What is it about majolica that ravishes the eye and inflames the imagination? The riotous forms? The supersaturated lollipop colors? The syrupy glazes that look ready for a lick? The exhibition “Majolica Mania: Transatlantic Pottery in England and the United States, 1850–1915,” on now at the Bard Graduate Center, addresses these questions with roughly 350 works pulled from collections in America and across the pond. Organized by the center’s founder and director, Susan Weber, and associate curator Jo Briggs, the show places these giddy, gaudy pieces in their historical and cultural contexts.
Hawked as suitable for a cottage or a castle, the millions as well as the millionaire, majolica, Weber and Julia Marciari-Alexander write in the exhibition catalogue, is “arguably the most important ceramic innovation of the nineteenth century. The story of majolica’s rise and fall encompasses not only art and design, but also industrial production, chemical invention, and an array of interests, enthusiasms, and preoccupations of the Victorian period: from the art of the Italian and French Renaissance to zoology, botany, and Darwin’s theory of evolution.”
