Photograph by Harvey Croze
Of all the émigré craftspeople who operated in America in the midcentury—and there were many—perhaps none had the far-reaching influence of the Finnish potter Maija Grotell. After a decade teaching in New York, she arrived at Cranbrook Academy of Art in 1938 as part of the Scandinavian core faculty assembled under Eliel Saarinen’s leadership. Over the years she trained innumerable ceramists, among them many exhibitors in Objects: USA, including Howard Kottler, Harvey Littleton, Jeff Schlanger, John and Suzanne Stephenson, and Toshiko Takaezu. Equally significant was the way that Grotell exemplified ceramics as a paradigmatically modernist medium.
She approached her work as a series of rigorous formal experiments, building toward a consummate expression of each research phase, then moving on to a new idea. The vase shown here dates to the 1950s (as did the piece included in the original Objects: USA, signaling Grotell’s position as a progenitor). Its ample proportions are enhanced by a scalloped pattern evoking birds in flight, with a glaze like sunlight through cloud cover. The elevated effect is one that she often pursued in her postwar work, which became ever more transcendent as her mastery increased.
Vase in glazed ceramic. Designed by Maija Grotell and produced at Cranbrook Academy of Art, USA, c. 1939.
11” H x 7.5” D
27.9cm H x 19.1cm D
SC846
Provenance: The photographer Joe Munroe, acquired from the artist no later than 1943
Collection of Mark McDonald