Jane Perryman’s Naked Clay arrives as both manifesto and love letter: a careful, persuasive case for the expressive potency of unglazed ceramics and a sustained meditation on what a surface — left deliberately “bare” — reveals about process, place, and person. The book is at once practical and philosophical, moving between shop-floor particulars (clay bodies, … Continue reading The. Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Naked Clay: Ceramics without a Glaze by Jane Perryman
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Taboo: The Art of Tiki, edited by Martin McIntosh with an introduction by Sven A. Kirsten
"Taboo: The Art of Tiki" is at once a curatorial flourish and a cultural document: a small, handsome volume that archives a particular late-20th-century fascination with Pacific iconography as refracted through the sensibilities of Lowbrow and pop-surrealist artists. Edited by Martin McIntosh with an introduction by Sven A. Kirsten, and credited with contributions from figures … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Taboo: The Art of Tiki, edited by Martin McIntosh with an introduction by Sven A. Kirsten
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Masters: Earthenware: Major Works by Leading Artists, Curated by Matthias Ostermann and edited by Ray Hemachandra
Masters: Earthenware arrives not as a dry handbook but as a museum catalogue written in the idiom of the studio. Curated by Matthias Ostermann and edited by Ray Hemachandra, the volume assembles compact, richly illustrated mini-retrospectives that together argue for earthenware as a lively, experimental, and emotionally capacious medium rather than a mere step on … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Masters: Earthenware: Major Works by Leading Artists, Curated by Matthias Ostermann and edited by Ray Hemachandra
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Édouard Manet: 1832–1883 — The First of the Moderns by Gilles Néret
Gilles Néret’s compact monograph—published in Taschen’s widely circulated Basic Art series under the title Édouard Manet: 1832–1883 — The First of the Moderns—functions less as a revisionist manifesto than as a lucid, image-forward argument for a familiar claim: that Manet inaugurates modern painting by refusing the consolations of academic narrative and classical imitation. The central … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Édouard Manet: 1832–1883 — The First of the Moderns by Gilles Néret
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Earth Fire Soul – The Masterpieces of Korean Ceramics from the National Museum of Korea
Earth Fire Soul is less a conventional catalogue and more a sustained meditation on making. The book stages Korean ceramics as a living conversation among three inevitable forces — the clay (earth), the kiln (fire), and the human presence that lends works their inward breath (soul). Organized around the masterpieces held by the National Museum … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Earth Fire Soul – The Masterpieces of Korean Ceramics from the National Museum of Korea
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Night of the Tiki: The Art of Shag, Schmaltz, and Selected Primitive Oceanic Carvings by Douglas A. Nason, Doug Harvey, Jeff Fox
Night of the Tiki arrives as a small, smartly produced argument in the idiom of the coffee-table book: it stakes a curatorial claim with images, short essays, and selection rather than a long, linear history. What it proposes—clearly, and with a kind of tasteful provocation—is that postwar American “Tiki” is neither mere kitsch nor purely … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Night of the Tiki: The Art of Shag, Schmaltz, and Selected Primitive Oceanic Carvings by Douglas A. Nason, Doug Harvey, Jeff Fox
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Picasso: Painter and Sculptor in Clay by Marilyn McCully
Marilyn McCully’s Picasso: Painter and Sculptor in Clay performs the double service every good exhibition catalogue must: it documents a body of work that has long been underrated in mainstream Picasso scholarship, and it supplies interpretive apparatus sufficient to make that body of work matter anew. The volume — produced to accompany the Royal Academy … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Picasso: Painter and Sculptor in Clay by Marilyn McCully
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Sex Pots – Eroticism in Ceramics by Paul Mathieu
Paul Mathieu’s Sex Pots is a bracing, often surprising intervention in both ceramics scholarship and the wider study of erotic art. Its premise is simple and stubbornly persuasive: clay and the vessel-form have been unusually intimate companions to human sexuality across cultures and ages, and the history of ceramics is one of repeated, inventive erotic … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Sex Pots – Eroticism in Ceramics by Paul Mathieu
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Martha Drexler Lynn’s American Studio Ceramics
Martha Drexler Lynn’s American Studio Ceramics is a capacious, corrective history: ambitious in chronological sweep, painstaking in archival detail, and insistently revisionist in its aim to relocate mid-century ceramics within the narrative of American modernism. Lynn’s central claim — that between roughly 1940 and 1979 studio ceramics migrated from domestic craft into the arena of … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Martha Drexler Lynn’s American Studio Ceramics
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Fauves and Fauvism by Jean Leymarie
Jean Leymarie’s Fauves and Fauvism reads less like a conventional survey and more like a practiced act of recovery: it brings into focus a moment that, though brief, reoriented the possibilities of painting for the twentieth century. Leymarie approaches the subject with the twin tools of an attentive connoisseur and a synthetic historian—he situates the … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Fauves and Fauvism by Jean Leymarie
The New Renaissance Mindset 