Cheryl Buckley’s Designing Modern Britain throws, what is to me, new light on Roger Fry’s contribution to the development of studio pottery in Britain.
I knew that Fry had personally tried his hand at pottery (not very successfully), and that his formalist art theories helped to shape the studio pottery aesthetic. Fry’s importance to studio pottery is increasingly recognised: Jeffrey Jones mentions him in Studio Pottery (2005) and Julian Stair devotes several pages to him in Things of Beauty Growing (2017). But Buckley has very interesting information about the way that Fry’s coverage of ceramics in The Burlington Magazine, which he edited from 1910 -1919, foreshadowed the new ceramics.
Fry published articles on Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Peruvian and African pottery. He wrote that the art of the East “presents the hope of discovering a more spiritual, more expressive idea of design.” The image above is from “Ancient Peruvian Pottery”, an article by C.H.Read of the British Museum (April 1910). Other significant contributors were George Eumorphopolos, whose exhibition of T’ang and Sung pottery in 1910 increased interest in oriental ceramics in Britain, and Bernard Rackham, keeper of ceramics at the V&A, an early connoisseur of studio pottery. Buckley reports that, during Fry’s tenure, early Chinese ceramics were often written about and that the journal had covered them from as early as 1903.
