Howard Kottler

Patricia Failing, Howard Kottler

Howard Kottler (1930-1989) was one of the West Coast ceramists who helped to redefine the entire field of contemporary American ceramic art. Patricia Failing's comprehensive and richly illustrated study is the first survey and summation of his work and is based on a series of interviews Kottler initiated after learning of his terminal illness. The artist's remarks - informed and wittily unpretentious - provide a vivid subtext to Failing's own thoughtful and compelling observations linking Kottler's innovative work with other developments in American visual arts. The book chronicles the evolution of an artist, thoroughly grounded in the traditional crafts and ceramics technology in the 1950s, who then established a rapport between his work and new directions in mainstream painting and sculpture. By the 1980s Kottler had become a conceptual artist who approached his materials as...