Lovers of sculpture who prefer clay to other materials have much to celebrate this month in Chicago, with a not-to-be-missed pair of shows at the Smart Museum of Art and the Art Institute, respectively dedicated to Ruth Duckworth and contemporary Japanese women ceramicists.
Those who prefer marble and bronze, and especially those torn between all these substances, need not dismay. Also ongoing at the AIC is an exhibition of clay sculptures made by the 18th century Italian master Antonio Canova as preparatory sketches for his famously lifelike marble figures of Pope Clement XIV, Napoleon’s mother and a variety of mythological characters. Elsewhere in the museum is a show — mixing finished marbles and bronzes, plus plaster and clay preliminaries — by the trailblazing Camille Claudel, who at the turn of the 19th century defied gender norms to become one of France’s preeminent sculptors.
The decision to use this material or that was not really a choice for historical European artists like Canova or Claudel. A sculpture of any importance first needed to be sketched in clay and molded in plaster, so it could later be cast in metal or carved from stone. Contemporary artists have often thought otherwise, however, and one of Chicago’s most dogged rule-breakers was Ruth Duckworth, subject of an elegantly installed monographic exhibition at the Smart Museum, on view through Feb. 4.
The gist of “Ruth Duckworth: Life as a Unity,” curated by Laura Steward, is that Duckworth was a sculptor who worked in clay, as opposed to a potter or ceramicist. The distinction matters a lot in traditional debates of art versus craft, but it needn’t trouble visitors who have come to look closely at the work of one of Chicago’s under-sung masters. In the five decades of work collected here, from organically misshapen “mama pots” to clean-lined biomorphic figures and ecologically textured murals, Duckworth massively expanded the possibilities of her chosen material, using it to express everything from the state of the body to the state of the planet.
Duckworth was born in Hamburg, Germany, in 1919, and she fled to Liverpool, England, as a teenager when, as the daughter of a Jewish father, Nazi law forbade her from studying art. After years of trying out different art schools in England, often feeling confined by traditionalism, she traveled with a puppet theater, volunteered in a munitions factory and carved tombstones before gaining enough renown to be offered a job teaching ceramics at the University of Chicago. The year was 1964. She accepted the position mostly because of a desire to visit the Grand Canyon and Yellowstone National Park, and then she stayed, living and working in a converted pickle factory in Lakeview until her death at the age of 90.
Duckworth arrived at the University of Chicago at a propitious moment, when the departments of geology and meteorology were being unified due to scientific advances. Her first big commission, to design lobby art for a new brutalist geophysics building, can still be visited today. “Earth, Water, Sky,” a completely immersive environment located a short walk from the Smart, feels like being simultaneously inside and outside the planet’s crust. Looking for inspiration, Duckworth wandered the faculty labs, and was especially drawn to the cloud and tornado photography of Professor Ted Fujita. The formal motifs she derived from his research reappear in many of the landscape reliefs on view here (and in an enormous 1976 mural, “Clouds Over Lake Michigan,” recently installed in nearby Regenstein Library), looking as much like fins and fungus as the anvil clouds and suction vortexes on which they were based. Hers was an interest in the world guided, as well, by the environmental and nuclear fears of the day, as the Smart explores in a tidy display of archival news clippings, leaflets and other ephemera.
Duckworth’s aerial views of land and its atmosphere — rocky, mysterious, layered and soil-toned — can appear less like they are picturing the Earth than that they are of the Earth. Which of course, being made of clay, they are. Her so-called “mama pots” — the artist referred to them as such but the vessels themselves are untitled — feel similarly grown from the ground, imperfectly built up of thick stoneware slabs, tight coils and rough ridges.
Duckworth’s porcelain sculptures are another thing entirely. She made all sorts, mostly building them by hand then sanding them down until they were gleamingly delicate. Some of these take on charming humanoid and birdlike shapes reminiscent of Constantin Brâncu?i and Henry Moore, two of her early influences. A number of bulbous reliefs recall the bodily sculptures of Louise Bourgeois and the unsettling voids of Lee Bontecou. And then there are her “cups and blades,” delightful sets of small bowls sliced by impossibly thin wedges of porcelain, made separately and put together later, when Duckworth would play through any number of combinations before settling on the right one.
If Duckworth’s reputation lagged on account of tiresome American arguments about craft versus art, the problem has been otherwise in Japan, a country with one of the world’s longest traditions of ceramic manufacture. Its finest practitioners are officially designated Living National Treasures — and to this day, not one is a woman.
And yet, as is magnificently shown in “Radical Clay: Contemporary Women Artists from Japan” at the Art Institute, many of the country’s most extraordinary ceramic artists are female. Examples by 36 individuals, from groundbreaking senior figures to emerging stars, positively flabbergast. This is work that must be seen to be believed and, even then, it can be hard to fathom the mind-numbing detail of Ikake Sayuri’s blue-green “breath,” with its hundreds of thousands of tiny spikes folded in on themselves, or Hattori Makiko’s pale coil, sheathed in even more delicate frills. Uncanny verisimilitude of both nature and culture abound: Futamura Yoshimi uses novel techniques to produce what looks like an enormous burl of old wood, Tanaka Yu somehow fashions clay into bright yellow fabric, tied in a knot, and Mishima Kimiyo exhibits a sheet of crumpled newsprint — made of glazed and silk-screened porcelain. Some works, including Kawaura Saki’s bloody, amorphous organ, are terrifically grotesque, while others push the boundaries of taste, overdecorating for parodical effect, as in a gold-edged dinner plate by Oishi Sayaka, piled high with a face, lizard, fish, coral, knife, hand, ear, butterfly, jewels, shells and more. Delicious.
“Ruth Duckworth: Life as a Unity” runs through Feb. 4 at the Smart Museum of Art, 5550 S. Greenwood Ave., 773-702-0200 and smartmuseum.uchicago.edu. “Radical Clay: Contemporary Women Artists from Japan” runs through June 3 at the Art Institute, 111 S. Michigan Ave., 312-443-3600 and artic.edu
Lori Waxman is a freelance critic.
