Ceramic, Art and Civilisation (Hardcover)

Prologue: a history in shards I: What Ceramic Is 1. A process and a place 2. The ceramic continuum 3. Transformers 4. The genre 5. Industry and the levels of production 6. Ubiquity: the plastic of the ancient world 7. The Potter 8. Domestic life, urban life 9. Telling stories 10. Civilisation, culture, and power 11. Conclusions: Western ceramic II: The Value of the Greek Potter 1. The world in Black and Red 2. The earlier Greek world 3. Reducing iron and oxygen 4. Who were these people? 5. Secular life 6. Anachronism, the value, and the price of things 7. Conclusions: the spread of black and red III: Rome and the Arrival of the Medieval World 1. The feel of Roman pots 2. Greeks, Romans, and the classical idea 3. Dark, light, an end, and a beginning. 4. The coarse and the local. 5. The origins of the vernacular. 6. Conclusions: the beginning of the classical idea. IV: Renaissances of Tin 1. The Chemistry of Islam. 2. Islam and ceramic history 3. The pottery revolution. 4. Islam and Europe 5. Renaissance pots. 6. Quantity, quality, and status. 7. Italian Potters and Potteries 8. Ceramic Renaissance 9. Conclusion: compendiario and onwards. V: The Enlightened Reign of White 1. Chinese pottery 2. China in Europe 3. The invention of European porcelain 4. Frivolity and Melancholy: the figurine 5. Blue, white, war, and peace 6. Delftware 7. The Rise of Staffordshire 8. Conclusion: Modern whiteness VI: The Natural and the Individual: lead, slip, stone, salt 1. Nature and new civilization 2. The Salt Renaissance 3. The nature of slip 4. Figuring life 5. The arrival of America 6. Conclusions: the ingredients of modernity VII: The Acceleration of Style and the Arrival of the Modern 1. Decoration, complication, and anxiety. 2. The last transformer: another modernity 3. Institutionalisation. 4. Ugliness and the Age. 5. The invention of style 6. Design Reform and the ingredients of modernity. 7. The meaning of majolica 8. Gender 9. The inferno of large-scale production. 10. Exoticism 11. The designer. 12. The Art Nouveau style. 13. Conclusions: high eclecticism to Art Nouveau. VIII: The Studio Arrives 1. A Modern place 2. Art Pottery. 3. Defining art 4. The invention of craft 5. The completeness of existence 6. The artist-craftsman 7. Emigres 8. Art Deco, International Style, Mid Century Modern 9. Potters and painters 10. Conclusions: a world is formed. IX:The Creative Explosion 1. Thunderous emotion 2. The world of Funk 3. Conceptualism 4. An ocean of pots 5. Abstract vessels 6. Postmodernity and the new ornamentalism 7. Conclusions: the potter now Postscript: Kerameikos to California