Photograph by Hella Hammid
Unlike the fine art world, which has always tended to reward individual authorship, collaboration within married couples has been an important part of the American studio craft movement. Objects: USA featured a few of these partnerships, such as the glass artists Michael and Frances Higgins and the experimental metalsmiths Svetozar and Ruth Clark Radakovich. In ceramics, the most powerful husband-and-wife team was undoubtedly Gertrud and Otto Natzler. Originally from Vienna, they were part of the Jewish flight from the Nazis, arriving in Los Angeles in 1938.
The couple observed a clear division of labor, with Gertrud throwing masterfully at the wheel and Otto handling the glazing, which he executed in an extraordinary range of colors and textures. A monumental bowl included in Objects: USA—now in the collection of the Museum of Arts and Design—was one of the exhibition’s tours de force, majestic yet thin-walled, with a green volcanic surface that (especially in 1969) might have called the moon’s surface to mind.