Toshiko Takaezu, Untitled (Growth)

Gifted by the artist to the present owner, circa 2007

Toshiko Takaezu’s Grown Forms

Toshiko Takaezu saw herself not so much as making art as growing it. She attributed a certain sentience to her materials–and she spoke of her clay forms ‘dying’ as she bisque-fired them in her kiln. To revitalize them, she gave them color through glazes. It’s no wonder then that seedpods figure prominently in her form language. Nor is it any wonder that, as a Hawaiian-born artist, the concept of destructive renewal and vegetal profusion was especially near to her mind. In the volcanic ecology of her homeland, forests were sometimes immolated by flows of magma only to creep back into verdancy, fertilized by the cinders of their predecessors.

At Cranbrook Academy of Art in the early 1950s, Takaezu started out on a path of making modernist, utilitarian ceramics–teapots and vessels and bowels. But soon her teapots began to sprout. Their spouts multiplied and their bellies morphed mitotically, becoming multi-lobed. What resulted had more to do with the sculptural energies of surrealism and biomorphism than their typological origins would suggest. As the critic and curator Glenn Adamson observed, her method of form-finding often “extended the power of the gesture through multiplication.” Just so, does a plant avail itself of more light by replicating its tendrils and leaves outward and upward. It is fitting, then, that Takaezu began to cohere her multi-lobed vessels into a new stacked typology she referred to as “Tamarinds”—a name taken from a similarly shaped seedpod.

Takaezu’s sculptural ecology seems to have found its ideal conditions in the late 1960s, when she moved to a new studio and home in Quakertown, New Jersey. There she began to dramatically increase her work’s scale, which now became bigger-than-human. She called one family of these larger forms “trees.” Bereft of branches and often marked by charred-looking oxide glazes, her trees were a direct response to the Devastation Forest on the Big Island of Hawai’i, an area scorched by a volcanic cataclysm. They have about them a kind of resonant mournful quality and are often presented in groupings that evoke vigils.

But before the devastation, Takaezu went on a spurt of sculptural form-finding to which Growth belongs. Untitled (Growth), the second tallest Takaezu sculpture to come up at auction, is likely to be one of the only instances of its kind that ever will come to auction. There may be only a single other example of this form in her oeuvre—a 1973 grouping permanently installed in Hawaii. The Growth forms wed her Tamarinds to her Trees, marking an important expansion in her sculptural vocabulary, one which led directly to her late monumental masterworks.

Untitled (Growth) captures the moment when Takaezu’s Tamarind forms began to reach tenuously, skyward, becoming more unstable and dynamically asymmetrical in the process. Monumental in scale, Growth strikes a pose that evokes an unbracketed range of visual references: the human body in motion, seaweed, stacked amphora, and oversized seed pods. It is also an expression of raw sculptural energy. The work’s palindromic symmetry means that it can be read downward or upwards—a root or a sprout. Several light brush marks trail down the sculpture’s flanks, indexing a sensual tentativeness like fingers sliding down hips. Even a straight line turns expressive when laid upon a curved surface. And Takaezu was almost the lone ceramicist with a claim to a significant role in Abstract Expressionism–she turned her forms into three-dimensional paintings–breaking the paradigm of opticality that so bedeviled theorists, such as Clement Greenberg, who took a flat picture plane as their primary reference. Gesturally brushed mark-making and diffuse washes are both evident in the glazing of Growth. Segmented in the middle, the bottom lobe of each half is glazed with auroras of earthy iron-oxide red, creating a rhythmic, organic pulse. Darker, lighter, darker, lighter, larger, smaller, larger, smaller. The sinuously swelling column emphasizes that nature was as much a conceptual as a literal reference for Takaezu.

The work conveys not merely the form, but the feeling of growth. An idea that no one captured more succinctly in words, perhaps, than, Jackson Pollock, when he declared, “I am nature.” More than merely resembling kelp seaweed, Growth expresses the undulating vitalism of something caught up in currents, something with a will to continue propagating and extending itself, something unfurling and pluming, seeking out more light, extending and multiplying—something with the energy of an inveterate lifelong artist, something like Takaezu herself.

- Brecht Wright Gander