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Eastern Tradition/Western Individualism
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19668 |
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THE ARTS
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| Issue
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9 / 1991 |
901 Words |
| Author
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Patricia Malarcher
Patricia Malarcher writes on the arts from Englewood, New
Jersey. |
Toshiko's ceramics range from small pots with curves that fit the hollow of a hand to enormous cylindrical and globular sculptures that suggest trees and boulders. Clustered on the floor as they were recently at the Montclair (N.J.) Art Museum for a forty-year retrospective of her works, the larger pieces resembled a lunar landscape and a giant melon patch. But mounted on pedestals, at the Allentown (Penn.) Museum, the show's second venue, they became pure abstract sculpture.
The pleasure of a retrospective such as Toshiko Takaezu: Four Decades is in being able to trace an artist's development, noting where an idea first enters the work and watching it mature.
Walking among some 150 "moon pots" of all sizes, cleft "hearts," "trees," and scores of undesignated works, one's first impression of a dazzling array of primary forms breaks down into one-on-one encounters. Each entity, like a living body, has its own personality and posture. Glazed surfaces range from muddy browns to phosphorescent ultramarines and visceral pinks, from the purple of a luscious grape to an ashen gray. Textures vary: One might suggest weathered metal; another, burnished leather; and still another, volcanic rock.
Organized according to decades, from the 1950s through the '80s, the show can be read as a history of an ongoing search. In the early fifties, Toshiko, (she is known by her first name, with the accent on the first syllable) made utilitarian wares such as teapots and bottles. Her exploration of form and materials was advanced for the time--for example, she was among the first contemporary potters to use porcelain. Nevertheless, by the end of the fifties she had put aside function to concentrate on the development of closed, evocative forms. The sixties saw these move in two distinct directions: Some expanded in volume and proportions, stretching upward and outward, while more intimate "sound forms," with audible shards of clay within, drew attention to interior space.
Sculptural connotations--for example, the arrangement of "trees," each five or more feet tall, in clusters that signified "forests"--were amplified in the seventies. Works from the eighties, which constitute the major portion of the show, extend but also transform the artist's earlier concerns.
Toshiko's work has been described as a blend of Eastern tradition and Western individualism. Born in 1922 in Pepeekeo, Hawaii, she was the sixth of eleven children whose parents had emigrated
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