Product Description
Jacques Sicard / Weller Pottery French Art Nouveau iridescent vase c. 1901-1907
JACQUES SICARD (décor) (1865-1923) France
WELLER POTTERY (form) Zanesville, OH
Vase c. 1901-1907
Earthenware with handpainted multicolored iridescent glaze
Other works by Sicard illustrated: Decorative Art 1880-1980, Dan Klein & Margaret Bishop (Oxford: Christie’s Ltd./Phaidon,1986) p. 109; The Ideal Home: 1900-1920, ed. Janet Kardon (New York: American Craft Museum, 1993) p. 166.
H: 9″
In 1902, Samuel Weller invited Sicard and his assistant Henri Gelie to Zanesville, where they developed a spectacular line of iridescent pottery called “Sicardo-Weller”. Sicard left the Weller Pottery in 1907 and never revealed the secrets to their copper-lustre glaze.
Jacques Sicard / Weller Pottery French Art Nouveau iridescent vase c. 1901-1907
PROF. MAX LÄUGER (1864-1952) Karlsruhe, Germany
Unique Jugendstil ceramic footed bowl inlaid with gold mosaic 1906
Light and dark green glazed earthenware inlaid with mosaic gold glass squares on four cylindrical feet.
Marks: ML, K (monogram)338 (incised), 4., MUSTER B.., GESCHTZ
For other mosaic inlaid works by Max Läuger see: Max Laeuger (1864-1952): sein graphisches, kunsthandwerkliches und keramisches Oeuvre, Elisabeth Kessler-Slotta (Saarbrücken: Saarbrücker Druckerei und Verlag, 1985) pp. 178/179; Europäisches Kunstgewerbe 1927, Stadtisches Kunstgewerbe-Museum zu Leipzig, (Leipzig: E.A. Seeman, 1928) p. 86; Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration vol. XII “Professor Max Laeuger Karlsruhe”, pp. 221-237; Modernism: Modernist Design 1880-1940 (The Norwest Collection, Norwest Corporation, Minneapolis), Alastair Duncan (Woodbridge, Suffolk, England: The Antique Collector’s Club, 1998), p. 86.
H: 5 3/4″ x Dia: 7 1/4″
Max Laeuger (or Läuger) was born in Lörrach on September 30, 1864. Laeuger was a self taught ceramicist, studied at the Karlsruhe Polytechnic a hundred miles to the north-west of Lörrach (now Karlsruhe University) and eventually became a professor at the university. In 1895 after travelling throughout Europe visiting the major cultural centers to study art he was appointed director of the art pottery department of Tonwerke Kanderne close to his home town. He stayed there until 1913 and later took up a similar position at Majolika-Manufaktur in Karlsruhe.
From 1921 he had his own workshop on the premises formerly owned by the company and produced designs there. The work produced fell into three categories, slip decorated wares designed by Laeuger but produced entirely by the factory, pieces made at the factory but decorated and glazed by Laeuger and one-off pieces by the professor made from beginning to end in his own workshop. All were marketed by Majolika-Manufaktur. Laeuger’s one-off pieces had the brushed initials ‘ML’ and the other works were marked ‘LAEUGER’ or ‘PROF. MAX LAEUGER’
Through the thirties and into the Second World War he worked on his own, but after his workshop was destroyed in 1944 he returned to Lörrach where he died on December 12, 1952. Laeuger was a major figure in German ceramics. His designs and his glazes had ‘organic’ characteristics that are his signature design and his work is much sought-after by collectors. Examples of Laeuger pieces are on display at the Badisches Landesmuseum in Karlsruhe.
ISOBEL STEELE MACKINNON (1896 – 1972) USA
Weimar Portrait c.1927
Gouache, tempera and oil on paper, lemon gold frame.
Signed: MacKinnon
Exhibited: Weimar Portraits, Riviera Landscapes: A Chicagoan in Hofmann’s Studio, 1925–1929, Corbett vs. Dempsey, Chicago, IL, March 28 – May 3, 2008
Illustrated: Weimar Portraits, Riviera Landscapes: A Chicagoan in Hofmann’s Studio, 1925–1929, exhibition catalog, Corbett vs. Dempsey, Chicago, IL, March 28 – May 3, 2008
Painting: H: 16 1/2″ x W: 13″
Frame: H: 20 1/2″ x W: 17 1/4″
SOLD
***This colorful and mesmerizing painting rather closely foreshadows the famous portraiture of the renowned American artist Alice Neel (1900-1984). Isobel Steele MacKinnon’s adventures as an American artist living and working in Europe echo those of many other expatriates of the epoch. MacKinnon and her husband Edgar Rupprecht were, by the time they left Chicago in 1925, both established figures in Chicago’s art world, and especially in Saugatuck, Michigan, where they taught at Ox-Bow Summer School. What the couple encountered in the studio of German artist Hans Hofmann would rock the impressionist foundations of their artwork and transform them into committed modernists. Hofmann’s Munich-based school was a magnet for foreign students after World War I, ever after Hofmann left Germany in the early Thirties. Indeed, over the period of four years (1925 to 1929) during which Steele and Rupprecht worked alongside Hofmann, their fellow students included renowned abstract artist Vaclav Vytlacil and painter Worth Ryder, the artist who would invite Hofmann to teach in the US for the first time in 1930. A small, elegant, realistic profile drawing Rupprecht made of MacKinnon in 1925 makes fascinating contrast with the work she produced while in Europe. In Chicago, her approach had been as conventional as his, but under Hofmann she took to the new ideas with startling ease, absorbing his “push and pull” spatial concept and his deep investigations of the compositional consequences of hot and cold colors. The portraits of German and other expat sitters made at the time have the analytic angularity associated with Hofmann, drawn and painted with a palpable power and sureness. Some resemble expressionists like Oskar Kokoschka or Ludwig Meidner. For instance, the small portrait of a rat-like man with a whiskery mustache or the jutting, harsh jaw of a stern woman with a fur collar, and a rosy-cheeked girl in red (this painting), straight from a German cabaret. More radical than her portraits, MacKinnon’s slashing charcoal gesture drawings of figures are sometimes exceptionally abstract, hauntingly presaging the abstract expressionist women of Willem de Kooning. These works represent an artist in the throes of letting herself loose, shaking off the constrictions of academicism, experimenting with vital energy and displaying an unwavering hand. During their European summers, MacKinnon and Rupprecht traveled with Hofmann. MacKinnon had quickly risen to become his premier student. On Capri and St. Tropez, she painted bright, abstracted landscapes, often based on carefully plotted line drawings. The warm environs often drew out her old impressionist tendencies, but in the most advanced of these works she blocked colors into shapes and patterns that suggest Marsden Hartley, Milton Avery or, in some cases, Jan Matulka. In one drawing, probably from Paris, she has sculpted the trees into architectural forms. After their sojourn, which extended from their studies with Hofmann to several years as active artists in Paris, MacKinnon and Rupprecht returned to Chicago. They were rejuvenated, heads full of new ideas, portfolios brimming with the work they’d done. When WWII was over, Steele began a long and fruitful teaching career at the School of the Art Institute. From this post she introduced many young artists, from Jack Beal to Tom Palazzolo, to Hofmann’s concepts at the same time he was teaching the future abstract expressionists of America from his schools in New York and Provincetown. In recognition of her unwavering interest in issue of space in pictoral composition, MacKinnon’s closest students were known as the “space cadets.” A larger-than-life character, she died in Chicago in 1972 after a protracted battle with Alzheimer’s.