https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O10560/combination-teapot-teapot-bogler-theodor/
https://www.moma.org/collection/works/3836
To what extent did time, economics and politics effect the design process of Theodor Bogler’s Combination Teapot?
I have chosen these three frames to look through because in the world the teapot was designed in, they were inextricably linked.
In 1923, the same year he became business director of the Bauhaus pottery, Theodor Bogler designed the Combination teapot. The Combination Teapot (also called the Modular teapot) is a design for four variations of a teapot, all assembled from the same 6 individual parts. The examples in the V&A are all hand thrown and altered, whereas the design was meant for industrial mass moulding – encompassing the Bauhaus philosophy that objects should be beautiful, well designed but affordable. Bogler designed the teapot during the period when Walter Gropius, the founder and leader of Bauhaus, decided that his students should design for industry. Anna Rowland explains this in her journal article; Business Management at the Weimar Bauhaus;
“Gropius realised that the very survival of the school depended on making contact with the external world (das Werkleben), and in particular, finding industrial manufacturers for the models developed in the workshops. The more money the school could earn through the sale of its workshop products, the less dependent it had to be on funding from the Thuringian government, and therefore upon government policy.”
Theodor Bogler eventually became a preist… after he passed the journeyman’s examination of the Chamber of Crafts Weimar in 1922, he studied philosophy and theology at two abbeys, became a monk and then a preist, while continuing his ceramic practice. I can find no evidence of this, especially since Bogler was known for designing, not making…
I can’t find any fired examples of the first (dare i say more traditional) teapot, only the plaster example. It’s rather more dumpy, what you would expect to be mass produced, not sleek and modernist like the more popular third and fourth option. – hard to achieve this shape from just throwing
“Gropius realised that the very survival of the school depended on making contact with the external world (das Werkleben), and in particular, finding industrial manufacturers for the models developed in the workshops. The more money the school could earn through the sale of its workshop products, the less dependent it had to be on funding from the Thuringian government, and therefore upon government policy.”
“The strains of the Syndikus’s job were enormous, and in Spring 1924 Lange resigned. As he did so, he complained that it was an impossible task to administrate an educational institution as a profit making concern.“
Flatback project – V&A Website –
“In the grim and troubled mid 19th century, the working population of Britain was so hungry for folk heroes that even a small-time (but particularly vicious) 18th-century highwayman like Dick Turpin could be raised in the public imagination to the romantic status of Robin Hood. His figure was often paired with that of Tom King, another highwayman whom Turpin shot and killed by mistake. It is perhaps doubtful whether King would have wished to be immortalised alongside his killer!”
delftware tiles – needs a certain amount of freedom with the brush, decoration – can’t make a ‘mistake’. Paul Bommer – printmaker now tile maker – i like that his practice is so specific – does he consider himself a potter?
could i add medium to ochre, or earthenware? for the plate?
could be nice to do some more majolica tests, feel good about the painterlyness…
post fired ceramic waste… surely it doesn’t all have to be sludgy and grey… how far is small scale sustainable practice relevant to industry, mass production, when these things are intrinsically linked to a commercialist, consumerist model of design and consumption…?
how can my own ceramic practice be sustainable and still look and feel like my own ceramic practice? i mean if it was up to me, i’d be making things almost entirely from clay id gathered myself, and pigments id found along the way… but there are lots of other things i want to explore, far far away from this. Ill try to get some more glaze tests done on saturday and next week…
GREENING…?
I ALSO like the idea of making things that are no longer or were never made out of clay, out of clay… functional objects that are not table ware and lend themselves to the material, so its not just for the sake of making it out of clay. One day i will make those rhubarb forcers for my neighbour…
more on horticulture… why we use clay, porosity, retention of heat, and coolness…also cooking – fridge
It wasn’t just the heating up of food that propelled us into the late neolithic, but the act of keeping it cool, both heavily relied on clay, all over the world. Clay and water are inseparable, in both form and function – especially because fired clay retains water. And raw clay needs water to exist in its malleable state. WORKS BOTH WAYS!
EXHIBITION VISIT…
To Gallery 46 in Whitechapel, to see ‘Queer as Folklore’ – Rites and Wrongs. An Exhibition of ten LGBTQ+ Artists exploring Paganism, Myth and Legend.
archaeology suggests it took 20,000 YEARS for people to start making vessels, instead of sculptures and votive figures…
10,000 BCE – Japan, Jomon Pottery – he term “Jōmon” (縄文) means “rope-patterned” in Japanese, describing the patterns that are pressed into the clay, a culture of basketry existed before they had pottery. Maybe
Vessel pottery is intrinsically linked with sedentism, pottery is not entirely suitable for nomadic life, vessels made from gourds or basketry are. HOWEVER, early Jomon Pottery is of particular interest because it represents a semi-nomadic, ceramic vessel using culture, who were not farmers… Proves why its important to be culturally relative, not everyone in the neolithic was farming…(western frame)
cord patterns on jomon pottery gave rise to a theory of how people discovered the transformative properties of clay when exposed to heat. before Ceramic vessels, people would line baskets with clay to make them watertight. perhaps a basket like this was accidentally left next to a fire, leaving a hard pot behind, with ‘basket patterns’ on the outside
Much of Dresser’s ceramic design could be described at well finished copies of ornamental japanese pieces, and ancient near eastern ceramics. He visited japan in the begginings of the technological revolution, infact he became a pioneer of the anglo-japanese style of the time… What i have chosen to focus on is his Silver teapot. When i first saw it i immediately thought bauhaus, of course the bauhaus was heavily influenced by the British Arts and Crafts movement, but come on!
The V&A website: “He grasped both the properties of materials and the processes of production and adapted his designs and aesthetics to them brilliantly.”
I personally would not expect the ‘Father of industrial design’ to design something so brilliantly subversive, his designs in nearly all other materials were heavily influenced by his interest in botany and plant forms, but not the silverware…
idea; the designer must respond to material, dresser’s silverware teapots are so different from the rest of his work…they are undeniably modernist
people are still drinking tea from fine china somewhere, hard culture to break through into – people are stubborn with their crockery…