Despite last night's restless sleep (thanks to spring storms rolling across North Texas), I find myself unable to nod off tonight. An Eva Zeisel "Lo-Ball" glass full of Crown Royal Black has done little to help matters. Now I'm sleepless and worrying about empty calories.
I stare across the room and think about Murphy. Not my darling, gonzo dog, but his namesake, Red Wing designer Charles E. Murphy.
Every once in a while, a collector feels a need to justify his passions to the uninitiated. It's easy to talk about Russel Wright and Eva Zeisel. Major exhibitions have been organized and books have been published celebrating their work. Noncollectors understand museum retrospectives. Murphy remains, to my mind, underappreciated, largely unknown outside of Red Wing Pottery circles. His work both responded to and influenced design trends of the day. What I like most about his designs is the way they pushed the limits of production pottery, playing with glaze color and the elasticity of clay in fanciful and unexpected ways.
Take the two Decorator Line pieces above, from 1959. Murphy had already explored a host of 1950s concepts by this time. He had developed shapes we might today call "Sputnik modern" or "Jetsons chic" -- shapes inspired by atomic energy, science fiction, and biomorphic abstraction. Think of his "Smart Set" dinnerware, with its metal-wire stands and elongated ceramic handles, his tripod-footed vases, bowls and candle holders, or his "spiky" bowls. It's hard not to think of trips to the moon or alien life forms. And the glazes Red Wing applied during this time -- especially the then-popular fleck glazes -- don't seem like they could have emerged from any other decade. Their hues reflect a sunny, Donna Reed optimism, except with a slight edge. The randomness of those flecks represents for me (and remember, I am sleepless and drinking) cultural anxiety about nuclear fallout, Communism, Beatnik poetry, and foreign cinema. The irregularity of the glaze contradicts the conformity of mass production, and the tension makes the objects come alive.
But back to those two pieces. Murphy's Crystalline Burnt Orange glaze is not a 50s shade. It presages the ochres, avocado greens, and harvest golds of the 60s and 70s. The iridescence and surprising textures in the glaze suggest both sunshine and magma, sky and earth. When combined with Murphy's lithe and, frankly, impractical forms (the compote is top-heavy; the bottle vase's narrow aperture defies use), the result is aethetic surprise. What are these things? What do I do with them? This looks nothing like my mother's fruit bowl! The viewer questions the object, challenges the authority that created it. In these two vessels I see a glimmer of the decade to come -- the era of change and confusion so brilliantly captured in Mad Men (the next season of which, by the way, I can't believe has been postponed). This is Murphy modernism at its apex.
And now, my Crown Royal kicking in, I look over at the other Murphy, the gonzo dog I mentioned. He sleeps on the couch, blissfully unconcerned about the meaning his insomniac dad could find in the shelves of pottery a few feet away. He sleeps, not worried about how he will reflect the Zeitgeist. Instead, he dreams of how he will once and for all get even with Mary Charles' evil cat, the striped devil who mewls outside the dining room window, reminding him that she is free to roam the neighborhood while he is stuck inside with a bunch of ugly orange pots which he doesn't even know are orange because dogs are color blind as well as stupid. Murphy hates that damn cat. I can't say that I blame him.
