A pottery book like no other!      Cowan's story in full context      Carefully researched and documented description of the Alfred University program in ceramic engineering; the gradual acceptance of Modernism in America (represented by the Cleveland arts scene); the unpredictable twists and turns in the life of a potter (R. Guy Cowan)       372-pg hdbk     Over 1200 illustrations      Nominated (1997) for a prize in distinguished scholarship, given annually by the Renwick Gallery, Smithsonian Institution      Mark Bassett's first book on ceramics      Co-author Victoria Naumann Peltz curated the Cowan Pottery Museum collection at Rocky River (OH) Public Library for more than 25 years (a position from which she retired in June 2002)       $65 plus shipping

"Impressive... The amount of information is encyclopedic, the research remarkable, and the range of pottery pictured exhilarating... The photos are copious, sharp and color accurate... Please don't let the price put you off. This is the book that will stand for a long time, if not forever, as THE definitive work on Cowan."

--Harvey Duke, The Daze, Spring 1998
 

"This book stands leagues ahead of the horde of 'collectors' books' that vie for the attention and dollars of pottery dealers and collectors. In terms of scholarship, detail, and insight there are few competitors... An exemplary and scholarly study not only of the Cowan Pottery but the national shift from studio pottery to industrial art... A work as expressive in its own way of a knowledge and love of ceramics as are the products of the Cowan phenomenon it documents."

--Jim Murphy, Ohio History, Summer-Autumn 1999

    Complete Cowan Pottery glaze and shape guide

    Biographies and designs of Cowan artists and students, including Russell Barnett Aitken, Elizabeth Andersen, Whitney Atchley, Arthur E. Baggs, Alexander Blazys, Paul Bogatay, R. Guy Cowan, Ralph Howard Cowan, Edris Eckhardt, Thelma Frazier, Waylande Gregory, Albert Drexler Jacobson, Katherine Barnes Jenkins, Raoul Josset, Paul Manship, Herman Matzen, F. Luis Mora, Charles E. Murphy, Elmer Novotny, Margaret Postgate, Horace Potter, Guy L. Rixford, Viktor Schreckengost, Elsa Vick Shaw, Walter Sinz, Frank Nelson Wilcox, and Edward Winter 

    History, definition, and examples of fine art and crafts by these and other members of the Cleveland School

     Other potters and potteries who feature prominently in this book include Charles Fergus Binns, Camark, Central New York, Cleveland Pottery and Tile, Frankoma, W.S. George (East Palestine), Gladding McBean, Haeger, Anton Lang, Marblehead, Muncie, Onondaga, Pfaltzgraff, Red Wing, Roseville, Scio, Sebring, Selden Bybee, Shenango, Syracuse China, Weller, and Western Stoneware 

    Institutions who figure in the story are Alfred University, the American Ceramic Society, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Cleveland School (now Institute) of Art, the National Ceramics Exhibitions, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Rowfant Club, Technical High School (Cleveland) 

     Detailed discussions of figural flower frogs, Cowan lamps, the Art Deco movement, the story of Waylande Gregory, the fine art medium of "ceramic sculpture," later copies and reproductions of Cowan shapes and glazes, and the three different styles of the famous Cowan Jazz Bowl 
 

© 2009 Mark Bassett
Updated  8/9/09