Vase with cityscape
Maija Grotell American, born Finland
Manufacturer Henry Street Settlement
The Finnish-born Maija Grotell was one of the most influential potters working in the vessel tradition during the 1930s and 1940s. Even though a relatively large number of women had played important roles in the Art Pottery movement of the early twentieth Century, few female ceramists were active between the wars. Grotell was one of the exceptions. After first studying in her native Finland, in 1927 Grotell immigrated to the United States to study under master potter and influential teacher, Charles Fergus Binns at the New York State Clay-Working School at Alfred University. Like so many other potters, Grotell soon began teaching to sustain her ceramics career. She worked in the crafts program at the Henry Street Settlement House in New York until she moved to Cranbrook in 1938; while in New York, she also taught at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, for two years beginning in 1936. Her vase with a décor of New York City skyscrapers, with its emphasis on rectangular blocks, adumbrates the magisterial designs she began to produce by 1940. Its silvery color speaks to the modernism of the 1930s and, as she later explained, her preference for metallic colors was a response to the aluminum and chrome furniture then in vogue.
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