Rudolf Staffel

In the mid-1950s, ceramicist Rudolf Staffel, a teacher at Philadelphia's Tyler School of Art, was commissioned by a local patron to create a dinner service in porcelain. Like most American ceramicists of the time, Staffel did not regard porcelain as a material suitable for craft productions. White, translucent, and vitrified, porcelain was firmly associated with decorative arts and dinnerware manufacturers, not studio potters. Unfamiliar with recipes for kaolin clay and necessary firing temperatures, Staffel's porcelain plates proved unsuccessful, but he marveled at their ability to transmit light. Soon, he began to experiment with porcelaneous clay bodies to achieve even stronger effects of translucency.

Initially, Rudi Staffel stained his porcelain vessels with colors, but as his experimentations with the physical properties of porcelain and its inherent translucency progressed, he began to produce bowls and cylindrical pots that were pure white. However, he later occasionally introduced a blue tone into his clay bodies. Either wheel thrown or hand-built, these open forms allow ambient light to enter the interior of the vessel and shine softly through thinner sections of the unglazed walls. "Translucency absorbs light, holds light, and lets some go through," he states; "it stores light, while it transmits light. ... inner light." Because of their luminous effects, the artist calls these containers Light Gatherers, and since their interiors emit light directly through the walls, the viewer is simultaneously made aware of the inside as well as the outside of the pot.

Rudi Staffel's "light gatherers" have walls of varying thickness, since, he declares: "To be aware of translucency, you must have opaqueness. ... It's the contrast in the body of the pot, between thick and thin, that gives the sensation of translucency." Thrown vessels are pinched by fingers or scored with sharp instruments, while the more sculptural, hand-built forms are often layered with pieces of clay to vary the transmittal of light.

The optical effects of dark and light contrasts on a pot's surface are analogous to the results of the "push-pull" theory of abstract painting promoted by Staffel's one-time teacher, Hans Hofmann. By manipulating the thickness of his pigments, the latter created a dynamic visual tension between transparent areas of thinly colored stash that suggest depth, and thickly painted zones that, by contrast, emphasize the flatness of the picture plane. Like Hofmann's abstract paintings, Staffel's porcelain "light gatherers" embody notions of push-pull. The thin, luminous sections of porcelain evoke deep space, while the opaque areas of thicker clay stress the material nature of the pot's wall. However, these essentially pictorial concerns are always balanced by Staffel's innate abilities to create vessels that, in their graceful plasticity, are satisfyingly sculptural.

Jeremy Adamson KPMG Peat Marwick Collection of American Craft: A Gift to the Renwick Gallery (Washington, D.C.: Renwick Gallery, National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, 1994)