The Human Condition: The Stephen and Pamela Hootkin Collection Sept. 2014 | Page 24

with runaway cancer, and passed away a few months
later. We lost a close friend and an artist who was
just beginning to test unexplored deeper waters.
Clearly Kraus is a lynchpin in the Hootkin collection as
one can tell by the quantity of her works. They followed
her to every show and her aesthetic in so many ways
summarizes a major stream of what they enjoy: vibrant
Anne Kraus, The Echo Motel Vase, 1995.

Her most important words were not those she spoke,
but the texts she neatly penned on her pots. All the
narratives and monologues came from dream diaries,
dozens of volumes, all of which live in my library awaiting
a major retrospective and book on her art in the future.

contexts, layered personal narratives, visual wit, surreal
dreamscapes, and above all, inner authenticity. In turn,
though I doubt she ever confided this to the Hootkins,
Kraus deeply valued their collecting of her work and took
pride in the fact there were so many objects clustered,
enjoyed, read, and understood in the Hootkin home. “No

As Kraus worked she became more confident with form

piece of mine is complete,” she once told me, “until it is

as seen in The Dead Bird Double Vase (2000), which

sold.” It was not the money (a subject to which Kraus was

is actually conjoined twins. Now becoming both more

largely indifferent), but the fact that the object was out

complex and accomplished, these forms are larger and

and in the world, like a chick that has left the nest. Once

play an increasingly active role in Kraus’ art. With this

a work was sold, its words were being seen and heard by

three-dimensional growth came a new fullness and

people other than the maker. By being sold it came alive.

expansiveness in her painting: less summary, more
complex, more filled in, and with a greater use of pattern.

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color, figuration, a distinctive quirkiness of style, emotional

Richard Notkin’s teapots are not of the palace born. He
channels stoneware Chinese Yixing wares of the fifteenth

Trained as a painter, Kraus enjoyed working flat on tile

and sixteenth centuries. In the Imperial palaces, only

panels. The Dot of Hope Wall Tile (1994) is an excellent

porcelain could touch the lips of court, but Yixing wares

mid-career example. By the time of her last show at the

were still made for an elite, the intelligentsia of Chinese

Garth Clark Gallery in 2003, vessels were becoming

poets, scholars, and philosophers. These elites were an

fewer and her work mainly comprised tile panels.

active part of the creative process in designing these small,

The exhibition was a great success commercially and

elegant pouring forms, inscribing poems on the sides of

aesthetically. Alas, the day she returned home from

the pots praising their beauty, or extolling the virtues of

the exhibition she was seized with pain, diagnosed

tea. They also debated aesthetics with the potters, arguing