A shape 379 Yo Yo vase hand painted on glaze in Farmhouse, 1931.
ALTHOUGH Clarice Cliff’s influences were many and varied, it is clear that some of the main sources of inspiration for her work were from London and Europe. The 1925 ‘Exposition des Arts Décoratifs et Industrial’ in Paris launched a new era in design and style. The florid motifs and whiplash lines of the Art Nouveau and Arts & Crafts movements were swept away in favour of abstraction, angularity, bold colours and dramatic new forms. Whilst these motifs and ideas took some time to filter across to the more sedate world of the Potteries, Clarice’s character and passion for design ensured she was at the forefront of fashion and taste.
Clarice’s brief secret trip to Paris with Colley Shorter fed her love of modernism and flooded her senses with styles, colours and forms. The influence of Cubism, Orphism, Abstraction and other key movements were manifested in her work for years to come. In some cases, direct reference can be made to a specific designer, artist or a particular painting. This, together with her brief placement at London’s Royal College of Art in 1927, combined to instil in her the seeds of an exciting new style for pottery far removed from the more sombre ceramics Staffordshire produced at this time.
In London and Paris, Clarice was exposed to a dazzling array of fashionable shops and even more fashionable shoppers, art galleries, museums and exhibitions. During her time in London she is known to have visited an exhibition of ‘Modern French and Russian Designs for Costume and Scenery’ held at the Victoria and Albert Museum. The exhibition offered illustrations and designs by Georges Braque, Leon Bakst and Pablo Picasso: a riot of colour and form shown in a swirl of fantasy with stylised landscapes, oversized blooms, trees and houses, all of which would appear in Clarice’s own work. Furthermore, the London museums offered access to hundreds of other items from civilisations old and new, from Greek vases to Egyptian masks, providing her with countless influences rarely incorporated into Staffordshire ceramics.
Clarice’s thirst for new and fresh ideas in design was supported by her increasing and carefully selected library, stored in a locked cabinet in her studio at Newport. Assembled from 1927 onwards, it marked the start of a period of tremendous personal artistic growth and productivity. It comprised various significant books, journals, and folios on decoration and design, none more important to her than the collection of works by leading French designer Eduard Benedictus.
The cover to Eduard Benedictus’s folio of designs Nouvelles Variations – Soixante-Quinze Motifs Décoratifs en Vingt Planches par Benedictus, formerly the property of Clarice Cliff, 1927.
Benedictus was an industrial artist and designer who created folios of custom-printed artwork, using the pochoir process. This enabled the use of vivid colours, and was intended for fabrics, wallpaper or other interior decorative uses. The folios were filled with groups of designs depicting floral, landscape or abstract motifs in bright modern colours. Clarice saw in them a rich vein of ideas that would translate beautifully onto her wares. From her extensive output of over 270 designs in the ‘Bizarre years’ there are several that may be seen as copies, for example Appliqué Lucerne, Sharks Teeth and Butterfly. In essence, however, Clarice only borrowed parts of the designs rather than plagiarised the whole image, which often provided a starting point from which her own signature design would emerge.
A pair of shape 279 vases hand painted on glaze in Sunburst, 1930.
Similarly the work of Eric Bagge was to provide the inspiration for one of Clarice’s best loved early abstracts. In 1929 Bagge created a design for a textile rug with a series of curved lines and dots, shown in an issue of Mobilier et Décoration. It was in monochrome so the stylish black, grey and red palette was Clarice’s own. As her original pattern name is lost, it naturally became known as Carpet.
A further striking abstract in similar colours was produced, and is now entitled Café. Its simple repeat of grey, black and red panels with contrasting red dots is believed to have been inspired by a daring 1928 interior scheme for the Café de l’Aubette in Strasbourg, designed by Swiss-born Sophie Taeuber-Arp in collaboration with Theo van Doesburg. If this was the starting point for Clarice’s interpretation, it once more shows a designer firmly in tune with the rise of international decorative arts.
Whilst some of her French-inspired shapes were intrinsically copies, Clarice clearly had a gift for turning the concept into a full range. There had long been a tradition of cross-over between the silver and ceramic arts, and many of Clarice’s greatest forms owe a debt to leading silversmiths of the period. Clarice regularly took journals such as Mobilier et Décoration which gave her source material from the world’s leading designers. The magazine showcased the latest designs in all mediums and Clarice is known to have used a number of pieces for key ranges in her work, most notably the Stamford and Conical shape ware.
An original pochoir print design by Eduard Benedictus from the folio of designs Nouvelles Variations – Soixante-Quinze Motifs Décoratifs en Vingt Planches par Benedictus, formerly the property of Clarice Cliff, 1927.
The Stamford shapes were a direct copy of a design by French silversmiths Tétard Frères, which had been created for the French actor Jean Richepain, and had won a medal at the 1925 Paris exhibition. The tea set had been featured in Mobilier et Décoration where conveniently one picture showed the teapot from two different angles. This allowed Clarice to understand perfectly the form and proportions enabling her to re-create it accurately. But it was ironic that in the five intervening years no-one else saw its appeal to a mass market, and that it took a designer from Stoke-on-Trent to realise that potential.
A Stamford shape teapot and cover hand painted on glaze in Carpet (red), 1930.
Whilst Clarice may have directly copied to create the Stamford teapot, the Conical series was an example of her skill in taking an idea and not only developing it but ultimately improving it. Clarice had seen a silver cocktail service created by Desny around 1926–8. This featured a large cone on top of a smaller one with a thin metal supporting blade between them. From this, in just a few months of 1929, Clarice created a range of daringly modern forms that included the popular Conical teapot, the Double Decker vase (one cone inside another), cups with triangular handles, bowls in many sizes, and (perhaps) her most breathtaking piece, the Yo Yo vase. In 1931 she belatedly completed the range with the stylish and now much sought-after Conical sugar sifter.
A Mei Ping vase and a pair of 391 Ziggurat candlesticks, all hand painted on glaze in Café, 1931.
A Stamford shape teapot hand painted on glaze in Appliqué Windmill, 1930–1.
A shape 380 double Conical bowl hand painted on glaze in Mondrian, 1929.
The years spent absorbing the technical processes of the Potteries had taught Clarice vital lessons regarding form, construction and viability. For example, the Yo Yo featured strong yet elegant supporting blades that, whilst decorative, prevented the whole piece collapsing when fired in the kiln. The shape remains one of the most desired forms she ever created. Introduced at the height of the Depression, it would appear that sales were limited, though for Clarice it was such a favourite that over several years a number of oversized, giant versions were created to use as centrepieces for her trade shows.
Other famous Clarice forms may be traced to European designers, such as the simple globe vase (shape 370), clearly inspired by the work of French designer Robert Lallemant, and the shape 463 cigarette holder that is instantly recognisable as a copy of a glass and metal version created by the Austrian Josef Hoffmann.
It took several writers and twenty years’ worth of books on Clarice Cliff to find the sources I have listed. Today some of the original designers remain obscure, whilst she is again a household name. This demonstrates how wisely and widely she delved into low-circulation little-known magazines in search of inspiration. And most importantly it has to be said that there are hundreds of shapes and designs that show no outside influences; many of her countless landscapes and bold florals owe nothing to anyone, they are pure Clarice. The fact that Clarice left the journals and folios at the factory when she retired shows that she did not intend to make a secret of using them. They proved to be an important reference source throughout the key years, keeping her informed of the ever-changing fashions. What may be deduced is that Clarice was a designer of her time. In the same way that art and design has always influenced itself and always will, so Clarice allowed herself to become part of the vogue. The fact that she was in Stoke-on-Trent and not London, Paris, Switzerland or Austria makes her achievements even more startling. She captured the mood of the times and transferred it onto wares that would be popular with her customers.
A shape 370 vase hand painted on glaze in Tennis, 1930–1.
A group of wares comprising shape 452 vase and cigarette box hand painted on glaze in Café pattern, 1931, together with a large dish form circular wall plaque, Athens jug and Stamford teapot, all hand painted on glaze in Carpet (red), 1930.