🎧 The Small, Tight, and Precious World of Richard Notkin Brandon Reintjes

Appears in the March 2023 issue of Ceramics Monthly.

The audio file for this article was produced by the Ceramic Arts Network staff and not read by the author.

Richard Notkin reflects the influence of Yixing more so than almost any other contemporary ceramic artist. Notkin relates, “At first, I was attracted to Yixing teapots for their small scale, detail, composition, as well as their narrative qualities. The wide range of imagery, from purely geometric forms to totally organic studies of fruit and bundles of firewood or bamboo, is remarkable, demonstrating a phenomenal explosion of individual creativity. Yixing teapots are seemingly small and quiet at first encounter, but closer inspection and introspection clearly reveal that these pieces are indeed powerful works of art . . . It is of the utmost importance, however, that my pieces retain a totally separate cultural identity, that they reflect our contemporary civilization’s imagery and speak of our society’s current situation.” As the late writer and ceramic artist Marvin Sweet notes in his catalog The Yixing Effect: Echoes of a Chinese Scholar,¹ “[Notkin] was the first to successfully adopt the artistic precedents instilled within the Yixing aesthetic, and so any discussion of contemporary American artists inspired by Yixing ware must begin with him.” Notkin has been an advocate of and promulgator for the Yixing tradition throughout his decades-long career, introducing hundreds of artists to Yixing teapots. 

The History of Yixing

Yixing (also I-Hsing, and Ixing) is situated to the west of Taihu, the great lake in Jiangsu Province (west of Shanghai), and the term has come to refer to the earth from that area, most famously a distinctive reddish-brown or purplish stoneware that has properties unlike any other clay body elsewhere. The most-prized Yixing teapots are made from the choicest grade of these stonewares, known as zisha or purple sand, which is composed of fine microparticles that act more like a stiff slurry than a composite body. It has different ceramic properties, which require great skill on the part of the potter, necessitating paddling and slab work to form the clay, wet luting parts together, and occasionally using press molds for detail. Zisha is sufficiently vitreous to prevent the tea contents from seeping to the exterior of the teapot, but retains just enough surface porosity when fired to gradually absorb tea sediments. For this reason, Yixing pots are never washed but gently rinsed and, with repeated use, older pots are distinguished by their remarkable luster and complex patination. 

The first Yixing teapots appeared during the Ming Dynasty (1368–1644 CE), beginning in the Zhengde period (1506–1521), and gaining strong momentum in the Wanli period (1573–1619). Yixing potters were some of the first ceramic artists in China to sign their wares, either with incised calligraphy or using carved seals and chops pressed into the wet clay. Teapots became the specialty objects of monks and scholars who lived in the Taihu lake region, and their history is lovingly intertwined. Teapots made by master potters have acted as archetypes and prototypes recreated by successive generations ever since. We know of the teapots of Gong Chun (active 1512–1517), Li Maolin (1567–1619), Shi Dabin (1573–1648) and his student Li Zhongfang, Hui Mencheng (active 1621–1722), and others through the copies, copies of copies, and—rarely—through the original. Later, Yixing teapots traveled to Europe with tea imports in the 1600 and 1700s, with pieces developed specifically as export ware. 

Embracing Ceramics

Notkin began studying at the Kansas City Art Institute in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1966, the same year that Mao Zedong launched the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China. Notkin moved to the ceramics department with Ken Ferguson in 1969.While American art students embraced new ideas, new practices and materials, and increased freedoms, the Chinese population was encouraged to rid itself of the Four Olds: old customs, old culture, old habits, and old ideas. 

Notkin pursued an MFA at the University of California, Davis (UC Davis), in 1971. His mantra “small, tight, and precious” is an axiom that could just as easily be applied to his love of Yixing teapots. Originally a criticism of his work while a graduate student, this approach is core to Notkin’s artistic identity. He notes, “This shop-worn phrase now seemed a compliment, an affirmation that my art was somehow different . . . And I began to see that maybe my art wasn’t small enough, tight enough, or precious enough to satisfy my own convictions and passions.”²

At UC-Davis, Notkin was Robert Arneson’s teaching assistant. “Each quarter, we would pack the beginning ceramic students onto a bus and travel to San Francisco’s M. H. DeYoung Museum, where we would head straight for the Avery Brundage Collection of Asian Ceramics.”³ The Brundage Collection introduced him to Yixing pots and netsuke as well—those intricately carved miniature ivories traditionally used as accessories in Japanese men’s dress—and their intense craft and small scale had an immediate impact. Notkin writes, “I have always believed that the aesthetic impact of a work of art is not proportional to its size alone, but also to its content. The teapots of Yixing (as well as earlier influences on my work, such as the intricate netsuke carvings of Japan) validate my belief in the power of diminutive scale. As the poet economizes words, I have found a similar means of expression in ceramics through the conservation of materials.”⁴ 

Development and Tradition

Following his graduation, Notkin moved to the small community of Myrtle Point, Oregon, in 1974 (he moved every 20 years—to Helena, Montana, in 1994, then to Vaughn, Washington, in 2014). Throughout the 1970s, he created miniature, Funk-inspired tableaus that carried issue-driven narratives about his concerns for society. He notes, “These ideas and images of Yixing teapots percolated through my mind for several years.”⁵ Notkin’s move away from glaze around this time was a momentous development and aligned his aesthetic more closely to Yixing. He says, “Around 1975, I began to get rid of low-fire clay and shiny glazes because they obscured the [surface] details. I began to work with colored porcelain and austere surfaces. Finally, I realized I didn’t even need color, and that the quality of the carving, the minutiae on the surface, was enough to carry the piece. The challenge was to find a clay with enough integrity to carry that detail. I realized Yixing wares were left unglazed because the clay had so much integrity, particularly the purple-sand stoneware.”⁶ 

The Cultural Revolution lasted a decade until Mao’s death in 1976. It was a terrible time for Yixing master potters, who were not allowed to sign or recreate their own art, but were made to produce the most pedestrian ware along with other factory workers for the people. Nothing that was in any way part of individual art or bourgeois thinking was allowed by the post-revolutionary state. The loss of tradition was so devastating that the Yixing Purple Sand Factory #1, which employed thousands in its heyday during the early Republic (1911–1938) when Yixing wares were exported in great quantity to Japan, Southeast Asia, Europe, and the US, was left with less than an estimated 400 workers and had an even smaller number of potters (less than 60) designated as master artisans. In December of 1991 and January 1992, Notkin traveled to China for the first time, accompanied by the Taiwanese artist Ah Leon (Chen, Ching-Liang), who introduced him to the factories, artists, and culture of Yixing in depth. Unsurprisingly, Notkin came home with 34 teapots. Following his 1991 trip, Notkin returned in 1996, 1998, 2001, 2005, and 2019.

A Sense of Homage

Notkin first started collecting Yixing teapots around 1978, gradually assembling a visual encyclopedia that now numbers more than 125 pieces. In the early 1980s, when he was really trying “to focus on the basic elements of the cup,” he started thinking more and more about Yixing teapots. As glaze and a multi-colored palette exited his work, the first pieces with an express kinship to Yixing ware were created in early 1983, with several teapot series, including his iconic Cooling Tower Teapots, Cube Skull Teapots, Crate Teapots, Dice Teapots, Light Bulb Teapots, and Landform Teapots. These were followed in 1984 with the introduction of the Oval Curbside Teapot and Hexagonal Curbside Teapot series. The teapot became his main expressive vehicle during this period. Author Gordon McConnell notes that, “Between 1983 and 1995, Richard Notkin’s work consisted almost exclusively of Yixing-inspired teapots,”⁷ an amazing 12-year span of intense productivity. Notkin began to think of his teapots sitting on people’s kitchen tables as a continuation of his tableau approach.⁷ 

Although Notkin’s finished pieces bear an affinity to Yixing, his methods are idiosyncratic and vastly different. He is celebrated throughout the ceramics community as an expert mold maker and slip caster, and has presented numerous workshops on these technologies. He spends countless hours creating texture and detail on each of the models he casts, taking as long as six months to design and fabricate the component parts of a teapot series, creating complex plaster molds of bodies, handles, spouts, lids, etc., then casting and assembling the myriad parts that comprise each uniquely finished piece. This is in sharp contrast to the handwork, slab forming, and paddling that define Yixing ware. He says, “Although I closely imitate the scale, formats, colors, and textures of the unglazed Yixing wares, my intention is to borrow from these formal qualities with honesty and a sense of homage,” and it is easy to name the historical precedents he references. 

For instance, his single chamber Cooling Tower Teapot #5 (1983) recalls the form of a 19th-century teapot in the form of a rice measure, while Cooling Towers Teapot (1983) references the double-chambered pots imitating two tea canisters of slightly different size bound by a trompe l’oeil ribbon or two adjacent scrolls bound together. His Lightbulb Teapot #1 (1983) adopts the form of pear-shaped Yixing pots, while Hexagonal Curbside Teapot #1 (1984) draws inspiration from the innovative hexagonal-bodied Yixing pots, particularly those with a ribbed-bamboo design. His noted Heart Teapot series was inspired by many variations of the Buddha’s Hand Citron teapot. This longstanding series, which is arguably his best known, explores the origin of conflict in human culture. Notkin has said, “The seeds of all conflict are found in the human heart.”

Most intriguing perhaps is Notkin’s affinity for the Seeds and Nuts teapot variations, alternately known as the One Thousand Nuts, One Hundred Seeds, Hundred Fruits, or—as Marvin Sweet calls it—the Pomegranate Teapot with Nuts and Fruit. It incorporates a pomegranate-shaped body decorated with a water-chestnut or caltrop handle; a lotus-shoot spout; and feet made from a walnut, lychee nut, and a lotus pod. It has a distinctive lid mimicking an upside-down mushroom—the lingzhi fungus important to Taoist belief. This teapot form originates in the Ming Dynasty and, though unattributed, draws on the precedent of Chen Mingyuan (active 1650 to 1700), whose tromp l’oeil basket of nuts and seeds in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, has inspired generations of potters, including Richard Notkin. 

Notkin has emulated this pot several times—including his Cube Skull Teapot #6A (1986), with the mushroom lid transformed into a nuclear mushroom cloud rising like an evil thought-bubble from the skull that forms the cup—but most successfully in his Nuclear Nuts Teapot, Variation #10 (1991). This teapot includes almonds, peanuts, and filberts; a spout crafted of cascading dice (an illusion that suggests motion, as if the dice are caught mid-roll, a symbol of Cold War brinkmanship); and an electric lightning-bolt handle. Or again with Nuclear Nuts Teapot Variation #13 (2001), in the collection of the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, which features a compressed spherical body, handle of interlocking dice, spout of telescopic oil barrels, lid in the form of a mushroom cloud, and feet that are an assortment of nuts. 

Commitments

Notkin’s social and political commitments are lifelong. He came of age following the twin horrors of the Holocaust and atomic bombings—unrelated events, but both magnifications of humanity’s ability to destroy itself.⁸ 

Notkin recalls Auschwitz survivors attending synagogue in Chicago, especially the dance instructor who taught him the Hora grapevine step and was a teenage survivor of Auschwitz. He quotes her as saying, “When the Nazis first began to come to power, the Jewish community said they were meshugah (Yiddish for crazy, insane)—it could not go further, and did nothing. Always be alert, aware, and active,” she cautioned, advice that stayed with him his entire life and serves as the basis for his activism.

The Holocaust and atomic bombings—aside from the argument on what degree they are related or not—left an indelible mark on Notkin, and their collective horrors permeate his consciousness and art making. The Holocaust especially remains an essential lens to understand Notkin’s work. Specifically, Legacy—a pile of press-molded stoneware ears heaped together (one half of the Passages installation, now in the collection of the Portland Art Museum)—recalls a grotesque pile of bodies, a mass grave, heartbreakingly personal items like shoes mounded at concentration camps—the tangible evidence of millions of murders. Notkin’s work was presented in a solo exhibition at the Holocaust Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida, titled “Peace/War, Survival/Extinction: An Artist’s Plea for Sanity,” during the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts (NCECA) conference in 2011. 

Notkin’s childhood was also shaped by a decade of deep social unrest and violence unparalleled in history. He specifically recalls the threat of nuclear annihilation that was the Cuban Missile Crisis—those 13 days between October 16 and October 28, 1962, when the fate of the world and humanity seemed to hang in the balance. Notkin was 14, an age old enough to understand the insanity of the Cold War, but impressionable enough to internalize a strong emotional response against war that would resonate with him throughout his life. This was followed by an almost unimaginable chain of events: the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963, anti-war protests beginning in 1964, years of racial violence after the Civil Rights Act passed that same year, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy, and rioting at the Democratic National Convention in 1968, and the Kent State Massacre in 1970. Each event built on his awareness and rejection of humanity’s capacity for atrocity. Author and ceramic artist Lisa Reinertson writes, “Richard Notkin’s social criticism carries the weight of outrage, yet his powerful images of nuclear explosions, anti-war themes, and capitalist corruption are stealthily presented in an exquisite package of great beauty and almost incomprehensible technical mastery—the power of the greatest of Goya’s social critiques delivered in the form of a functional teapot.”⁸ 

Notkin evolved into a staunch pacifist. He sees his role as an artist aligned with Gandhi’s concept that enough grains of sand can halt the mightiest machine. Notkin has an ongoing commitment to exposing the insanity and inhumanity of war. In an undated artist statement, Notkin states, “I was an active draft resistor in 1969, having returned my draft card to the Selective Service System along with a letter explaining why I would not participate in the US military during its disastrous involvement in Vietnam. I voluntarily forfeited my college-student deferment to the military draft at that time to protest the war, and was later called into an induction physical examination, but was found ‘mentally unfit.’ I guess I was not considered killer enough for the army.” 

All in the Details

Notkin’s 20th Century Solutions Teapot series from 2003 includes his most sculptural, or maybe least functional, teapots, depicting in exacting detail the heaped and shattered ruins of bombed-out buildings. The functional aspects of the teapot are all but lost, even as they are obsessively included. Distinguishing the stack of bricks serving as the spout from the stack of bricks serving as a handle is difficult. The 20th Century Solutions Teapots are, in a sense, a return to the tableau—a scene laid out for the viewer, a vehicle to carry issue-driven narratives about Notkin’s concerns for society, a moralistic story depicting an event. Here, the viewer encounters the moment after the bombs have fallen, the second after the dust has settled, an uninhabited wasteland of a destroyed civilization. They are also some of the last teapots he made before focusing more exclusively on his saggar-fired tile murals, first begun in 1999 with The Gift (from the Passages installation), and continuing with his piece All Nations Have Their Moment of Foolishness (2006), It Is No Use Shouting (2008), The Last Syllable of Recorded Time (2010), Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow (2011), as well as his recent Hill Jar and Trumpolini series. 

The title, 20th Century Solutions, of course, is taken from the axiom of “using 20th century solutions to solve 21st century problems”—a criticism of humanity underscoring the necessity of global governance, interconnectivity, unity and cooperation, equality, and justice to imagine our shared future. Notkin’s artist statement elaborates, “We have stumbled into the 21st Century with the technologies of ‘Star Wars’ and the emotional maturity of cavemen. If we can’t find more creative solutions to solving worldwide social and political problems than sending young men and women to shred and incinerate one another’s flesh with weapons of ever-increasing efficiency, we will not survive to celebrate the passage into the 22nd.” 

His Jewish identity, status as a draftable male in the 1960s, and disapproval of the foreign policy during the Reagan, dual Bush, and Trump years, have each contributed to him feeling personally threatened by movements and decisions larger than him. He says, “I fight the dark side with my creative side,”⁹ through the tiny form of the teapot. “I used to think I could make a teapot that could change the world,” he muses. Maybe he has. 

the author Brandon Reintjes is senior curator at the Missoula Art Museum. He writes about contemporary ceramics for Ceramics Monthly and Ceramics Art and Perception, and recently wrote about the postwar craft movement in Montana for The Journal of Modern Craft.

Notes:

1 Marvin Sweet, The Yixing Effect: Echoes of a Chinese Scholar (Duxbury, Massachusetts: The Art Complex Museum, 2006).

2 Richard Notkin, “Fear of Failure as a (Gasp) Positive Indicator,” Studio Potter 39, no. 2 (Summer/Fall 2011).

3 Richard Notkin, “Statement on my choice of the Yixing Aesthetic in my Work,” (Undated).

4 Richard Notkin, “Journey to Yixing,” Studio Potter 21, no. 1 (December 1992).

5 Richard Notkin, “Artist’s Statement on the Yixing Series,” (1985).

6 Patricia Failing, “Richard Notkin: Conduits for Social Meaning,” American Craft (April/May 1991).

7 Gordon McConnell, “Richard Notkin’s Passages: Art, Allegory, and the Atomic Bomb,” Passages, (Billings, Montana: Yellowstone Art Museum, 1999).

8 Lisa Reinertson, Bay Area Clay: A Legacy of Social Consciousness (City of Industry, CA: Laguna Clay, 2017).

9 Sandi Blake, “Artist of the West: Poetry and Prose in Clay,” Big Sky Journal (Arts 2009).

Additional Notes:

10 Antoinette Badenhorst, “Peace/War, Survival/Extinction: An Artist’s Plea for Sanity,” Ceramics: Art and Perception No. 86 (2011).

11 Terese Tse Bartholomew, Everything you need to know about Yixing pottery, Christie’s. March 20, 2019, www.christies.com/features/A-guide-to-Yixing-teapots-9709-3.aspx, (accessed 3/29/2022).

12 Terese Tse Bartholomew, I-Hsing Ware. New York: China House Gallery/China Institute in America, (1977).

13 Terese Tse Bartholomew, The Art of the Yixing Potter: The K.S. Lo Collection, Flagstaff House Museum of Tea Ware, (1990).

14 March 20, 2019. https://www.christies.com/features/A-guide-to-Yixing-teapots-9709-3.aspx. accessed 3/29/2022.

15 Michael Dunas and Sarah Bodine, “The Precarious Scale of Justice: Richard Notkin’s Precious Protest,” American Ceramics: The Ceramic Art Quarterly Volume 5, number 3, (1987).

16 Vicki Halper, Strong Tea: Richard Notkin and the Yixing Tradition, Seattle: Seattle Art Museum, (1990). 

17 Louana M. Lackey, “Not Just Another Pretty Vase: New Work by Richard Notkin,” Ceramics Monthly (October 2000).

18 K.S. Lo, The Stonewares of Yixing, From The Ming Period to the Present Day, London: Sotheby’s Publications (1986).

19 Marvin Sweet, The Yixing Effect. Beijing: Foreign Language Press (2001).

20 Marvin Sweet, “The Yixing Effect,” Ceramics Monthly (January 1999).

21 Ran Zwigenberg, “What do the Holocaust and Hiroshima — the two big events of WW II — share in common?” History News Network, https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/160240, (accessed 5/10/2022).

22 Author’s email correspondence with the artist (April 4, 2022).

23 Author’s interview with the artist (April 20, 2022).