The Human Condition: The Stephen and Pamela Hootkin Collection Sept. 2014 | Page 23

Saxe was able to give a fresh voice to court porcelain—
one of the most original and inventive periods in
history—and bring it into the contemporary art arena.

royal life. It all resides dangerously on the border of über-

of Ceramics, Alfred, New York. Kraus emerged from

kitsch, a flagrant provocation to modernist taste, daring one to

Alfred making remarkable pots, cups and saucers (her

love its opulence, which as the artist well knows, deep down,

early specialty), vases, lidded vessels, and bowls. Garth

many of us do. The decadence of the object is magnetic.

Clark Gallery gave her a solo exhibition shortly after

The same game is in play with Cindy Kolodziejski.
She attended the Otis Art Institute and is also part of
the Chouinard tradition through Ralph Bacerra, as he
was head of the ceramic department. He taught at the

she left school and her beautiful introspective works
gained immediate traction. All the work that sold durin g
her first show was mostly to museums, other artists (a
rare but good omen) and of course, the Hootkins.

Chouinard Art Institute (it later became the California

Kraus made no attempt at virtuosity in any area

Institute of the Arts) where Saxe, Elsa Rady, and Peter

of her craft other than her under-glaze painting,

Shire were among his students. The difference with

which was remarkably fluent and relaxed, a skill

Kolodziejski's Star-Crossed Teapot (1990) is low rent.

understated by the informality of her style. She

The same elements are all present as with Saxe, but

worked in working-class white earthenware (not

the effect is less grand, as though Versailles had a

upper-class porcelain), and chose to mold her pieces.

love child with K-Mart. I mean this as a compliment.

At the time, this was not an entirely acceptable

Kolodziejski‘s glaze palette later became much more silky,

route in a ceramic art world that still placed a

refined, and elegant, but at this stage her surfaces were

premium on the presumed magic of the hand.

appealingly funky and lowbrow with a coarse swagger.

Kraus made no attempt to hide the seam marks on

Court porcelains hijacked Anne Kraus and lured her away

her pots, leaving them rudely exposed like a ladder

from her painting studio. She found herself repeatedly

in a stocking. And she did not seek refinement. This is

visiting the eighteenth-century porcelain cabinets at the

clear in The Frontier Vase (1986) where the Baroque

Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Their surface

ornament that erupts from the vase is almost a caricature

beauty, the mellifluous, translucent, china painting, and

of the real thing, brusquely formed, sans elegance.

the crisp, almost-acid color fixated her. But their lack of

The same is true of The Image Vase (1987) where

emotional substance bothered her; no figures exhibited

ornament is almost dime-store-like in its casualness.

conflict, desire, and vulnerability. There was no intrigue.

For Kraus it was not the object itself that mattered.

It was a play with no dialogue, just a single, trite pose.

That was just a stage, the space for a psychodrama.

She decided to correct this, went back to school, and
graduated with a master’s degree in ceramics from
Alfred University‘s prestigious New York State College

Early in her career she was almost incapacitated by
shyness and later studied acting, which enabled her
to at least converse—albeit shyly—at her openings.

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