LEAH OLLMAN / VISUAL ARTS : Teacher Gets a Handle on Ceramics’ History

Since 1985, when she started teaching at UCLA, Elaine Levin has had to rely on “dribs and drabs” for her course on the history of American ceramics. Specialized books, catalogues and articles abounded, but not a single comprehensive text had been written that traced the continuity between past and present work in clay.

Starting this semester, Levin’s students will no longer need to patch together lectures and disparate readings to get a sense of clay’s chronology. Their teacher has done it for them, in her new book, “The History of American Ceramics: 1607 to the Present, From Pipkins and Bean Pots to Contemporary Forms.” Released in October by Abrams, the book integrates the history of ceramic art with the history of art of other media, making it a valuable resource for scholars and collectors of all the arts, as well as artists themselves.

“What ceramic artists needed was to see a continuum,” Levin said during a recent visit to San Diego from her home in Los Angeles. “A lot of things they were doing in contemporary work had a very important relationship to their American past, and yet they were looking toward Japan and Europe.

“Much of the work that we feel is so strongly influenced by non-American influences has roots in American art as well. If you’re going to grow as an art form, you need that background. You can’t grow without it.”

In San Diego, ceramics has grown enough as an art form to merit the inclusion of three local artists in Levin’s book. T. J. Dixon, Joanne Hayakawa and Jens Morrison “may not have had as much exposure to a wide public as the top echelon of ceramic artists, but within all the different directions that ceramics is going, they have very definite statements to make,” according to Levin.

Dixon’s realistic figurative sculpture, Hayakawa’s still lifes and Morrison’s “homages to the anonymous Mexican potter and the whole feeling of Mexican culture” did not flourish here spontaneously, Levin noted. “They are the result of things that happened much earlier that drew potters to San Diego and created an ambiance where people have worked and developed a community.”

The opening here of the Valentien Pottery Co. (1911-1913) marked the introduction of the art pottery movement to San Diego, Levin said. Attention to the area blossomed in 1938, when the Fine Arts Gallery of San Diego (now the San Diego Museum of Art) hosted the first all-California ceramics exhibition. “This exhibition means that the Pacific Coast ceramic child is able to walk alone,” one critic wrote of the works on view.

Those first few independent steps evolved into a marvelously singular dance by the 1950s and ‘60s, when artists such as Peter Voulkos and Robert Arneson defied tradition by introducing spontaneity, chance and humor to the vocabulary of ceramics. With each of these artists leading workshops across the country, their influence spread and, with it, the reputation of California as fertile ground for ceramic artists.

Although San Diego hasn’t fulfilled its early potential as a deeply nourishing environment for its ceramic artists, it does boast a substantial audience for work in clay, Levin said. Community college and university instructors, students and members of groups such as the Potters Guild and the Ceramic Artists of San Diego may be making work that is only of secondary importance, but, added an optimistic Levin, “I don’t think you can write it off, because it gives a certain energy to what is primary.”

Local venues for showing ceramics are limited to a handful of galleries, colleges and the sporadic efforts of museums. A dearth of collectors locally adds little muscle to this flimsy support system, which is equally frail in providing opportunities to artists working in other media. But San Diego is not alone in its neglect of contemporary ceramic artists, Levin pointed out. “Contemporary work that’s directly within your sight is ignored for the more exotic, the more exciting--or what seem to be more exciting--forms of folk art,” she said.

There is one exception, however: San Francisco. The popularity of ceramics in the Bay Area, among galleries and collectors, may be an isolated phenomenon, but it wasn’t achieved through isolating ceramics from other art. Several of the area’s most important galleries show ceramic work alongside painting and sculpture and, for most ceramic artists, Levin said, “that is the way things should go.”

Although she concludes in the preface to her book that American ceramics “has earned its place within the mainstream of American art,” Levin conceded that disparities, segregation and condescension still plague the medium.

“The art world has opened the door a foot, maybe a foot and a half,” she said, but she attributed the move more to economic forces than to a sudden recognition of the value of ceramic art. As prices of painting and sculpture soar to obscene heights, buyers with earthbound budgets are looking more and more at works made in clay, relative bargains in today’s art market.

“If that’s what it takes to recognize ceramic sculpture and vessels as an art form, I’m not averse to it,” Levin said.

Nevertheless, in contemporary society, a high price tag marks a work with greater cultural and qualitative value than a low price does, and ceramics have not only lagged behind in price, they’ve always lagged behind in status, too.

“It’s that pottery background,” Levin explained. “How do you make a material valuable when people think of it as dug out of the earth? Historically, many other cultures gave it an enormous amount of value. They gave it value when they planted figures of pregnant women in the soil, because they really felt those images would increase agricultural production. But that isn’t the part of ceramics, unfortunately, that has nurtured today’s kind of objects. It has in the eyes of the artists, but not in the eyes of the public.”

Levin will attend a reception and book-signing tomorrow afternoon from 2 to 4 at The Book Works in Del Mar (2670 Via de la Valle).