Free-Form Bowl

The transmission of European ideals about recent modernism and vanguard ceramic production to an American context at the end of the 1930s is of critical importance for the mid-century history of the now legendary studio pottery movement in the United States. The husband-and-wife team of potters Gertrud and Otto Natzler (he was usually the glazer, and she the potter), who emigrated from their native Austria to Los Angeles in 1939, are part of this history. On this free-form bowl, the Natzlers applied one of their favorite glazes—an iridescent black inspired by German Bauhaus ceramics of the mid-1920s. The vessel's shape, on the other hand, recalls the organic, curvilinear forms of Surrealism.