Arty Farty Friday ~ Hedi Schoop's Californian Ceramics from the 1940s

Another acquisition from last month's trip - this one not found in an antique store but in a thrift store run by a hospice organisation in Pratt, Kansas where we stopped for a short leg-stretching break.

The ceramic figure was sitting on a table by the cash desk along with a few other "specials offers". A notice informed prospective buyers that it is a ceramic "Phantasy Dancer" from the 1940s by Hedi Schoop. A photograph of a comparable piece available on e-bay, and its price there was attached. The Dancer, now offered at half the original asking price in the thrift store seemed a real bargain, particularly as the delicate piece had attracted my eye anyway, before knowing anything about it. I bought it. At home I searched for information about Hedi Schoop.

Sculptor, ceramist, painter, entrepreneuse, her proper name was Hedwig Schoop, born on April 3 1906 in Switzerland into a prominent Zurich family. She died in California in 1995. Following details come from findagrave.com

She studied sculpture, architecture, painting, and fashion design at several European art institutions. With her sister, Trudi Schoop, she is also remembered for her work in European dance and cabaret.
Fleeing the rising Nazi power, she and her husband, renowned composer and torch song writer, Friedrich Hollander, left Germany for Hollywood in 1933. In her new environment, she became an innovator of mid-century California pottery design, and became perhaps the most commercially successful California ceramics designer of the postwar period, and certainly the most ubiquitous. If a Schoop figure proved popular with consumers, an entire line of accompanying décor objects, such as planters, bowls, ashtrays, and candy dishes, and lamps would be built around it. At its busiest in the late 1940s, the studio produced over 30,000 giftware items per year, and employed over fifty workers. The factory was destroyed by fire in 1958, and shortly after that Schoop retired from ceramic design, focusing instead on painting.

In 1943 Hedi Schoop married Ernst Verebes, talented in his own right as a famous actor in European film, and with whom she had a son, Anthony Verebes. The son survives, and is a prominent Los Angeles photographer.

Hedi Schoop designed almost every piece in her line herself, including vases, plates, bowls, ashtrays. Her figurines of men and women are said to be the most popular with collectors.

Many examples of Hedi Schoop ceramics can be seen via Google Image. Some, such as the two shown below, are clearly related in style to my piece, but some others wouldn't have attracted my attention nearly as much as this Dancer did....she was probably waiting there that day, just for me!

Arty Farty Friday ~ Two March 3rd Birthdays: Ceramicist Beatrice Wood & Cartoonist Ronald Searle

Two characters from the art world, would both have celebrated birthdays tomorrow, 3 March. Both lived long, varied and productive lives, one to age 105, the other 91:

Born in San Francisco, USA, Beatrice Wood
(March 3, 1893 – March 12, 1998)
Artist, potter, ceramicist.

Born in Cambridge, UK, Ronald Searle CBE
(3 March 1920 – 30 December 2011)
Cartoonist.

First a brief outlines of their lives, and their natal charts follow.

BEATRICE WOOD

Paragraph from a book description at Amazon, relating to Beatrice Wood's Autobiography, I Shock Myself~

Beatrice Wood's Life was extraordinary in every way, from earliest childhood, when her dominating Victorian mother realized she "wasn't like the rest of them," to her still productive life at ninety-five in California's Ojiai Valley. Rebellious, radical and romantic, Beatrice Wood was determined to be an artist. She fled to Paris for several bohemian seasons as a painter and actress, then returned to New York where she fell into the loving clutches of two Frenchmen: Henri-Pierre Roche, the author of Jules and Jim, and Marcel Duchamp, the iconoclastic Dadaist. Her promising youth was followed by a disastrous marriage, financial woes and a debilitating physical affliction; but in 1933, at the age of forty, she discovered the passion that would change her life: pottery. One of America's acclaimed ceramicists, Beatrice Wood shared the intriguing details of her unconventional life in I Shock Myself.

Three examples of her fine work, more can be seen via Google Image.













RONALD SEARLE


Information taken from obituaries of Ronald Searle from BBC and The GuardianSearle Obit BBC

For many Searle's cartoon adventures depicting the tearaway girls' school St Trinian's, with their black humour, something fairly new in 1950s Britain, defined the cartoonist's career, in fact though they occupied only five years of his life.

Searle's terrible World War II experiences as a prisoner of the Japanese, after being captured in 1942 during army service in Singapore, were less widely known.
He spent the rest of the war in appalling, lethal conditions, at first in prison, then as a forced labourer, building the Burma Railway in Thailand.

He later said that what he witnessed as a prisoner of war marked him for life. "I was in conditions of total isolation, total brutality - it was slavery. I woke up day after day with men dead on each side of me."

Searle, a published cartoonist since teenage, made hundreds of small sketches of the squalor and misery of life in the Japanese camps, having to hide them, sometimes under bodies of sick and dying men.

Amazingly he survived the war, and was able to slowly regain his health and strength, and to begin cartooning in earnest, supplying famous magazines of the time such as Punch and The Strand, and later with his St Trinians and Molesworth books and cartoons. I have copies of two of his non-Trinian/Molesworth books: Searle's Zodiac and Searle's Cats, both of which are a constant delight.

Having separated from his wife and family in England, in 1961 Searle went to live in France - Paris, then Provence. He later married again, and remained in Provence until his death in late December 2011.

Searle "created an alternative to the conformity of Harold Macmillan's Britain", said his publisher Simon Winder. "He gave Britain in the 1950s particularly a sense of anarchy. He was extraordinarily sceptical about all forms of authority [and] there's something just astonishingly anarchic about Molesworth and St Trinian's," said Winder. "That's why they have appealed to so many generations."

These illustrations are used, with Fair Use Guidelines in mind, as examples and expalantion of the artist's style and are not intended to infringe copyright.

The first two are scanned from my own copy of Searle's Zodiac




From Searle's Cats



And this from http://www.broadsheet.ie/tag/ronald-searle/




Varied selection of Searle's works at Perpetua, a Ronald Searle Tribute



ASTROLOGY





I've shown both charts as at 12 noon. Astrodatabank gives 1.45pm for Ronald Searle, but with only a "C" rating, so not to be trusted. That time of birth would put Leo ascending, with Jupiter/Neptune close to ascendant degree - a little too convenient? For a brief look at these charts 12 noon will show planetary positions, apart from that of Moon. Moon for Ms Wood would have been in late Virgo to early Libra, Mr Searle's Moon late-ish Leo or early Virgo if born later than 10 PM.

The only common factors in Searle's and Wood's charts are their Pisces Sun and Aquarius Venus. Uranus makes an harmonious trine to Ms Wood's natal Sun, and manifested in her unconventional lifestyle. In Mr Searle's chart Uranus is just 10 degrees from his natal Sun, a wide conjunction, but Uranus's eccentricities are easily seen reflected in all Searle cartoons.


In Beatrice Wood's chart there's a Yod (Finger of Fate) which brings to mind a quote of hers: "Very few people know how to work. Inspiration, everyone has inspiration, that's just hot air."

The Yod links the sextile (60*) between her natal Sun (self) and Mars(energy, dynamism) to Saturn (work and discipline) by quincunx aspect (150*).

In Ronald Searle's chart there's a Grand Trine - a triangular configuration: three 120* aspects form a harmonious linkage between, in Mr Searle's case, his natal Sun and Uranus (self and out-of-the-ordinary style) to Mars (energy, dynamism, and in this case perhaps his war experiences) and Pluto (darkness, intensity, death, and maybe here, again his war experiences).

Arty Farty Friday ~ Clarice Cliff ~ Aquarian Bizarre-ness

Clarice Cliff - sounds like the name of one of today's pop stars! She was, however, an English designer of ceramics, one of the most prominent of her heyday: late 1920s to late 1930s, the Art Deco period. She was born on 20 January 1899 in Tunstall, in the area of England known as the midlands, Staffordshire to be exact. Staffordshire was, and still is, famous for its potteries.






(From Economist.com and inlifeplus - here)

Clarice Cliff was always her own person. A Victorian (she was born in 1899), she carried on with her married boss, drove her own car from an early age and never stopped working until she died at 73.

She was raised in Staffordshire, the centre of Britain’s pottery industry, and joined a local business, the Newport Pottery factory, as a lithographer when she was still in her teens. Cliff’s artistic talent quickly came to the attention of her senior colleagues who sent her, at company expense, to the Royal College of Art in London and on trips to Paris where the Art Deco style was developing.

The phrase “Art Deco” was not commonly used in Britain until the 1960s. It derived from the Paris Exposition of 1925 and became a catch-all for a new visual language that drew on a wide range of sources--Cubism, the Ballets Russes, the Bauhaus, folk art, classicism and the rectilinear design of Art Nouveau. Reinterpreting these influences, artists and designers throughout Europe strove for an aggressively modern style that turned its back on the 19th century and the great war that had effectively brought it to an end.

Cliff and her team of paintresses eagerly set about appropriating this style for a domestic setting. Not for nothing has she been called the Mary Quant of her age. For in applying vivid, coloured designs to pottery that was made to be used--cups and saucers, teapots and plates--Cliff brought modernity face-to-face with the kitchen sink. Japanese pagodas, tennis nets, fruit and sunrays--they all served a purpose. Cliff’s shapes were distinctive, her colours appealingly bright. Hand-painting bands of colour without making a mistake took skill. The pottery may have been produced in multiple sets, but it never looked or felt as if it came off a conveyor belt. Cliff’s work sold and sold.

Three-quarters of a century later, it has also become widely collected, both in America and in Britain.

12 noon chart (no time of birth known)


"The Art of Bizarre" declares the book cover at the top of this post. Yeah, well.... when you see the word "bizarre" and astrology is involved, the next thing you expect to see is Aquarius and/or Uranus prominent in the natal chart. Yes! Sun at 00 Aquarius, with Uranus, Aquarius' modern ruler, in helpful sextile to Sun from 6 Sagittarius.

Some Sun Aquarius-types are more bizarre than others. I believe this to be dependent on the placement of Uranus. I'm an Aquarius-type myself, with Uranus in Earthy Taurus - I tend to be more of a "feet-on-the-ground" person, a wee bit less bizarre than some others born with Sun in Aquarius. In the case of Ms Cliff, with Uranus in Sagittarius, signifying exaggeration and all that's a wee bit over-the-top, we could expect a decent - or even indecent - showing of bizarre-ness!

Clarice Cliff did not disappoint, in art or in her lifestyle. Carrying on with the married boss, driving one's own car from an early age, working until age 73: these things aren't at all uncommon nowadays; some have become "the norm". But for a woman born into the Victorian era, in the midlands, far from the "wicked" city, her lifestyle must have seemed more than a little bizarre to onlookers. Her artwork too, her designs and use of colour were certainly bizarre, for those times.

Ms Cliff's natal Moon would have been in Taurus whatever time of day or night she was born. Taurus is ruled by Venus, planet of the arts - her gravitation to artistic design comes mainly from here. Taurus' ruler, Venus is in Sagittarius - so we find another echo of the same trend towards exaggeration seen in her Sun ruler's placement. However, Venus is conjunct practical business-minded Saturn which may explain her pull towards designing items for everyday practical use rather than merely for show.