|
|
|
|
|
By Richard D. Mohr
 |
The design on this tile by the Pewabic Pottery (Detroit, 1903-1961) looks like it is
hand-incised, but is in fact molded.
Photo Courtesy of Pewabic Pottery
|
American Arts & Crafts tiles are hard to hate. The worst one can say about them is that their subjects are frequently sentimental (romantic cottages to California missions) or cute (lots of insouciant animals). For sensuousness, however, Arts & Crafts tiles are better than chocolate. Their velvet matte glazes, nuanced faience bodies, and hand-size dimensions invite touch, especially in contrast to the hard surfaces and glare of lead-glazed, industrially produced Victorian tiles. Even better for the eye, art tile designs are rich without being intrusive, making them perfect for rooms intended to be realms of repose and privacy. Is it any surprise, then, that antique Arts & Crafts tiles and their modern descendants now find their way into today's homes—even houses that are neither period bungalows nor Arts & Crafts revivals?
Many of the elements that make Arts & Crafts tiles so beguiling and unaffected stem from forthright design principles. Yet some of these elements are, in fact, clever deceptions aimed at efficiency of manufacture and seduction of the senses. Exploring what makes up the look of art tiles and where it comes from helps explain why.
The Grammar of Grueby
Consider the paradigm of Arts & Crafts tiles, "The Pines" designed in 1906 by Grueby Faience (Boston, 1894-1920). Like many Arts & Crafts designs, it floats halfway between representation and abstraction. Its layout has instant appeal even if the viewer does not immediately read it as the complex landscape that it is—one of forest, lake, mountains, and shadows. In the design, these objects are conventionalized (treated in an abstract, simplified manner) to the point that they have as much life as pure color fields as they do as images. Here art is supplanting—not capturing—nature.
Part of the tile's beauty comes from the way the whole design telescopes into a single plane—which, by no accident, is the surface of the tile itself. The basic plan almost reads as an open grid of strings whose segments have been plucked this way and that, then frozen in midresonance. Grueby achieves this contraction of space in several ways (see "Designing the Pines," page 46). Enhancing the effect are the distinctive and pleasing features of Grueby's glazes. Their subtle puddling or agglutinating into pads or platelets-what potters call "sintering"—further emphasizes the plane of the tile's face by placing visually lively, flat forms there.
All of these design devices erase three-dimensional perspective, and with this erasure goes realism. The design is startlingly old: The painting of perspectiveless objects died with Giotto in the 14th century. Yet it is also startlingly new: Flatness of design was the hallmark of abstract expressionism and of pop-art responses to expressionism, like the flags and archery targets of painter Jasper Johns.
The general inspiration for "The Pines" derives from the godfather of American Arts & Crafts design, Arthur Wesley Dow (1857-1922) and his highly influential manual, Composition, first published in 1899 with many later editions. Drawing in turn on the look of Japanese woodblocks, Composition advocates the use of gridlike layouts, the dominance of planar shapes over lines as basic design elements, and complementary relationships between light and dark, foreground and background. "The Pines" is actually a richer and more ramified design than any of the numerous landscapes illustrated in Composition. Other Arts & Crafts tile companies cleaved more closely to the primer's ideal of simple shapes and open textures. For example, the Van Briggle Pottery (Colorado Springs, 1907-1915) produced tiles on a par with Grueby, but its basic landscape design could almost be considered a Dow knockoff. On the other hand, the Los Angeles Pressed Brick Company (1887-1926) did Dow one better by offering an even simpler landscape of mountains, lake, and trees.
The compression of volume, mass, and space into flat surface patches pervades Grueby's tile motifs. In Grueby's famous galleon design, the sails that in real life would billow out like parachutes are flattened and aligned to form crescents that all fall in the same plane-that of the ship's flank. The design's conventionalized waves scroll like a Greek-key border across the bottom of the tile independent of the rest of the image, and so convert the whole composition from picture to frieze. Any suggestion of three dimensions and open seas is sucked from the design.
Mode Follows Manufacture
American tile makers' embrace of Dow's aesthetic was virtually compelled by their choice of tile-making techniques. A constitutional majority of American Arts & Crafts tiles was produced by one of two methods, and both of these result in flat, patchwork designs. Grueby tiles are made by what is called the raised-line technique, which results in a sort of "ceramic cloisonnÿ." In this technique, the tile maker presses damp clay into a plaster mold that is incised or impressed with a network of trenches. When the clay is turned out of the mold, what were trenches become on the face of the tile a system of clay walls or ridges, which surround and separate flat areas. After the clay body is fired in a kiln, a single glaze color is poured into each walled-off zone. The tile is then fired a second time, and the resulting adjacent plats of glaze form the final design.
The other method of tile decoration is called the dry-line technique. In this method, the artisan silk-screens lines onto a fired tile blank using an unguent made by "frappÿ-ing" manganese oxide and mineral oil. These waxy lines offer just enough resistance to the flow of liquids so that when glazes are carefully pipetted into the zones created by the lines, the glazes fill the zones but do not spill across the lines. In the kiln, the mineral oil fires away, leaving behind the manganese, which turns a dull black. The black lines feel dry to the touch, especially when compared to the glazes flanking them.
In both the dry-line and raised-line techniques, the design has to be rendered as an array of contiguous, blocked-out, two-dimensional shapes—exactly what Dow's principles require. Furthermore, each zone of the design ends up as a single, uniform color in both techniques. As in woodblock printing, this process prohibits the use of color gradients and shading—the standard ways by which artists indicate volume and massing. So the distinctive requirements of coloration on tiles also render their designs flat.
Now, mold pressing and silk-screening are both mass-production systems—or, at least, processes whereby artisans can easily and reliably duplicate designs. This efficiency, though, opens the door to a bit of deception and seduction in American art tiles. While in the ideal Arts & Crafts environment each object is entirely handmade, the American art tile-like American "Mission" oak furniture—settles for being factory-made with a handcrafted appearance.
Furthermore, nearly all Arts & Crafts tiles lack the honesty of construction that was a cardinal tenet of the Arts & Crafts Movement. The tiles fail to be an expression of their structure in such a way that one can infer the manner of their making from their decoration. The tiles want you to think that each is a unique work of art, the product of hand-tooling and freehand glazing, but hardly any of the designs are actually the result of an artist working the surface of each individual tile. Even worse, the techniques by which the designs are executed try to disguise this fact from the viewer.
Many people are taken in by the ruse. The reason for the success of this seduction is that the average tile viewer doesn't realize just how good silk-screeners and mold makers can be. For example, the Malibu Potteries created dry-line tiles on which the black manganese lines were absorbed into the glazes, giving the impression that the design was applied freehand. Molds can create edges and ridges that are so crisp that they appear cut or carved. Good mold makers even build little irregularities into designs to lead the unsuspecting to believe that the piece must be unique.
Take the wonderful "Asilomar" tile by the Walrich Pottery (Berkeley, 1922-1930) depicting a stretch of the California coast near Carmel. With all of its irregularities, the tile works hard to make you think that it is one of a kind. The background looks as though it has been excised—its open areas scraped out to a uniform depth. The flowers bracketing the upper left corner rise above the rest of the surface, making one think that extra clay must have been added there, then modeled and carved. Yet exact duplicates of the tile, with irregularities and all, establish that it is a repeatedly molded design.
Multiple Tile Techniques
Arts & Crafts tiles were luxury items in their time, even without the costs that labor-intensive incising, modeling, and carving would entail. High-end Grueby tiles and vases are frequently initialed by individual artists, but while the artists did hand-tool the leaves and other dÿcor on vases, they did not tool the designs on tiles; artists simply got the right glazes in the right boxes. Their initials on tiles have the same gravity as a signature on a paint-by-number landscape.
Other masters of such Arts & Crafts sleights of hand include the Rookwood Pottery (Cincinnati, 1902-1933) and the Pewabic Pottery (Detroit, 1903-1961, 1984-present). You'd swear that Rookwood's early sculptural faience tiles were hand-modeled and carved, but examples of uniquely designed Rookwood and Pewabic faience tiles are as rare as the proverbial hen's teeth.
The flatness that typifies Arts & Crafts tiles can be achieved by means that do not adopt the Dow aesthetic. One way is simply to pick a subject that is flat to begin with. Good examples are "Mexican Ruin" by Muresque Tiles (Oakland, 1925-1934), "San Gabriel Mission" by Claycraft (Los Angeles, 1921-1939), and tiles of angel and lookdown fish by Solon & Schemmel Tiles (San Jose, 1920-1953). Another way is to use a glazing technique that blurs background and foreground. Rookwood's "double vellum" tiles do this by sandwiching their designs between two layers of Rookwood's award-winning hazy vellum glaze. Still another variant of flat results from what art historians call horror vacui—the fear of the void. Fill every bit of a tile's face with something, especially something busy, and there will be no background. The designer Ernest Batchelder (Pasadena/Los Angeles, 1909-1932) was the master of this style. Indeed, one can detect Batchelder fakes and imitations by their bald spots.
Because the look of American Arts & Crafts tiles relies so heavily on conventionalized and abstracted forms, these tiles bear many family resemblances to other styles of American art tiles. If three-dimensional shapes are conventionalized into lines rather than patches, then you end up with the Art Nouveau. (As readers of Gustav Stickley's Craftsman magazine knew, at least in America, the Art Nouveau Movement and the Arts & Crafts Movement were fraternal twins in a perpetual state of sibling rivalry.) The Van Briggle Pottery (Colorado Springs, 1907-1915) was the great maker of Art Nouveau tiles in America. Hundreds of these tiles can still be found on its 1907 building (now the Physical Plant at Colorado College). The near geometrizing of shapes that occurs in the Dow aesthetic means that Arts & Crafts tile designs also easily bleed into Art Deco designs, sometimes even bordering upon the surreal.
This flexibility and variation of design in American art tiles means that a homeowner can adapt Arts & Crafts-related tiles into almost any style of house from the Aesthetic era to the present. Just because you live in a brownstone or a Cape Cod doesn't mean you have to live a tileless or Victorian lifestyle. It just requires a little imagination. Start in the kitchen with an art-tiled splashboard and, the next thing you know, you may be eyeing the fireplace surround.
Richard D. Mohr is a professor of philosophy at the University of Illinois-Urbana and the author of Pottery, Politics, Art: George Ohr and the Brothers Kirkpatrick.
|
What's the Meaning of Faience?
In the United States the term "faience" refers to tiles made of wet clay and intended for architectural use. The clay is usually shaped into a tile by being pressed into a plaster mold by hand or by a foot-driven lever. The clay has to be supple enough to take even fine impressions, but must not be so fine-grained and compact that it warps when fired. Sometimes a vase will be said to have a "faience body." This locution means that the vase's clay is the sort that could be used to make wet-clay tiles.
It may come as a surprise, but most tiles are not made of wet clay. Instead they are made by compressing dry, clay powders (or sometimes talc) into metal molds under enormous hydraulic pressure. The mechanically fused powders then fuse chemically in the heat of the kiln. Most antique American tiles with Victorian designs, pure white bodies, and tinted transparent glazes are such "dust pressed" tiles.
| |
|
|
|
|
