Ceramic art has been undervalued for too long

The use of ‘Ceramic’ rather than ‘Ceramics’ in the title of this book indicates Paul Greenhalgh’s passionate belief that ‘ceramic is a thing in itself: a many-headed but nevertheless singular entity, with an on-going intellectual discourse’ which he christens ‘the ceramic continuum’. He believes that this has been ‘actively denied its place as an artistic practice’ and that ‘its exclusion from the canon of art history is squarely to do with money, class and race’.

The book is a prodigious attempt to right that wrong. Ceramic, Greenhalgh says, has been seen as ‘too cheap’ (though the sale of the Qianlong Vase in 2010 for £43 million might change that), is ‘available to the point of vulgarity’, and ‘its formation is bound up with foreign cultures which ruffle nationalist ideology’. While art historians are no doubt a dubious bunch, the charge of nationalism seems curious, given that art history as a discipline was itself introduced to this country from abroad.