Topics : CERAMICS : Pottery Is Baking Its Mark in World of Fine Art

“If you’re a gallery that sells paintings, people think you’re an art gallery,” says Garth Clark, sitting in his smallish second-story gallery situated along a trendy stretch of La Brea Avenue. “But if you’re a gallery that sells ceramics, well, people’s immediate assumption is that you’re a craft shop.”

Make no mistake, the Garth Clark Gallery is no craft shop. The first ceramics fine arts gallery in the nation when it opened in 1981, it has become the focal point in the growing awareness by the mainstream art world of pottery as a fine art. Here is where now-celebrated artists such as Adrian Saxe and Richard Notkin began regularly selling their works--and where aficionados worldwide now pay up to $75,000 for some pieces. And despite the burgeoning interest in ceramics, here is one of the few places nationwide exclusively devoted to pottery as fine art. Two of the others, in Manhattan and in Kansas City, also belong to Clark.

Methodically, the soft-spoken gallery owner recounts some of the recent victories in securing a measure of acceptance for pottery in the mainstream art world. For three months last year, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art staged a well-received exhibit of works by Saxe.

Today, some ceramic works command 10 times the price they did just a decade ago, heightening the movement’s legitimacy in the eyes of some collectors. And, Clark notes, after years of running reviews of ceramics shows on its “Home” page, now the New York Times reviews pottery in its arts section.

Artists and colleagues say the emerging appreciation for pottery--both economic as well as artistic--is largely due to Clark’s efforts.

“He’s created the market for people like myself,” Saxe said. “He’s done the educating, the dealing and the connoisseurship. He’s never made it fashionable. He just stepped in and made a case for the significance of some ceramics.”

Venice artist Cindy Kolodziejski agrees. “If you didn’t have a gallery here, there just wouldn’t be as many people making ceramics,” she said.

In marked contrast to the influence it would later wield, however, Clark’s gallery began modestly. It was originally intended solely as a space to sell the works of famed potter Beatrice Wood, then in her 80s and having difficulty selling her work.

At the time, Clark was a noted art historian who funneled most of his efforts into writing books on ceramics and curating ceramics exhibits. But from the opening show, the gallery, originally located across from the L.A. County Museum, quickly branched out, featuring works of both established artists and younger potters. Since then, Clark’s galleries have had a singular presence, presenting more than 300 exhibitions, placing about 500 works in various museums, and organizing dozens of shows for other galleries and museums.

“We really did have a mission. We wanted to present ceramics as fine art,” said Clark, who co-founded the gallery with his partner Mark Del Vecchio.

Clark and Del Vecchio say the gallery’s success is largely attributable to its location. Not only did Los Angeles’ relative lack of an entrenched art tradition enable the gallery to flourish without critical constraints, but historically the city has been the lone center in the country for non-traditional ceramics artists.

Here, a new generation of artists stretched the long-held view of pottery, introducing abstract Expressionism into ceramics to create often bizarrely shaped pots whose primary appeal was their sculptural form.

“Everyone assumes we began in New York and moved to L.A.,” said Clark, who has been author of 14 books on ceramics. “But it’s very important that this happened here. It didn’t happen in San Francisco, and you couldn’t do it (then) in New York.” Even today, Del Vecchio adds, about half of the pottery being made in art-conscious New York is still of the traditional kind.

Del Vecchio attributes some of the mainstream art world’s reluctance to embrace pottery is its functionality.

“You’re still looking at pottery, but it’s not functional pottery,” Del Vecchio said. “This is more about ideas.”

In a world where the latest and most extreme offerings are unhesitatingly accepted as “art,” both Clark and Del Vecchio recognize the irony in the fact that ceramics--the product of a 10,000-year-old tradition--is still struggling to be celebrated as such. Clark acknowledges that the prices for top works in the field are still relatively low compared to those fetched in other disciplines, and that many casual art lovers still think of ceramics as just cups and pots. But, he adds, the battle for acceptance is inexorably being won.