Photograph by Juliam Williams
From today’s standpoint, one of the more surprising aspects of Objects: USA is its small section on enamels, which, along with the equally unexpected inclusion of mosaic and plastics, stands out from the standard five-part catechism of studio craft (ceramics, fiber, glass, metal, and wood). This choice can be explained by the brief but intense enthusiasm for the medium in the postwar decades. The Museum of Contemporary Crafts hosted an exhibition of enamels early on, in 1959; that presentation had as its leading light June Schwarcz, originally from Denver but by then working in the Bay Area. Though personally mild mannered, her artistic dominance over the discipline was nearly total and lasted for six decades. Possessed of both a miniaturist’s eye for detail and an expressionist’s impulse, she created vessels that veer from jewel-like to craggy, gorgeous to raunchy.
By the late 1960s, she had hit her stride, sculpturally speaking, using electroplating to expand her formal language. “The audacious body of work she produced at this time,” as Hal Nelson and Bernard Jazzar of the Enamel Arts Foundation have noted, “combined the raw, protean properties of metal with the luminosity of glass in a richly evocative mix.”¹ Schwarcz continued her experiments, always touched with alchemy, well into her nineties, remaining throughout a modest master of abstraction.
¹ Hal Nelson and Bernard Jazzar, “All Fired Up,” The Magazine Antiques (Nov. 11 2019).