Mara Superior Large Porcelain Charger, “Prize,” Painted With a Cow

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Description

Mara Superior Large Porcelain Charger, “Prize,” Painted with a Cow
Dated 1989

Mara Superior painted this large porcelain charger, titled … Read more Mara Superior Large Porcelain Charger, “Prize,” Painted with a Cow
Dated 1989

Mara Superior painted this large porcelain charger, titled “Prize,” in 1989, and it shows a prize cow standing in profile on a grassy knoll, her dark blue-black coat patterned with white flowers in place of the usual patches. Above her, two white doves fly toward a heart-shaped wreath of red blossoms, crowned with a pair of blue-and-white flowers and tied below with a green bow, which encloses the word “PRIZE” in Roman capitals. Stylized fir trees flank the cow, strokes of blue cloud cross the sky, and red dots are scattered over the white ground.

A black-and-white checkered band frames the well, and the broad rim is painted with a meandering vine bearing green fern-like sprays and red flowerheads with dark centers, the flowers raised in low relief. The decoration is painted in underglaze colors on the white high-fired porcelain beneath a clear glaze, with the deliberately naive drawing that Superior takes from American folk painting.

Dimensions
Diameter: 15½ inches (39.4 cm)
Height: 2 inches (5.1 cm)

Marks
Incised on the reverse “MARA” above “89.”

Provenance
Earle D. Vandekar of Knightsbridge

References
The Marks Project, Dictionary of American Ceramics, 1945 Onward, “Mara Superior.”
Mara Superior: A Retrospective, exhibition catalogue (New Britain, CT: New Britain Museum of American Art, 2006).
Lloyd E. Herman, Art That Works: The Decorative Arts of the Eighties, Crafted in America (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1990).

Historical Context
Mara Superior (born New York, 1951) trained as a painter, taking a B.F.A. at the University of Connecticut in 1975 and an M.A.T. at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, in 1980, and in 1979 she co-founded Pinch Pottery in Northampton, Massachusetts, with Leslie Ferrin and Barbara Walch. Working from her studio in Williamsburg, Massachusetts, she has built her career in high-fired porcelain, treating her platters as painted canvases and drawing on traditional American folk imagery, the history of the decorative arts and, from 2007, politics and the environment. The late 1980s brought her national recognition, with American Crafts Design Awards from The Guild in 1988 and 1989 and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in 1990. Her work is in the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Renwick Gallery, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Museum of Arts and Design, and the Racine Art Museum in Wisconsin holds probably the largest public collection.

“Prize” belongs to this formative decade. It borrows from the American tradition of prize-livestock portraits made for proud nineteenth-century farmers and agricultural fairs, while its doves and heart recall the decoration of Pennsylvania German fraktur.

(Ref: NY11290-licx) See less