CRAFTING A UNIVERSE IN CLAY
The world has finally caught up with ceramicist Toshiko Takaezu
There was no excuse that Toshiko Takaezu, a formidable ceramist, deemed acceptable when students missed her class at Princeton University’s Program in Visual Arts. Not even if a student was training for a place on the US women’s field hockey team for the Olympic Games.
Martha Russo was a sophomore in 1982 who was absent for two weeks while travelling with her team.
“I have given your spot away to someone who cares about ceramics,” Russo says Takaezu snapped at her. “Don’t ever come back.”
But after Russo’s Olympic dreams were dashed by a career-ending knee injury in 1984, she did return, begging re-admittance from her teacher, who was recognised at the time as one of the pre-eminent figures in the field. And Russo said she came to treasure Takaezu’s bluntness and tough criticism.
“Toshiko became my new coach,” Russo recalled in a recent interview. After graduating, she worked as an assistant in Takaezu’s class for three years, lived in her kiln shed as an apprentice and remained close with her until the artist’s death in 2011, at age 88. “She kind of saved my life,” said Russo, now a sculptor and instructor at the University of Colorado Boulder.
Russo is among dozens of former students, apprentices, collectors and relatives who have maintained an almost cultlike devotion to Takaezu and collaborated on national exhibitions from Boston to Bentonville, Arkansas, that are repositioning her squarely at the centre of 20th-century art.
Last year, Takaezu’s glazed stoneware Moon from 1985, a celestial sphere washed in purples, golds and rusts, set an auction record of US$541,800 (19.5 million baht) in a sold-out sale at Rago. It is part of the potter’s posthumous reappraisal and broader art world embrace of long-marginalised craft mediums as well as female artists.
“This surging interest and recognition is in large part because of the incredible force of Takaezu’s extended network so deeply committed to her and her legacy,” said Kate Wiener, a curator at the Noguchi Museum in Queens, NYC, who helped organise the artist’s largest exhibition to date, “Toshiko Takaezu: Worlds Within”, opening today. Takaezu was close friends with Isamu Noguchi, the renowned Japanese-American sculptor, who collected her work.
A smaller show at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, “Toshiko Takaezu: Shaping Abstraction” is built around a significant gift of ceramics the potter made in 2007 to the institution. It is one of 16 museums that Takaezu strategically earmarked to receive self-selected constellations of her best works.
“She knew she was ahead of her time,” said Nonie Gadsden, the senior curator of American decorative arts and sculpture at the MFA Boston. “She was just laying the seeds so it was there — ready when we were.”
Gadsden unearthed seven of Takaezu’s pots from storage in 2019 for the exhibition “Women Take The Floor”, placing the vessels, with their vibrant glazes and calligraphic brushwork, in lively conversation with abstract expressionist canvases by female contemporaries, including Joan Mitchell, Helen Frankenthaler and Lee Krasner.
The Noguchi retrospective — which will travel to the Cranbrook Art Museum in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Chazen Museum of Art, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison; and the Honolulu Museum of Art — includes about 200 works in ceramics as well as the artist’s paintings, weavings and bronze-cast sculptures.
They span functional wares Takaezu produced as a student in Hawaii, where she was born to Japanese émigré parents — the middle of 11 children — to her highly experimental and organic “closed” forms, including monumental cylindrical sculptures, that she grouped in immersive installations.
“This idea of the total environment does register very well with contemporary art and what’s happening now,” said Glenn Adamson, an art historian and a curator of the forthcoming show at the Noguchi Museum and another at LongHouse Reserve in East Hampton, New York, opening on March 30. (Reflecting her holistic approach, the artist once said: “I see no difference between making pots, cooking and growing vegetables. They are all related.”)
At her home and studio in an 1800 farmhouse in Quakertown, New Jersey, Takaezu would host fellow artists and Princeton students for large communal meals and Raku firings. Today, an animated crowd of closed forms cluster around its stone hearth, the space largely as she left it. It is preserved by Don Fletcher, who bought the home with the artist’s blessing and is president of the Quakertown Studio Project, which has kept facilities open to artists interested in working there, according to Takaezu’s wishes.
Fletcher was drawn into her orbit at Princeton in 1969 after she initially rebuffed him for coming to her class late.
“She was a fantastic teacher — I’ve never seen anybody like her for knowing what to say to inspire somebody,” Fletcher said. For three decades after graduating, he would hang out at the house on weekends, firing pots and cleaning gutters or planting a strawberry bed. “She was really good at putting people to work.”
Now sculptures by Russo and Fitzhugh Karol, another apprentice, will be displayed in dialogue with works by Takaezu and Tawney in the show at LongHouse Reserve.
When Takaezu had a stroke in 2010, Russo’s brother Peter, who collected her work in depth, helped get her back to Honolulu to be with her siblings, where she died the next year.
Peter Russo initiated the digitising of Takaezu’s papers left in Fletcher’s home, which fostered research for the current exhibitions. The two men also recruited Takaezu’s grandniece Darlene Fukuji to take the helm of the Toshiko Takaezu Foundation, and they have worked in concert to promote her legacy.
“Auntie Toshi never really spoke in complete sentences,” Fukuji said, comparing her utterances to poetry. “It was up for so much interpretation.”
The foundation is working with the David Zwirner gallery to present an online exhibition, “Toshiko Takaezu: Beyond Form”, which began last Friday, with 20 works priced between $25,000 and $150,000. Fletcher, whose Takaezu collection in Quakertown numbers more than 1,200 expressive clay forms, has collaborated with the James Cohan gallery on recent well-received presentations that have crossed over “to a whole cohort of collectors in the painting and sculpture world”, Cohan said.
The separation between ceramics and what was traditionally considered fine art was something that Simone Leigh bumped against as an emerging artist using clay as her primary medium. But her success representing the United States in the 2022 Venice Biennale has helped break down old hierarchies in the art world.
“I really wonder what would happen if Takaezu was having her career now,” Leigh said, adding: “I’m sure she also had to live through all kinds of things being a Japanese-American.”
Fletcher described the discrimination Takaezu encountered when she tried to buy the Quakertown farmhouse in 1966 from a neighbour who refused to sell to a Japanese woman. So she had a friend buy it and in turn purchased it from him.
“Toshiko just knew how to not let other people’s bigotries and limitations wreck her life,” Fletcher said.