and I think for Kurt, too, who’s had much more experience in Japan, meeting the artist is another avenue to exploring Japan and Japanese culture through something we love, which is art.

Kurt: Another encounter was with the world-renowned porcelain artist Sueharu Fukami. It happened like this. We already had a piece of his from the New York dealer Garth Clark, but then Hans Thomsen (now a Professor at the University of Zurich) came to visit us in New Orleans, after he’d finished his Ph.D. at Princeton, because he was working on the eighteenth-century painter Jakuchu. Hans told me that his wife was the niece of Fukami and I said, “Great! Well, I’d like to meet him.” So we got to meet Fukami several times at his home and workshop in Fushimi, south of Kyoto, had lunch together, met his wife and his lovely daughter. And we bought a couple of ceramics from him.

But basically, most of the things I’ve bought, I’ve bought in this country.

Another artist we went to visit was Shiro Tsujimura. That was quite an experience.

It was such a special day. We went to his beautiful home near Nara and had a huge meal there, a fabulous all-day meal. He is such a delight. He’s been here to the United States a few times when we go out and we have a big meal and a lot to drink. He’s obviously a major player all over the world by now and he introduced us to his boys, who are also becoming ceramic stars. We’ve bought works from the sons, we’ve bought things from him, as well as from galleries.

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Alice with Machiko Ogawa in Tokyo, 2015

Machiko Ogawa, Layered Vessel, 2014, 5 1⁄2 × 19 1⁄4 in. © Machiko Ogawa

Kazuo Takiguchi is another artist we adore. He’s a character—very, very, very, able—and he has a wide diversity of media and styles, from very realistic little objects that he does to some of the most glorious kinds of modern pottery. He’s also a wonderful calligrapher. He invited us to his ceramics show, which was on when we visited Kyoto quite a while ago. We walked in and there was a series of small calligraphies framed in plexiglass, all together.

And now they’re on our wall, right where you enter our art study center.

Alice: We had a wonderful time once with Zenji Miyashita. I remember interviewing him and learning about how he infuses the clay with colors.

It was just a fascinating process. The thing is that after we’ve met an artist, we never look at their work the same way. Once they tell us about the work and how they’ve done it, we see a bit of who they are in it, and the meaning of what they produce is fuller. It doesn’t change the beauty of it, but understanding an artwork enriches our relationship to it. Friendships with these artists have offered both of us a very special path into Japanese culture. It’s added so many extra layers of meaning and interest to our experience of the country.

Kurt: One of the things I want to stress is that I’ve always been my own boss.

Mind you, I ask a lot of opinions of a lot of people and I gather information and advice from a range of sources—many galleries, curators, and individuals.

I always make my own purchasing decisions.

Japanese Ceramics from the Gitter-Yelen Collection

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MEMORIES OF A COLLECTING COUPLE Alice: Japan became such an important part of Kurt’s life, a long time ago, before Japanese food could be had on every street in Manhattan. Every couple of months, he’d say, “You know, I’m really hungry for Japanese food. I have to go back to Japan.” I think that Kurt’s original comfort with Japan came from a couple of things. One is that his parents came to this country when he was only one year old, so he was essentially raised in a European household, within a different culture than the culture that he lived in every day as a schoolboy.

So I think he was predisposed to being comfortable with varied cultures.

Kurt: In 2010–2011, a special exhibition of our Japanese painting collection was shown in Nagoya, Chiba, Shizuoka, Fukushima, and finally Kyoto, where 50,000 people saw the exhibition in just one month. And at the Kyoto opening, all these potters that we spoke about came. I didn’t send them invitations, but they knew all about it and one of them even brought me a beautiful tea bowl.

I think that event really was where our many worlds in Japan came together for us, because all of the American and Japanese painting scholars came, as well as non art-related old Japanese friends of mine from Kyushu.

Alice: So somewhere in his relationship to Japan, there’s a layering for Kurt, the various layers of his Japanese-art life, his contemporary-art life, and his early life in Japan during that first stay in Kyushu. A lot of people just look at art from the contemporary point of view. Kurt did that too, was a big fan of contemporary art and abstraction in the 1950s before it became commonplace. But what’s more important is that he comes to contemporary Japanese ceramics with a deep and lasting experience of Japan, which started with living in a place where ceramics were treasured.

Kurt and Alice in New York City, 1988

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Japanese Ceramics from the Gitter-Yelen Collection

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new forms, new voices Japanese Ceramics from the Gitter-Yelen Collection Japan is home to a culture of fired clay that is both venerable and vibrant.

The country boasts one of the world’s longest unbroken traditions of ceramic manufacture, dating back more than 15,000 years, and it was in sixteenthcentury Japan that potters were first empowered to earn reputations as named, creative individuals, long before the idea of the “studio potter” or “ceramic artist” had emerged in Europe and the United States. Today, there are likely more artists in Japan earning a living from ceramics than anywhere else on earth, energized by global influences, traditional philosophies and techniques, and decades of relative economic prosperity.

This selection of eighty-two works from the Gitter-Yelen collection covers a vast range of imagination and endeavor. In an effort to make sense of all this dazzling diversity, the collection is considered here in five distinct sections.

The first, Inspired by Ancient Kilns, introduces three historic pieces and then shows the work of artists who draw inspiration from the past yet make pots that are radically different from their antecedents.

The second section, Hewn from the Earth, Inspired by Nature, focuses on a distinct tendency in the ceramics of Japan, bringing together a large group of pieces that emulate natural phenomena, from violent geological forces to the effects of wind and sea or the textures of rocks and flowers.

Porcelain, a ceramic ware of Chinese origin, was not made in Japan until about 1610. The third section, Masters of Porcelain, focuses on contemporary porcelain vessel forms and pure sculptures, all asserting a distinctive new aesthetic that is neither Chinese nor traditionally Japanese.

The fourth section, Embracing the Avant-Garde, celebrates the work of a generation of potters, mostly working in Kyoto, who turned their back on time-honored artistic and social conventions, rejected the vessel form, and developed a new style of ceramic sculpture.

Japanese Ceramics from the Gitter-Yelen Collection

OPPOSITE PAGE Shiro Tsujimura Large Jar, 2008 19 5⁄8 × 17 3⁄4 in. © Shiro Tsujimura

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The last section, A Love of Decoration, brings together a group of diverse artists whose practice combines supreme skill in the working of clay with a passion for surface pattern, often executed in groundbreaking styles and techniques.

Every day, the forty artists introduced here confront the opportunities and challenges presented by the mysterious interaction of clay and fire. All of them must also constantly address another issue: that of their relationship with tradition. The past seven decades of Japan’s ceramic history have witnessed a struggle to make the most of a unique aesthetic and technical heritage while escaping the burdens of history and national identity, the need to “look Japanese.�

The works gathered here, mostly created during the early twenty-first century, demonstrate the success of the second and third postwar generations in carving out a space for original modes of expression. Poised at a turning point between past and future, they hold the promise of a time when Japanese ceramics, and the crafts in general, develop a still more pluralist outlook and deepen their engagement with other cultures without losing sight of their own rich past.

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INSPIRED BY ANCIENT KILNS Many of Japan’s medieval kiln centers are still active today and the country’s ancient ceramics remain an important source of inspiration. This section puts three early pots from the Gitter-Yelen collection alongside recent pieces by eight contemporary artists, nearly all of whom either live and work at a traditional site of ceramic production or make wares based on classic kiln prototypes.

The earliest piece is an example of Haji ware, probably dating from the fourth century A.D., just before the Japanese acquired the technology to make stoneware by firing pots at temperatures high enough to melt the silicon-aluminum compound in the clay and form a watertight body. The other pre-modern pieces are more than a thousand years younger and come from Echizen and Shigaraki, two of the so-called “Six Old Kilns” (in reality there were many more) where utilitarian stoneware vessels were made during the medieval period. These are admired today for their rugged forms and subtle finishes that owe some of their aesthetic appeal to patches of incidental glazing caused when accumulations of flying wood ash settled on the surface and its silica content melted and fused during the long firing process.

The contemporary works include one vase from Shigaraki, alongside pieces made in the style of nearby Iga, as well as several examples of dense, dark Bizen ware from the west of Honshu (Japan’s main island). Also included are two pieces made at Hagi, west of Bizen, where a glazed stoneware was first made during the seventeenth century. Finally, the large white jar by Koichi Uchida seems to be based on the early ceramic traditions of several different world cultures.

Japanese Ceramics from the Gitter-Yelen Collection

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INSPIRED BY ANCIENT KILNS

Haji Ware (4th – 11th century) The term Haji refers to unglazed, utilitarian, standardized reddish-brown pottery, fired at a low temperature, that was initially produced in huge quantities in the Kansai Region (Kyoto, Osaka, and surrounding prefectures) and then spread farther west and east. Early Haji wares are typically hand-built rather than thrown on a wheel, have round bases, are not very large, and often bear large burn marks, either from firing or from prolonged use as cooking pots. Like the products of medieval stoneware kilns such as Echizen and Shigaraki, Haji wares have been much admired and emulated by Japanese ceramic artists in the postwar period on account of their austere, elegant yet irregular forms and interesting, varied surface textures and colors.

Artist Unknown, Haji Ware Jar, 4th century 14 1⁄2 × 12 7⁄8 in.

OPPOSITE PAGE Artist Unknown Echizen Ware Storage Jar with Natural Ash Glaze 14th–15th century 10 1⁄2 × 13 1⁄4 in.

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Artist Unknown Shigaraki Ware Storage Jar with Natural Ash Glaze 15th century 18 1⁄2 × 16 in.

New forms, new voices

Echizen Ware Shigaraki Ware (14th – 15th century)

(14th – 16th century)

The earliest Japanese earthenware dates back about 15,000 years, but it was not until much later that Japanese potters acquired the technology to make stoneware, fired at temperatures high enough to melt the silicon-aluminum compound in the clay and form a watertight body. From the twelfth century, major stoneware centers developed throughout the country, including the “Six Old Kilns,” one of which was in Echizen Province (present-day Fukui Prefecture). After World War II, archaeologists discovered the location of the Echizen kilns, sparking a revival of interest.

Contemporary Japanese ceramic artists admire Echizen pots for their bold, rugged, hand-built forms and accidental glazing caused by accumulations of wood ash during the long firing process.

Originally made to store rice or other foodstuffs, stonewares from Shigaraki attained high status toward the end of the sixteenth century thanks to their popularity among devotees of the tea ceremony, the Japanese style of formal tea drinking. After World War II, large Shigaraki jars became perhaps the most sought-after of medieval Japanese ceramics, admired for their rugged, handbuilt forms, orange-red surfaces flecked with random crystalline inclusions, and dramatic splashes of pale-green glaze formed from flying ash. Thanks in part to a 1965 catalogue featuring legendary photographer Ken Domon’s dramatic images, by the 1970s virtually no ceramic collection in Japan was complete without a Shigaraki jar.

The products of the Shigaraki kilns have also exercised a powerful influence on contemporary ceramic artists, not just those working in Shigaraki like Yasuhisa Koyama, but others throughout Japan and around the world.

Japanese Ceramics from the Gitter-Yelen Collection

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INSPIRED BY ANCIENT KILNS

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Ryuichi Kakurezaki (1950 – ) Raised in Nagasaki and a graduate of Osaka University of Art, where he studied design and not ceramics, Kakurezaki started off as an outsider in the world of Bizen, one of Japan’s most venerated medieval kiln centers, but has now become perhaps its most famous representative. Following a long apprenticeship under Living National Treasure Jun Isezaki, who himself produces both modified traditional-style wares and ceramic sculptures, for more than thirty years Kakurezaki has been taking Bizen in new directions with his rugged, assertive sculptural and semi-sculptural works, winning innumerable awards along the way. Prohibited at first from using the best local clay, he has always made a virtue of necessity, experimenting tirelessly with novel ways of forming and firing that are broadly true to the stoneware tradition but at the same time recognizably contemporary.

LEFT Ryuichi Kakurezaki Fish Bowl in Shigaraki Style 1999–2000 12 5⁄8 × 39 in. © Ryuichi Kakurezaki

BELOW Ryuichi Kakurezaki Long Platter, 2004 2 7⁄8 × 29 1⁄2 in. © Ryuichi Kakurezaki

OPPOSITE PAGE Ryuichi Kakurezaki Large Platter, circa 2006 6 × 34 5⁄8 in. © Ryuichi Kakurezaki

Japanese Ceramics from the Gitter-Yelen Collection

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INSPIRED BY ANCIENT KILNS

Ryuichi Kakurezaki Small Bucket-Shaped Flower Stand circa 2004, 9 3⁄8 × 10 1⁄4 in. © Ryuichi Kakurezaki

Ryuichi Kakurezaki Three-Sided Vase 2004, 8 5⁄8 × 6 3⁄4 in. © Ryuichi Kakurezaki

Ryuichi Kakurezaki Bizen-Ware Large Flower Vase 2003, 21 × 9 1⁄2 in. © Ryuichi Kakurezaki

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INSPIRED BY ANCIENT KILNS

Togaku Mori (1937 – ) Unlike Ryuichi Kakurezaki, Mori is a Bizen insider, scion of a line of potters that has been active in the district for centuries. After training in the Bizen workshops and at nearby Okayama University, he has made it his mission to revive long-lost traditional working practices, in particular the “great kilns,” averaging over fifty yards in length and about twelve feet in height, used to fire Bizen pots from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. The roundel in the center of the Gitter-Yelen collection platter was protected from falling ash by a pre-fired clay pad and applied with strands of rice straw that left red lines after firing. This method was revived in the 1930s and has become a hallmark of contemporary Bizen ware.

Togaku Mori Bizen-Ware Rectangular Plate circa 2000, 15 × 9 1⁄2 in. © Togaku Mori

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Yasuhisa Koyama (1936 – )

A native of Shigaraki, one of the most venerable of the “Six Old Kilns,” Koyama has never wavered in his loyalty to his birthplace despite traveling, teaching, and exhibiting his work throughout the world. After graduating from a local ceramic college he immediately took an interest in the area’s earlier stoneware technology and revived the use of the anagama (a simple tunnel kiln with a single chamber), building the first such kiln in the Shigaraki valley since late-medieval times. Despite his allegiance to Shigaraki, he is more than ready to modify ancient methods, for example by carrying out not one but multiple firings at very high temperatures to create sculptural ceramics that evoke the effect of natural forces on the surface of the earth.

Yasuhisa Koyama Wind, circa 2004 12 5⁄8 × 12 5⁄8 in. © Yasuhisa Koyama

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Shiro Tsujimura (1947 – ) In 1965, Tsujimura left his home in Nara and traveled to Tokyo with plans to study oil painting. He soon abandoned the idea and eventually decided to become a potter, inspired by the opportunity to handle a rare old Korean bowl. After two years back working on the family farm, he had saved enough money to buy land on a nearby hillside, build a series of kilns, and embark on a life of self-taught study and experimentation. His first exhibition, held in 1977, was a near sell-out.

Tsujimura takes inspiration from several old kilns but Iga in Mie Prefecture—an ash-glazed, high-fired stoneware first used for formal tea drinking around 1600— is among his favorites. His rough, boldly formed stoneware vessels, sometimes fired using nontraditional methods such as adding fuel oil to the kiln, have earned him a worldwide following.

OPPOSITE PAGE Shiro Tsujimura Iga-Ware Standing Flower Vase, 2004 17 1⁄2 × 7 1⁄2 in. © Shiro Tsujimura RIGHT Shiro Tsujimura Large Jar, 2008 19 5⁄8 × 17 3⁄4 in. © Shiro Tsujimura

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Shuhei Fujioka (1947 – ) In 1974, inspired by Yaburebukuro (“Burst Bag”), a famous old water jar from the Iga kilns in Mie Prefecture, Fujioka apprenticed to the only potter still working there. However, like other potters drawn to traditional stoneware, he learns from but does not directly copy earlier pieces, often preferring to create more boldly modeled works with a contemporary look. This is especially true of his chunky, assertive flower vases. These works share characteristics with contemporary sculptural ceramics from around the globe, yet they still retain the “Three Landscapes” associated with Iga ware: a shiny emerald-green glaze that sometimes forms small globules; unglazed or semi-glazed areas of orange or brown; and occasional scorched patches, the half-random results of natural wood firing.

Shuhei Fujioka Iga-Ware Flower Vase, circa 2010 12 1⁄4 × 6 3⁄4 in. © Shuhei Fujioka

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Masanao Kaneta (1953 – ) Kaneta has benefited from the combination of an art-college education in Tokyo with specialist apprenticeship under his father, a seventh-generation potter in Hagi (western Honshu), a group of kilns celebrated for the soft feel of the local clays and the cool look of the local glaze. After years of training in the use of a kick wheel, Kaneta decided to abandon this hallowed mode of production in favor of a more direct, personal encounter with his raw material. He slams the clay against a board to compress and strengthen it, pounding it with his bare hands to develop the overall form, then carves away parts of the surface to create a sculptural effect, scoops a cavity in the center, and applies a rich frosting of rice-ash glaze that fires in places to pinkish-gray accents.

Masanao Kaneta Hagi-Ware Water Jar 8 5⁄8 × 10 1⁄4 in. © Masanao Kaneta

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Kazuhiko Miwa (1951 – ) Kazuhiko Miwa was born into one of the most renowned potting dynasties in Hagi (western Honshu). As the third rather than the first son, he has enjoyed a degree of freedom to develop in his own way. His attitude toward his artistic heritage changed abruptly when he was only thirteen years old during a visit to the 1964 Tokyo Olympics where he saw the influential exhibition International Contemporary Ceramics, featuring the work of over one-hundred Japanese artists alongside more than ninety pieces by foreign potters. The powerful work of American artist Peter Voulkos, then a ceramic superstar, inspired him to study in the United States and develop a style of vessel that marries bold sculptural form to the legendary cool Hagi glaze. Interestingly, however, Miwa also continues to make delicate wares for the tea ceremony, the Japanese style of formal tea drinking.

Kazuhiko Miwa Garland Number 9, 2006 8 7⁄8 × 3 1⁄2 in. © Kazuhiko Miwa

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Koichi Uchida (1969 – ) A native of Nagoya, Uchida graduated from a local ceramic college and worked intermittently in a factory turning out mass-produced pots while devoting an unusually long time to broadening his ceramic vision through travels in Europe, Africa, Asia, and South America, living and learning in pottery-making villages.

Since setting up on his own in 1992, he has enjoyed considerable success despite avoiding close affiliation with any particular group or tendency. His series of works entitled Kasai otsubo (“Large Jar with Added Color”) are made from unrefined white clay with the lightest possible dressing of glaze. Their powerful, generous forms, with wide, slightly irregular mouths, reflect Uchida’s love of imperfect, worn surfaces, as well as his knowledge of world ceramics, but seem not to refer to any specific local tradition, whether Japanese or foreign.

Koichi Uchida Large White Jar, 2011 20 1⁄2 × 21 5⁄8 in. © Koichi Uchida

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BY NATURE The six male and four female artists featured in this section all make work that emulates the natural world. Stimulated perhaps by the almost geologic appearance and texture of traditional stoneware, both Kenji Gomi and the prolific, sculpturally inventive Ken Mihara use special firing processes to achieve a tranquil, rock-like finish. Others such as Yo Akiyama and especially Jun Nishida seem to have based their practice on an effort to evoke convulsive environmental forces. In Japan, a chain of volcanic islands often devastated by major earthquakes, such forces can be extremely violent, as reflected in Nishida’s stark porcelain masses which he made by replicating the dynamism of nature in the kiln, boldly celebrating the explosive behavior of clay and glaze when subjected to extremely high temperatures.

Akiyama’s Metavoid looks as though it has been dug from the earth, or is perhaps being swallowed back underground, as the result of some catastrophic subterranean event. Machiko Ogawa shares the elemental look of Akiyama and especially Nishida, but her grainy, twisted clay is often offset by clear pools of glaze looking like cracked ice. The dark textures and layered forms of Yukiya Izumita’s work recall the barren, windswept shores of his northern home. Shoko Koike has said that her earliest pots tried to capture the qualities of sky and water in ceramic form, a statement borne out by her creamy-glazed, shell-like vessels. The more benign effects of wind and waves seem also to have inspired Takayuki Sakiyama’s vase, its surface treatment suggesting a sandy beach or raked gravel garden. Sachiko Fujino’s delicate flower-like form contrasts with Yoshimi Futamura’s rough, porcelain-frosted Vasque, but the works of these two female artists are set apart by their distinctly erotic charge.

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Ken Mihara (1958 – ) Mihara came to fame in the early 2000s with a slowly evolving series of high-fired stoneware forms. An unglazed, hand-formed Mihara piece is typically first fired for half a day at low temperature, then twice at high temperature for between thirty and forty hours. Between the first and second firings the piece is covered with fire-resistant removable clay that prevents the formation of accidental glazing. This protection is removed before the final firing, causing the surface of the finished piece to take on a range of colors, from misty white through dark gray-blue to peach and terracotta red, as iron in the clay reacts to high heat in different ways, an effect enhanced by “reduction,” limiting the supply of oxygen within the kiln.

Japanese Ceramics from the Gitter-Yelen Collection

BELOW LEFT Ken Mihara Orange Vessel with Lip, “Origin” 2006, 7 3⁄4 × 13 1⁄4 in. © Ken Mihara BELOW Ken Mihara Stoneware Flower Vessel, 2007 12 5⁄8 × 15 in. © Ken Mihara BOTTOM PHOTO Ken Mihara Stoneware Flower Vessel, 2010 18 1⁄8 × 31 1⁄8 in. © Ken Mihara

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Kenji Gomi (1978 – ) After graduating from a leading Tokyo university, Gomi moved to Naha City, in the group of remote southern islands that make up Japan’s Okinawa Prefecture, to study tsuboya-yaki, a ceramic ware that has been produced there since the seventeenth century. In 2004, he returned to Toki, in Gifu Prefecture, a center of ceramic art on Japan’s main island of Honshu. According to Gomi, his austere, organic forms are modeled so as to benefit as much as possible from an unusual firing process during which they are buried in rice chaff, producing striking surface effects. This results in works that look almost like stones excavated from some ancient archaeological site, an illusion that, on closer examination, is dispelled by faint traces of bluish color on their surfaces.

Kenji Gomi Colored Ceramic Form, circa 2010 18 1⁄2 × 10 5⁄8 in. © Kenji Gomi

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Yo Akiyama (1953 – ) A leading pupil of avant-garde pioneer Kazuo Yagi, Akiyama has followed his teacher in reducing his reliance on the potter’s wheel as a primary tool for ceramic expression. To create his distinctive unglazed tubular forms, he makes flat rings of stoneware clay, scorches them with a blowtorch, and then turns them inside out so that the inner surfaces, cracked and distorted, appear on the outside. After he has joined several rings using semi-liquid clay, he embeds the surface with iron filings and fires the whole piece in a gas kiln.

This use of innovative surface treatments contributes to the impression that Akiyama’s fissured, fractured ceramic sculptures have been dug from somewhere deep within the earth, but Flower T-172, a very recent work, is finished inside with a silver glaze, heralding an interesting new phase in his practice.

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OPPOSITE PAGE, LEFT Yo Akiyama Untitled T-015, 2001 13 3⁄8 × 12 1⁄4 in. © Yo Akiyama

ABOVE Yo Akiyama Metavoid 8, 2005 22 × 29 7⁄8 in. © Yo Akiyama

OPPOSITE PAGE, RIGHT Yo Akiyama Flower T-172, 2017 16 3⁄4 × 11 in. © Yo Akiyama

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Jun Nishida (1977 – 2005) Nishida’s sculptures are made from porcelain clay with often massively thick glazes fired at extremely high temperatures. Like several of his now-famous series Zetsu (“Extremity” or “Extinction”), the Gitter-Yelen collection piece entered the kiln as part of a larger mass of clay and glaze, weighing as much as one ton, but was excavated as a separate work. The semi-accidental product of violent kiln events, it was then enhanced by the artist, who smashed away at the clay with a hammer to reveal pre-formed pipe-like structures and rougher, underfired surfaces that contrast with the glassy exterior. In 2005 Nishida, by then already a rising star, visited Indonesia to help female potters develop their unique traditional industry. He died there, aged 28, in an explosion during the commissioning of a new communal kiln.

Jun Nishida Untitled, early 21st century 12 1/4 × 22 in. © The Estate of Jun Nishida

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Machiko Ogawa (1946 – ) After graduating from Tokyo University of Arts, Ogawa moved to Paris where she studied ceramics at the École des métiers d’art and became fascinated by mineral specimens she saw at the Musée de minéralogie. For over three years from 1972 she traveled in West Africa, an experience which allowed her to practice local molding and paddling techniques and, more importantly, gave her the opportunity to live in close contact with the earth and nature. Combining technical expertise with a love of geologic forms, Ogawa has developed a unique practice, creating works that seem to have emerged naturally from the earth, with warped and fissured surfaces offset by deep pools of crackled glaze.

A special favorite of Kurt Gitter and Alice Yelen Gitter, Ogawa has recently been making work that recalls the primal, chthonic energy of Jun Nishida.

Machiko Ogawa Lunar Fragment-2, 2014 16 1⁄4 × 15 in. © Machiko Ogawa

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Machiko Ogawa Lunar Fragment-1, 2014 9 5⁄8 × 17 7⁄8 in. © Machiko Ogawa

New forms, new voices

LEFT Machiko Ogawa Large Vessel with Metallic Glaze, 2009 7 3⁄4 × 10 5⁄8 in. © Machiko Ogawa BELOW Machiko Ogawa Silver Boat-Form Vessel, 2009 5 1⁄2 × 22 1⁄2 in. © Machiko Ogawa

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Machiko Ogawa Plate Glass Fragment-I, 2013 2 × 17 1⁄8 in. © Machiko Ogawa

Machiko Ogawa White Vessel with Cracked Blue Glass Glaze, 2009 18 3⁄4 × 24 5⁄8 in. © Machiko Ogawa

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Machiko Ogawa Layered Vessel, 2014 5 1⁄2 × 19 1⁄4 in. © Machiko Ogawa

Machiko Ogawa 2013-SH-4, 2013 7 7⁄8 × 21 1⁄4 in. © Machiko Ogawa

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Yukiya Izumita (1966 – ) Perhaps more than any other artist in the Gitter-Yelen collection, Izumita’s ceramics closely reflect his local environment: Iwate Prefecture in northern Japan where he has lived since 1992. Two series from the past decade—the earlier, more weighty, Folds and the more recent, fragile-looking, Layers—evoke the stark beauty of windswept, storm-beaten desolate shores; both are the product of extraordinary skill in the preparation and manipulation of the local salt-rich clay, blended with sand and stones, which he spreads, twists, and hones, often after first creating studies in folded paper. Using both gas- and wood-fueled kilns, he deepens the sense of primal nature by limited application of glazes to enhance the earthy, textured surfaces of his strangely formed sculptures.

OPPOSITE PAGE Yukiya Izumita Layers, 2016 10 1⁄4 × 18 7⁄8 in. © Yukiya Izumita

LEFT Yukiya Izumita Folds, circa 2011 3 ⁄4 × 25 5/8 in. © Yukiya Izumita

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Shoko Koike (1943 – ) A graduate of Tokyo University of Arts and one of the earliest female Japanese studio potters to earn a living from her work, Koike was also among the first ceramic artists to make the evocation of natural forms a cornerstone of her practice, in works that suggest ocean waves or the strata of seaside cliffs. At the start of her career (after briefly hoping to become a glassmaker) she was already attempting to capture the qualities of sky and water and she still draws inspiration from marine life, often finishing her pots with a shell-like ribbing, achieved by applying multiple layers of clay followed by coats of rich, thick, creamy white glaze into which she scratches textures and crevices using a comb-like tool.

OPPOSITE PAGE Shoko Koike Shell Vase, 2003 14 1⁄8 × 16 1⁄2 in. © Shoko Koike RIGHT Shoko Koike Shell Vase, circa 2007 7 1⁄2 × 15 3⁄8 in. © Shoko Koike

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Takayuki Sakiyama (1958 – ) As a child, Sakiyama would accompany his father, an amateur painter, on sketching trips along Japan’s coasts. Having decided in his early teens that he must find a way of living and working by the sea, for most of his career he has made his home on the edge of the Izu Peninsula, southwest of Tokyo. At Osaka University of Arts he trained under famous teachers—including Hikaru Yamada—who had rejected the vessel as a means of ceramic expression, but Sakiyama, as well as making smaller pieces for the Japanese tea ceremony, has consistently specialized in using clay from Shigaraki to create large doublewalled flower vases that combine functionality with bold sculptural form. His love of the ocean is apparent in every one of his serene pots, whose twisted, ridged surfaces evoke gently rippling waves or the textures of sandy beaches.

Takayuki Sakiyama Listening to the Waves, 2004 16 × 14 1⁄8 in. © Takayuki Sakiyama

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Sachiko Fujino (1950 – ) Like other Japanese female potters, Fujino has made her name with the support of the Women’s Association of Ceramic Art, whose Grand Prize she won in 1987. She spent a period studying and working in the field of fashion design and fabric-dyeing before she was drawn to pottery, a background apparent in her approach to clay, which she folds, tucks, and crimps as one might a piece of cloth. Exploiting the flexibility and plasticity of moist clay to its fullest extent, for several years she has created increasingly elaborate, flower-like forms enhanced by a thin mixture of clay and water applied using an airbrush-like tool, giving the plain surfaces of her works a sense of depth.

Sachiko Fujino Bud Flush 2010-II, 2010 14 1⁄8 × 18 7⁄8 in. © Sachiko Fujino

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Yoshimi Futamura (1959 – ) After studying at the School of Ceramic Art in Seto (Aichi Prefecture), Futamura worked for a time in Sri Lanka before moving to Paris, where she graduated from the Centre artisanal de céramique de l’école Duperre. Since 1986 she has mostly lived in France, setting up her own wood-fired kiln there in 1995. This change of location has helped her escape some of the constraints of a largely male-dominated ceramic world back home and develop a unique new expressive language. Her work retains some affinities with artists who have remained in Japan, especially in the way that she takes inspiration from nature, in the sense both of natural-looking, geologic forms and of natural, semiaccidental kiln effects. Her use of pre-fired granules of porcelain gives her work a particularly distinctive appearance.

Yoshimi Futamura Vasque (Bowl), 2010 10 × 19 1⁄8 in. © Yoshimi Futamura

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MASTERS OF PORCELAIN Porcelain has has been made in China for about a millenium but in Japan it is a relative newcomer, owing its origins to a group of captive Korean potters who were brought back to Kyushu (Japan’s southernmost main island) a little over four centuries ago, following an attempted invasion of their country. The newcomers soon discovered deposits of the china stone and china clay essential for porcelain production; they also knew how to build and operate kilns that could be fired at the required high temperature.

The first porcelain wares were produced on Kyushu around 1610 and a thriving industry soon developed, making pieces both for Japan and for Asian and distant European markets. Over time, porcelain came to be manufactured in other centers, including Kyoto, then Japan’s capital.

Although some Kyoto workshops have continued to specialize in conventional high-quality porcelain wares for everyday use, during the latenineteenth century several artists began to elevate the status of porcelain as a ceramic medium, in particular by making wares that closely emulated the very best historic Chinese (or sometimes Korean) porcelains. Both trends within Japanese porcelain, the mass-produced and the “studio,” have nurtured the post-war artists featured here. Shinobu Kawase and Akihiro Maeta remain loyal to the vessel tradition, producing pieces that might, at least in theory, be used to display flowers. The practice of the other five ceramists, by contrast, follows the Kyoto ceramic avantgarde in rejecting utilitarian considerations altogether. They create purely sculptural work intended solely for display and contemplation, often using molds rather than the time-honored potter’s wheel. The two groups are united, however, by technical innovation and ingenuity and a dedication to standards of perfection unmatched anywhere else on earth.

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Yasuko Sakurai (1969 – ) Sakurai trained in Kyoto and worked for a time in Shigaraki, but like several other female ceramists—including Yoshimi Futamura and Machiko Ogawa—her creative outlook has been shaped in large part by time spent in France. From 1999 to 2001 she worked at the École nationale supérieure d’art, Limoges, learning to use plaster molds to fashion complicated shapes, a process that brought her closer to her material and enabled her to make fine, sharp pieces freed from the weight of Japanese tradition and the cult of formal tea drinking.

To construct her pierced forms, Sakurai builds a structure made of pre-cast porcelain tubes, pours slip between them, then removes the tubes from the stillwet clay and carves out the shape prior to firing. This challenging process results in intriguing porcelain webs that mingle exterior and interior, light and shade.

Yasuko Sakurai White Flower, 2008 10 3⁄8 × 19 in. © Yasuko Sakurai

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Sueharu Fukami (1947 – ) Born into a family that made porcelain tableware, Fukami learned the challenges of ceramic production from an early age. Thanks to this early experience, he aims to make work that comes out exactly as planned, in contrast to other artists who revel in unpredictability. About forty years ago he discovered seihakuji, a luminous bluish-white glaze of Chinese origin, and began to apply it to sculptural forms that were either thrown on the wheel or formed by injecting liquid clay into a mold under high pressure, using a technique whose precise details remain secret.

Fukami’s mature work has earned him a worldwide reputation for its combination of the global language of sculptural abstraction with a traditional Japanese disregard for the time and effort required to produce works of flawless beauty.

busa Kato (1962 – )

OPPOSITE PAGE, TOP Sueharu Fukami Sky III-I, 2002 19 × 41 in. © Sueharu Fukami LEFT Sueharu Fukami Mid-Air III Cone-Shaped Bowl, circa 2005 14 1⁄8 × 21 1⁄4 in. © Sueharu Fukami OPPOSITE PAGE, BOTTOM Sueharu Fukami Distant Seascape I 4 3⁄8 × 15 3⁄4 in. © Sueharu Fukami

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masters of porcelain

Tsubusa Kato (1962 – ) A native of Gifu Prefecture, long a center of ceramic production, Kato was exposed to clay from his earliest years thanks to relatives who owned a pottery business. He graduated in 1979 from a local ceramic design institute and worked for several years throwing and decorating small cups for local companies.

Subsequently, he started to experiment with the sculptural potential of imported porcelain clay from New Zealand, using his hard-won skills to carve and model extraordinary, jagged, fragile yet aggressive-looking works that have gained him a worldwide following. He applies lavish quantities of transparent glaze, which can produce unpredictable results thanks to his use of a wood-fired kiln, emphasizing an unorthodox aesthetic that both celebrates and challenges our assumptions about the purity and malleability of porcelain clay.

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OPPOSITE PAGE Tsubusa Kato Square Box, 2004 3 × 14 5⁄8 in. © Tsubusa Kato ABOVE Tsubusa Kato Rhomboidal Celadon Vase, 2004 11 7⁄8 × 24 in. © Tsubusa Kato LEFT Tsubusa Kato Large Standing Form, 2014 29 1⁄8 × 16 1⁄8 in. © Tsubusa Kato

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Satoshi Kino (1987 – ) Having planned to study sculpture, Kino was inspired by Jun Nishida’s revolutionary work to major instead in ceramics, but after a brief period emulating Nishida’s practice he began to create pieces that clearly reflect the influence of Sueharu Fukami. Rather than employing the moldcasting technique favored by Fukami, however, Kino uses the wheel to make work that paradoxically appears almost to deny the wheel. First he throws a thin ring of porcelain clay, then he cuts the ring into pieces and uses the wheel again to stretch them out into long, flowing ribbons, eventually firing them with a pale blue-green glaze similar to Fukami’s seihakuji. The resulting delicate, fragile-looking forms suggest exciting new possibilities for the future of porcelain sculpture in Kyoto.

Japanese Ceramics from the Gitter-Yelen Collection

OPPOSITE PAGE, TOP Satoshi Kino Fall Wind 150202, 2015 15 1⁄8 × 28 3⁄8 in. © Satoshi Kino OPPOSITE PAGE, BOTTOM Satoshi Kino Fall Wind 041008, 2014 9 1⁄4 × 21 7⁄8 in. © Satoshi Kino BELOW Satoshi Kino Fall Wind 16-32, 2016 13 3⁄8 × 34 5⁄8 in. © Satoshi Kino

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Shigekazu Nagae (1953 – ) Frustrated by his early experiences casting porcelain tableware in the family workshop, Nagae has devised a technique that brings an element of creative chance into an otherwise predictable process. He starts by injecting liquid porcelain clay into a parallelogram-shaped mold, then fires the resulting form until it is strong enough for him to hone the edges and give the flat surfaces a textured pattern. Next, he sprays it with glaze and suspends it inside a gas kiln, attached with supports and weights that will cause the porcelain to warp and curve, somewhat randomly, during high-temperature firing. Earlier pieces were made from a single parallelogram but Nagae later started combining two of them, one within the other, so that they morph into a complex, interlocking set of sensual lines and surfaces.

RIGHT Shigekazu Nagae Forms in Succession, 2008 9 1⁄4 × 11 3⁄4 in. © Shigekazu Nagae

OPPOSITE PAGE Shigekazu Nagae Wind, 2008 5 1⁄2 × 15 3⁄4 in. © Shigekazu Nagae

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Ryota Aoki (1978 – ) Aoki experimented with fashion, accessories, and interior design before discovering a passion for ceramics. He graduated from ceramic college in 2002, studied at the École des art decoratifs in Geneva, Switzerland, and developed quickly enough to produce his groundbreaking “Bijoux” (Jewels) series before he reached the age of thirty. Each piece in the series, such as the one here, was made from porcelain, shaped in a mold and finished by cutting away parts of the resulting form to create a unique sculptural work. Aoki infused the clay with a special glaze of his own devising which was slowly forced to the surface in the heat of the kiln, coating the porcelain with a snow-white finish. Today, he focuses on creating elegant tableware finished in a gold, silver, and platinum glazes.

Ryota Aoki Bijoux (Jewels), circa 2004 9 7⁄8 × 14 1⁄8 in. © Ryota Aoki

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Shinobu Kawase (1950 – ) Born the son and grandson of artists who emulated Chinese ceramic styles, Kawase began his training at age eighteen. He soon was experimenting with an iron-oxide glaze, originating in tenth- to eleventh-century China and known as “celadon” in the West but seiji or seihakuji in Japan, that is admired for its blue or gray-green glaze, achieved by firing in a kiln atmosphere starved of oxygen. After throwing the basic form of a piece on the wheel, he waits until the clay is semi-dry and then continues the shaping process, creating curves and crooked edges. Some of his earlier bowls are quite similar to the Chinese exemplars that originally inspired him but his later works, with their sharp points, undulating lobes, and subtly modulated glazes, are executed in an unmistakable individual style.

OPPOSITE PAGE, ABOVE Shinobu Kawase Celadon Flower-Shaped Bowl, 2004 3 × 9 in. © Shinobu Kawase OPPOSITE PAGE, BELOW Shinobu Kawase Large Celadon Bowl, 2005 4 1⁄4 × 16 in. © Shinobu Kawase

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Akihiro Maeta (1954 – ) Ever since porcelain was first produced in Japan some four-hundred years ago, its pure white surface has been regarded as an ideal background for colorful decoration, but during the twentieth century some influential potters challenged this assumption, preferring to celebrate its natural surface qualities. The most famous such artist was Kenkichi Tomimoto, better known today as a decorator, who also made striking white wares throughout his career. Akihiro Maeta was one of Tomimoto’s last apprentices and his master’s teaching is evident not only in the pure surfaces of Maeta’s works but also in their strong sense of control and avoidance of accident. In 2013, Maeta’s dedication to the creation of serene, subtly faceted sculptural vessels earned him the official designation of “Holder of an Important Intangible Cultural Property,” informally known as “Living National Treasure.”

Akihiro Maeta White Porcelain Twisted Faceted Jar, 2015 10 7⁄8 × 10 1⁄2 in. © Akihiro Maeta

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EMBRACING THE AVANT-GARDE After their country’s defeat in World War II, many Japanese lost confidence not just in a political and ideological system that had brought the country to its knees but also in artistic and social conventions that had dominated creative life for centuries. In Kyoto, Japan’s former capital and a long-established center for quality ceramics, younger artists returned from military service determined to challenge the stifling control of the semi-hereditary workshops and the assumption that clay objects should be made in utilitarian shapes, using a potter’s wheel. While still respectful of their city’s craft traditions, they started to make work that was sculptural rather than functional.

Four of the artists introduced here—Kazuo Yagi, Junkichi Kumakura, Osamu Suzuki, and Hikaru Yamada—were members of Sodeisha, an avant-garde group that played a seminal role in world ceramics from 1948 until 1998. Their undisputed leader was the articulate, witty, and combative Yagi. After a period of experimentation, his ceramics took a decisive turn with the creation of Mr. Samsa’s Walk (1954), an eccentric construction made from a double-walled ring of clay and several small clay cylinders, three of them forming a tripod so that the ring stood on its side. This iconic yet jaunty piece was important for its rejection of vessel form and its subversive use of the potter’s wheel, which the Sodeisha artists would often abandon altogether in favor of hand building.

Although the Sodeisha potters moved in different artistic directions after the 1950s, and some like Yagi even made vessel-like objects from time to time, they remained united in their shared respect for clay as a medium, their quest for creative autonomy and avoidance of convention, and their openness to trends in global twentieth-century art.

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Junkichi Kumakura (1920 – 1985) A native of Kyoto, Kumakura graduated from ceramic college in wartime and, on his return from military service in 1945, continued his studies under Rikisaburo Fukuda—a master of porcelain and Chinese-style stoneware—and the veteran porcelain decorator Kenkichi Tomimoto. It was not until 1957 that he fully abandoned his links with the world of traditional-style Kyoto ceramics and joined Kazuo Yagi’s avant-garde Sodeisha group; the following year he took the Grand Prize at the Brussels World Exposition. During the 1960s he mostly produced biomorphic sculptures, made using ash-glazed Shigaraki clay. The Gitter-Yelen collection piece echoes twentieth-century European masterworks such as Henri Matisse’s Back IV (circa 1931) or the broadshouldered, small-headed figures in Henry Moore’s Family Group (1949).

Junkichi Kumakura Work, 1965 23 5⁄8 × 14 1⁄8 in. © Estate of Junkichi Kumakura

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Osamu Suzuki (1926 – 2001) The son of a Kyoto industrial potter, in 1948 Suzuki became a founding member of the Sodeisha avant-garde ceramic group. After a period making massproduced wares for a living, he turned to ceramic sculpture in 1955 and in the 1960s began creating abstract minimalist forms, inspired by nature, that show the influence of Romanian-French sculptor Constantin Brancusi. The first of Suzuki’s Horses dates from 1967. His larger works were hand-built and paddled into shape using clay from Shigaraki, but since wood-firing had been banned in Kyoto to reduce air pollution, they were mostly fired in an electric kiln, with the color enhanced beforehand by applying a thin layer of iron oxide to the surface. In 1987, Suzuki produced a series of one hundred small, whimsically named forms made from porcelain with a pale blue glaze, fired in a gas kiln.

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LEFT Osamu Suzuki Horse Form, 1982 31 1⁄2 × 12 in. © Estate of Osamu Suzuki OPPOSITE PAGE Osamu Suzuki Set of Five Miniature Celadon Forms from the Series “100 Clay Forms for the Palm of the Hand,” 1987 © Estate of Osamu Suzuki From left to right: Hailstone 3 7⁄8 × 2 3⁄8 in.

Duck-Hunting 3 × 3 1⁄8 in.

Sand Dune 4 3⁄4 × 2 3⁄8 in.

Sign of the Wind 7 5⁄8 × 2 5⁄8 in.

Heaven’s Boat 1 5⁄8 × 2 3⁄4 in.

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Kazuo Yagi (1918 – 1979) The leading figure in a generation of young artists who yearned to throw off the shackles of both organizational and creative convention, in 1948 Yagi founded the avant-garde Sodeisha group along with Osamu Suzuki, Hikaru Yamada, and others. Taking inspiration from such artists as the Japanese-American sculptor Isamu Noguchi and the Europeans Joan Miró, Pablo Picasso, and Paul Klee, in 1954 Yagi stunned the staid Kyoto ceramic world with his Mr. Samsa’s Walk, an abstract piece assembled from wheel-thrown irregular pipe-shaped elements. In the early 1950s Sodeisha members came to attach great importance to “closing the mouth,” thus avoiding any semblance of functionality. Later on, however, Yagi would make a number of vessel-like pieces, finished in a white glaze incised with scribbled abstract motifs, that recall his work in the immediate postwar years.

OPPOSITE PAGE Kazuo Yagi Sgraffito Square Jar, 1966 12 3⁄8 × 9 7/8 in. © Estate of Kazuo Yagi LEFT Kazuo Yagi Flask, circa 1960 6 3⁄8 × 6 in. © Estate of Kazuo Yagi

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Hikaru Yamada (1923 – 2001) Born in Tokyo in the year of the Great Kanto Earthquake, Yamada was brought up in his mother’s family home in the ceramic center of Gifu Prefecture. After completing his formal ceramic studies in Kyoto, in 1948 he was a founding member, with Kazuo Yagi and Osamu Suzuki, of the avant-garde Sodeisha group.

He started his career creating functional vessels but gradually made their openings smaller and smaller until they disappeared altogether in the early 1950s, marking his transition from potter to ceramic sculptor. After he became a professor at Osaka University of Art in 1979, an appointment that gave him access to student labor, Yamada began to create elaborate hand-built sculptures, with either a smoke-blackened finish or a matt silvery glaze, that demonstrate his mastery of the language of sculptural abstraction.

Hikaru Yamada Sculpture, circa 1993 18 3⁄4 × 16 1⁄8 in. © Estate of Hikaru Yamada

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Kazuo Takiguchi (1953 – ) Although born in the heart of Kyoto’s pottery district, Takiguchi did not find his vocation in clay until 1978, after dropping out of two university courses, apprenticing briefly to a ceramics master, and working as a delivery driver. He finally completed a formal postgraduate course in 1992 at London’s Royal College of Art, but by then was already showing his work at prestigious venues. Takiguchi studied for a while with Kazuo Yagi, who may have inspired him to abandon the use of the wheel. He has since developed a unique method of spreading clay on canvases with pulleys attached to each corner and manipulating them to form balloon-like, biomorphic shapes with openings that reveal the thinness of the body. He also makes smaller vessels painted with a lively mixture of traditional and contemporary motifs.

OPPOSITE PAGE, LEFT Kazuo Takiguchi Look up at the Stars from the Plain, 2005 9 1⁄2 × 5 7⁄8 in. © Kazuo Takiguchi OPPOSITE PAGE, RIGHT Kazuo Takiguchi Untitled, 1992 14 1⁄8 × 21 5⁄8 in. © Kazuo Takiguchi BELOW, LEFT Kazuo Takiguchi Untitled, 2008 14 1⁄2 × 26 in. © Kazuo Takiguchi BELOW, RIGHT Kazuo Takiguchi Untitled, 2004 8 7⁄8 × 16 1/8 in. © Kazuo Takiguchi

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Kaku Hayashi (1953 – ) Born in Taipei, Hayashi did not move to Japan until she was ten years old and arrived there unable speak a word of Japanese. When she was eighteen, Japan opened diplomatic relations with mainland China and, in consequence, severed its formal ties with Taiwan. These disruptive events convinced Hayashi of the role art can playing in overcoming barriers between nations, transcending differences of language, culture, and belief. After receiving instruction at Tokyo University of the Arts from some of the most distinguished masters of the previous generation, Hayashi embarked on a successful career that has encompassed both bowls for the tea ceremony and sculptural pieces like the work in the Gitter-Yelen collection, which is likely intended as a reaction to the famous Circle paintings of avant-garde painter Jiro Yoshihara.

Kaku Hayashi Zero, circa 2010 20 1⁄4 × 21 in. © Kaku Hayashi

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A LOVE OF DECORATION The earliest Japanese pots, made some 15,000 years ago, are known as Jomon (“cord-marked”) in reference to patterns that were pressed onto their surfaces while the clay was still wet. For most of history, however, the great majority of Japanese ceramics, in contrast to those from China and Korea, have been undecorated; it was not around 1570 that simple designs began to be applied to some stonewares, using techniques that are still practiced today.

These include applying and then scraping away iron-rich clay to create areas of white, as in the bowl by Toshisada Wakao, and painting designs in brown iron-oxide offset by areas of bright copper-green glaze, as in the works of Ryoji Koie and Goro Suzuki. Wakao’s bowl, while lively and appealing, is closely based on originals that were made four-hundred years ago. Koie and Suzuki, by contrast, decorate their wares with a variety of playful, contemporary motifs that are sometimes rich in social comment and satire.

Around 1610, porcelain production began on Kyushu (Japan’s southernmost main island) and most Japanese porcelain was decorated, using two techniques imported from China: underglaze cobalt blue and overglaze multi-colored enamels. Takuo Nakamura’s Vessel That Is Not a Vessel, while made from stoneware, is decorated in a contemporary version of Kutani, an enameled porcelain first made in the seventeenth century. The remaining artists in this section work in or near Kyoto but their work has little in common with the city’s decorated ceramic tradition. Zenji Miyashita and Eiko Kishi, in particular, have each developed a personal visual language that combines original forms with sophisticated use of colored clays.

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Toshisada Wakao (1932 – ) Wakao has followed in the footsteps of Toyozo Arakawa, the great mid-twentieth century scholar and potter who rediscovered and revived some of the most important late-sixteenth-century kilns in present-day Gifu Prefecture. Until about 1985, Wakao confined his production to tea bowls but since then he has extended his repertoire to both sculptural forms and larger vessels, giving as much prominence to lively decoration as to form. Specializing in a version of the glazing style known as Gray Shino, Wakao first covers the surface of his wares with a liquid iron-rich clay. When this has dried he scrapes away areas that will appear white in the finished piece and applies the glaze, wiping it away in a few places, such as the veins of leaves, that will turn brown during firing.

Toshisada Wakao Gray Shino-Ware Bowl with Dragonfly and Lotus, 2003 4 3⁄8 × 11 3⁄4 in. © Toshisada Wakao

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Ryoji Koie (1938 – ) Born in Tokoname, one of Japan’s oldest stoneware centers, Koie trained in local ceramic schools for more than a decade before achieving independent status in 1966. He lost parts of two fingers working at a pipe factory in his teens, a disability which, he claims, spurs his enduring strength and ebullience. Koie works in a broad range of techniques and materials including decorated porcelain, unglazed stoneware, and especially his version of Oribe, a copper-green-glazed ware that was first made some four centuries ago. An unapologetic product of the antiwar, activist, bohemian, jazz-loving 1960s generation, he revels in the unpredictability of ceramics and is outspoken in his criticism of artists who try too hard to achieve superficial perfection.

Ryoji Koie Tea Bowl, 2004 3 1⁄2 × 4 7⁄8 in. © Ryoji Koie

Ryoji Koie Salaam-Salaam No. 3, 1991 2 3⁄4 × 13 3⁄8 in. © Ryoji Koie

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Ryoji Koie Large Oribe-Style Jar, 2004 13 3⁄8 × 12 5⁄8 in. © Ryoji Koie

Japanese Ceramics from the Gitter-Yelen Collection

Ryoji Koie Oribe-Style Jar, 2008 9 1⁄2 × 11 in. © Ryoji Koie

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Goro Suzuki (1941 – )

Born in Aichi Prefecture—with neighboring Gifu Prefecture one of the epicenters of the Japanese ceramic industry—Goro Suzuki has made pots for a living since his mid-teens. He is brilliantly proficient in many different styles, but the two pieces in the Gitter-Yelen collection both emulate Oribe, a ware first made at Yashichida and other Gifu kilns at the start of the seventeenth century and characterized by lively, often abstract decoration. His eyes opened by a stay in the United States from 1969 to 1970, Suzuki has developed a unique version of Oribe which is exuberantly unconventional in terms of both potting and decoration, light-heartedly incorporating cartoon-like elements from contemporary life such as electric lights, helicopters, stretch limos, and buses, as well as making dramatic use of the famous Oribe copper-green glaze.

OPPOSITE PAGE Goro Suzuki Yashichida-Oribe-Ware Jar, 2010 9 7⁄8 × 5 7⁄8 in. © Goro Suzuki LEFT Goro Suzuki Large Teapot 17 7⁄8 × 18 7⁄8 in. © Goro Suzuki

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Takuo Nakamura (1945 – ) Nakamura is a native of Kanazawa, a city associated with a type of colorful enameled porcelain called Kutani. As second son, he was free to pursue a business career but apprenticed to his father, a master potter, when he was in his thirties.

He takes his basic inspiration from Kutani but, working in stoneware rather than porcelain, models his decoration on a still more prestigious source: the great artist Korin (1658–1716), who pioneered an influential style of flat, stylized painting in ink and vibrant mineral pigments on gold. Intended to be arranged by the viewer according to his or her personal preference, Nakamura’s nonvessel works—painted on both sides— brilliantly breathe new life into a revered pictorial tradition. His creative talent has earned him a commission from the Wedgwood company in England, for whom he designed a line entitled Japonesque.

Takuo Nakamura Vessel That Is Not a Vessel, 2016 9 1⁄2 × 16 1⁄2 in. © Takuo Nakamura

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Taimei Morino (1934 – ) The son of a Kyoto ceramic artist, in the 1950s Morino studied with Kenkichi Tomimoto and Yoshimichi Fujimoto, both relatively conservative specialists in painting on porcelain. In the 1960s, he experienced the latest international trends during two periods as a ceramic instructor at the University of Chicago. His unique style of decoration is applied both to vessels and to sculptural forms that owe something to Kazuo Yagi and his Sodeisha group, combining the language of abstraction with a traditional Kyoto elegance in terms of form and color. This is perhaps best seen in his trademark pierced wall-like pieces, first made in the 1980s, which are carefully built by hand and finished with several layers of high-gloss glaze, each separately fired and sometimes worked with irregular surface patterning.

Japanese Ceramics from the Gitter-Yelen Collection

OPPOSITE PAGE Taimei Morino Work 97-4, 2005 5 ⁄8 × 8 1⁄8 in. © Taimei Morino BELOW LEFT Taimei Morino Black Bowl with Red Wave, 2004 2 3⁄8 × 8 1⁄2 in. © Taimei Morino BELOW RIGHT Taimei Morino Black Flower Vase with Red Wave Pattern, 2004 7 5⁄8 × 9 1⁄4 in. © Taimei Morino

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Eiko Kishi (1948 – ) Kishi studied archeology, anthropology, art history, dyeing, and painting before committing herself to ceramics, and has since avoided formal ties to any particular school or tendency. Virtually all her work over the past three decades has been created in the same distinctive “colored inlay” technique. After preparing a range of more than a dozen multi-colored clays, she uses them to build an intriguingly faceted, often quite large geometric form. While this is still damp she striates the surface and digs out thousands of small holes that she fills with colored slip before spraying on a thin glaze. This painstaking method results in a surface that looks at first glance like stone, but turns out on closer inspection to be made up of a myriad of tiny vibrant colored inlays arranged in bands.

Eiko Kishi Noh-Inspired Form with Colored-Clay Inlay, 2006 18 1⁄4 × 22 7⁄8 in. © Eiko Kishi

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Zenji Miyashita (1939 – 2012) Born half a generation after avant-garde Kyoto artists such as Kazuo Yagi and Junkichi Kumakura, Miyashita passed his early professional career in a more traditionalist milieu, studying first under his father Zenju, a specialist in Chineseand Korean-inspired porcelain, and then under Yaichi Kusube, a stalwart of the official Nitten annual art exhibition. He soon settled on the unique style that earned him a global reputation and garnered eighteen Nitten prizes. His sculptural stoneware vessels are decorated with bands of clay mixed with cobalt, chrome, or other metal-based pigments, applied in thin, overlapping bands with irregular edges that resemble ocean waves or receding mountain ranges, evoking the work of Taikan Yokoyama, the great landscape painter in Nihonga (neo-nativist) style.

LEFT Zenji Miyashita Faraway, 2004 18 × 19 3⁄8 in. © Estate of Zenji Miyashita OPPOSITE PAGE Zenji Miyashita Budding Wind, 2004 15 × 9 1⁄2 in. © Estate of Zenji Miyashita

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Masahiko Ichino (1961 – ) Masahiko Ichino is the son of a potter who works at Tanba, one of the so-called “Six Old Kilns” (in reality there were many more) that prospered in the medieval period. However, because he has an elder brother who, according to custom, will take over the family business and carry on its traditions, Masahiko was free, after a brief period of apprenticeship under his father, to set up his own kiln. There he developed his practice quickly, receiving the Grand Prize at the Japan Ceramic Art Exhibition in 1995 at the precocious age of thirty-four and devising a unique postmodern style using local clay in combination with lively surface decoration that reflects the influence of senior artists including Goro Suzuki and Taimei Morino.

Masahiko Ichino Vase with C-Shaped Patterns circa 2003 23 × 13 1⁄4 in. © Masahiko Ichino

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NEW FORMS, NEW VOICES Japanese Ceramics from the Gitter-Yelen Collection

Japanese Ceramics from the Gitter-Yelen Collection