Art of the everyday

To call Bill Stern’s Hancock Park apartment a showcase of California pottery would be to radically understate the case: It is a shrine.

Stern is a man possessed. In corners and on shelves, in stacks under and on top of tables, in boxes by the bed, in alcoves and nooks, on counter tops and mantels and finally spilling out on the balcony is every imaginable example of the solid-color commercial pottery that revolutionized American tableware in the 1930s and sparked a nationwide design trend.

Here, in this unlikely setting -- the shaded upper floor of an unassuming duplex -- is a startling collection of more than 3,000 platters, plates, pitchers, bowls, and cups and saucers that have taken over not only the rooms but his life.

Two years ago Stern, executive director of the Museum of California Design, guest-curated the first major exhibition of these utilitarian ceramics, “California Pottery: From Missions to Modernism,” at the San Francisco Museum of Art; Chronicle Books recently published his comprehensive history of the genre by the same name.

In July (and running through January), Stern brought the show of 370 pieces from 47 collections, including his own, to the Autry Museum of Western Heritage in Griffith Park. The elegant and concisely edited displays map the evolution of California’s mass-produced pottery, with pieces culled from many of the 600 potteries that flourished here between 1900 and 1955.

Upon entering Stern’s home in the mottled half-light of midmorning, it is readily apparent that he has the instincts of a painter, one who has an innate sense of what he calls “the arrangement of color.” Everywhere you look, even inside drawers, there are carefully composed still-lifes in cobalt blue, red-orange, yellow, green, turquoise, eggplant, fuchsia and lavender-gray. “I’ll often rearrange these in different groupings, alternating colors,” says Stern, opening a cabinet in his kitchen to reveal hundreds of vintage plates in what is most likely every color they ever came in. “I just love them.”

He comes by his talent naturally. In nearly every room is a painting by Stern’s mother, whose intense colors are a direct mirror of the pottery on display around it. “I didn’t know that the pottery pieces I was buying were the same colors in my mother’s paintings,” Stern says. “Through collecting, I was reconnecting to my own childhood.”

His collecting began in 1980, and the obsession was immediate. Until then, his kitchen cabinets were filled with mostly serviceable white dishes, but he couldn’t help himself when he saw a set of vibrantly colored Vernon Kilns plates at a neighbor’s estate sale. He brought them home, cleared a space on a shelf, stood back, took a look, and was hooked.

The cabinet, he says, cried “more!” And more and more. The colors were jubilant; the room came alive. Stern remembers a sign that hung over one of the antiques markets that he frequented during the height of his collecting: “If you can’t be happy,” it read, “at least be cheerful.”

Soon enough, he began to learn everything he could about California pottery and its amazing potters, becoming an expert and now a published historian on the genre, which made an art form of the ordinary. Stern is also an enthusiastic educator on the subject.

“People take for granted what they see everyday,” says Stern, motioning to the upper floor of another Spanish Colonial Revival apartment complex nearby. He points to the tiled lip of a chimney festooned with several small tiles arranged in a simple, spare pattern.

“That’s where it began, in a way,” he says. “It’s those Spanish-Moorish colors used in geometric shapes on glazed tiles that literally paved the way.” As Stern notes in his book, the first great cultural fusion in California pottery design took place with the 1915 Panama-California International Exposition in San Diego. The architect Bertram Goodhue ornamented the Balboa Park buildings with glazed Spanish-Moorish tiles, and in short order designers reconfigured the patterns and replaced the pale Hispano-Moresque colors with bold Mexican colors.

The next big event, he writes, occurred in the 1930s with the solid-color revolution -- pioneered by J.A. Bauer Pottery Co., Catalina Pottery, Brayton Laguna and Pacific Pottery -- that swept the country and sparked further innovations in form and decoration. Everyone wanted these cheap and cheerful tablewares.

“The solid-color pottery kitchenware, dinnerware and gardenware we now take for granted was a shocking innovation,” writes Stern. “In America ‘good’ dinnerware was French or English porcelain -- an ivory background decorated with an elaborate floral or geometric pattern -- and everyday dishes were cheaper American imitations of it.” But the mass-produced California pottery, he explains, was made possible by aesthetic and technological innovations introduced by commercial potteries around 1930. By adding white mineral talc to the region’s red clay, makers could achieve brilliant saturated glazes that could reach an even, craze-free hardness -- an advance not previously possible in low-firing.

But it took the Depression to popularize the pottery. To recover the loss of their construction market -- roof and decorative tiles and terra-cotta facing -- they turned to dinnerware and other low-priced pottery in vibrant, cheerful colors for the home. The imitations were quick to follow, most famously in the West Virginia-produced Fiestaware.

With the market eventually flooded by even cheaper European and Asian knockoffs, the production of California pottery steadily declined after World War II -- and along with it the careers of many of its gifted potters.

From the late ‘50s until the mid-’90s, Barbara Willis disappeared from the pottery scene after years of creating some of California pottery’s most remarkable works: She is behind the mass production of between 350,000 to 500,000 pieces, as best she can estimate.

The surviving pieces are among the finest examples of the Modernist aesthetic translated into wet clay and glaze. Though her plates and vases were mass-produced, to the untrained eye they appear to be one of a kind, bearing all the traits of studio pottery.

Her simple geometries emblazoned with eye-popping colors on rough bisques are highly prized collectibles, some 50 years after she made them. A trio of bright red, yellow and blue pieces from the mid-’40s -- the height of her career -- were chosen as the key image in the Autry show’s literature and advertisements.

Now 86, Willis’ sea-blue eyes flash when she modestly recounts her early success. “I’m a gal who got lucky,” she says. “But I’ve never worked for anyone but myself. Ever.”

After studying at UCLA in the early ‘40s with master potter Laura Andreson, another key figure in the movement, Willis started a small commercial pottery firm on her family property near today’s Farmers Market at Third and Fairfax. She was soon making $25,000 a year in an era when, in her words, “My girlfriends were making $1,200 a year. I was very successful, especially for a woman.”

Willis decided it was time to move on. “It was just a business and it was over with,” she says with characteristic candor. She closed her pottery in 1958 and started an artificial flower import business -- it too flourished. “You find a hole in the market and you fill it, she says simply.” She didn’t sit down with a mound of clay for 40 years. Until recently. “Wow” is Willis’ one-word reaction to the current market prices of her pieces -- some fetch upward of $1,200.

Willis has spent the last few years buying back as much of her work as possible. Grouped by color, her work is characterized by a technique that she invented -- one using a course, sand-like material made from pre-fired terra cotta called “grog.”

It is with grog that Willis was able to achieve a distinctive lined texture that had never been seen, and hasn’t been successfully copied since. Many tried, of course. Bill Stern has a display of Willis imitations in his collection, but “no one could get it right,” Stern says.

“I can’t get over this; it’s so ridiculous,” she says of her reemergence as the grand dame of Southern California’s commercial Modernist pottery. Her cast pottery, though sold at the time of production at high end stores like Gump’s, Lord & Taylor and Bullocks, was produced in the cheapest way possible. She now sits at a tiny fluorescent-lighted work table in her Malibu garage, separated from the constant flow of cars on Pacific Coast Highway by a garage door. Her white Cadillac takes up most of the room, leaving just enough space for a small kiln to be tucked into a far corner. She works four days a week. “I do it now for therapy.”

Ever the entrepreneur, she has been making delicate fired-clay pendants, hand dying the beads and stringing them herself. It’s no surprise that these too have become highly collectible.

“I still have sales all the time here at the house. Anyone can come -- just look me up, I’m listed,” she says as she uncovers stacks of her signature glaze-and-bisque pots at the ready for her periodic home sales.

The Autry museum gift shop, which is carrying her work for the length of the show, says new pieces by Willis are selling well -- more than 40 years after her kilns were closed.

The shop is also carrying the work of a new generation of potters, including works by a man who is something of a Willis disciple, Andrew Frank, a dentist by trade -- and, by coincidence, Stern’s dentist -- and a potter by passion.

After seeing Willis’ work at a show some years back, Frank was taken by her unusual ability to work bisque and glaze in concert.

Then, at a recent charity function at the Autry, he happened to be carrying one of his own bisque-and-glaze pieces that he creates as “my homage to Barbara Willis’ work.”

Stern introduced Frank to Willis. Who, she wanted to know, was the potter who made the beautiful blue-and-black vase he was clutching? Frank gave Willis his piece. “I love Andy’s work,” Willis says, as she pulls the piece from its place among the shelves displaying her own work.

This resurgence of a medium often relegated to the category of “craft” couldn’t be more pleasing to Stern.

“Part of my role,” he says, “is to transmit this knowledge of a heretofore unacknowledged part of American culture. I firmly believe that every human being has to be taught that what they see wasn’t always there.”