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 – The Essential Guide to Mold Making & Slip Casting by Andrew Martin
Andrew Martin’s The Essential Guide to Mold Making & Slip Casting stakes a clear claim to usefulness: it is a book written by a practitioner for practitioners, and it reads that way—methodical, economy-minded, and exquisitely practical. But what elevates this manual beyond a mere how-to compendium is the way the author balances procedural exactitude with … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Essential Guide to Mold Making & Slip Casting by Andrew Martin
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 – 500 Glass Objects – A Celebration of Functional & Sculptural Glass edited by Maurine Littleton
Maurine Littleton’s 500 Glass Objects reads less like a conventional catalogue and more like a visual anthology: a sustained argument for glass as a medium that consistently unsettles our categories — between use and display, craft and fine art, commodity and heirloom. The book’s straightforward title promises breadth; what the pages deliver is a series … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – 500 Glass Objects – A Celebration of Functional & Sculptural Glass edited by Maurine Littleton
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 Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Pottery Handbook: A Comprehensive Guide to Throwing Beautiful, Functional Pots by Simon Leach
Simon Leach’s Pottery Handbook stands as both a technical manual and a philosophical meditation on craft. Descended from one of Britain’s most celebrated lineages of studio potters—his grandfather Bernard Leach being the seminal figure in the Anglo-Japanese pottery tradition—Simon Leach bridges tradition and contemporaneity with rare grace. His handbook is not merely an instructional text … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Pottery Handbook: A Comprehensive Guide to Throwing Beautiful, Functional Pots by Simon Leach
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – 500 Metal Vessels: Contemporary Explorations of Containment, Edited by Marthe Le Van
Marthe Le Van’s 500 Metal Vessels arrives like a compact anthology of the everyday and the ceremonial — a taxonomy of containment that doubles as a meditation on form, function and the material imagination. If a vessel’s primary job is to hold, this book insists that holding is never neutral: it is a cultural act, … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – 500 Metal Vessels: Contemporary Explorations of Containment, Edited by Marthe Le Van
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – 500 Knives: Celebrating Traditional & Innovative Designs, Edited by Marthe Le van
Marthe Le Van’s 500 Knives is at once a catalogue of craft and a meditation on form. Like other volumes in the “500” series, it trusts the visual authority of objects to make an argument: that knives—tools born of necessity—have been consistently shaped by cultural priorities, technological change, and aesthetic impulse. The book’s pleasures are … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – 500 Knives: Celebrating Traditional & Innovative Designs, Edited by Marthe Le van
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – 500 Enamelled Objects: A Celebration of Color on Metal Edited by Marthe Le Van
Marthe Le Van’s 500 Enamelled Objects is an exercise in visual generosity: a catalogue raisonné of the enamelled surface presented less as dry typology and more as a sustained love letter to colour, light, and the tiny, deliberate acts of making that turn metal and glass into something incandescent. The book’s premise is simple and … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – 500 Enamelled Objects: A Celebration of Color on Metal Edited by Marthe Le Van
The New Renaissance Mindset 