A Scholarly Witness -Watching Arlene Shechet at Meissen
By Maureen Cassidy-Geiger
Strange as it may sound, the artists I study are all dead. For this reason, it was a particular pleasure and a great revelation for me, an American scholar of eighteenth-century Meissen porcelain, to witness a living sculptor at work inside the Meissen manufactory compound, a fortresslike state industry founded in 1710. Access to Meissen, which is located in a slumbering former Communist way station between Dresden and Leipzig, is highly restricted; the historical archive at its core (my playground) is tough enough to crack, so I had never actually been inside the workrooms or storerooms until Arlene Shechet and her hosts invited me to join her there for a few days in September 2012. This place has protected the “arcanum,” or secret knowledge of the porcelain industry, for over three hundred years. Yet there was Arlene, wily mistress of a sun-drenched studio on the Meissen premises, not taking nein for an answer and toying boldly with tradition in ways I could never have imagined or attempted. Golden-haired, diminutive, and poised, Shechet was quietly assertive, nimble, and alert, sashaying around in black clogs and an old industrial apron that was the envy of the staff. We looked and talked; I watched and photographed. In our time together, I glimpsed a visionary at work, harnessing and taming an anachronistic behemoth. Shechet tested and pushed the medium as Meissen artists have done since 1710, achieving bold and original results by mastering the challenges that surrounded her.
When I first met Shechet in New York some months before our rendezvous in Meissen, I made the mistake of calling her a ceramicist. The eighteenth-century artists I study were considered either sculptors (sometimes called “modelers”) or painters, and Shechet, too, is rightly a sculptor, according to tradition and in her life. There were always tensions in the eighteenth century between the painters and the sculptors at Meissen, and I now saw Shechet confronting the same predicament. In the rigid hierarchy of the studio system, she was understood to be a guest and a sculptor whose only right to a paintbrush was at the moment of inscribing her initials next to the factory’s famous crossedswords mark—although she could apply glazes and oxides at will. At the factory, no single person carries out the entire process; rather, each step is assigned to and completed by a specialist. For certain kinds of painted decoration, Shechet could enlist the help of just one unhurried factory artist for one afternoon a week. This was somewhat frustrating for her, as was the unrelenting kiln schedule, but I saw her adjust her ambitions and artistry to suit the situation. In time, Shechet made one of the ornament painters her ally, and he rallied his invisible team to whimsically tweak some classic patterns to her precise specifications.
The manufactory was also reluctant to grant Shechet free access to molds, despite having shown us hundreds of them packed densely on shelves in a succession of fascinating storerooms. This led Shechet to Dumpster-dive for discarded molds, conniving resourcefully for the sculptural ingredients that yielded the willfully irreverent results exhibited at the RISD Museum in Providence, Rhode Island, in spring 2014. At Meissen, I was impressed that no one stopped her. The powersthat- be at the factory, accustomed to exercising an abundance of caution, seemed resigned to, if not inspired and amused by, watching her break the mold by breaking the rules.
To prepare for her sojourn at the manufactory, Shechet had delved into the culture of eighteenth-century Saxony, read Janet Gleeson’s 1998 bestseller The Arcanum, and looked at historical Meissen in illustrated books and American collections. While in residence at Meissen, she lived in an apartment near the Albrechtsburg, the fortified late-Gothic castle overlooking the Elbe River where the royal porcelain factory was founded in 1710 and housed until the mid-nineteenth century. This setting, as much as Shechet’s commute by foot through the crooked streets down to the present-day factory at the base of the hill, furthered her immersion in the past. She also made many visits to Dresden to see the Porzellansammlung, the definitive ceramic museum established by Augustus the Strong (1670–1733) around 1719, as well as every other museum in the city linked to this ambitious monarch and his son, Augustus III (1696–1763), the hereditary electors of Saxony and elected kings of Poland who propelled Meissen to greatness.
Remarkably, the factory’s lifeblood has always been the Baroque and Rococo models created for Augustus the Strong and Augustus III. When the disruptions of the Seven Years’ War (1756–63) left Dresden a relative backwater and led to the ascendency of the French royal porcelain manufactory at Sèvres, Meissen stopped inventing new models and instead started imitating the work of its rivals in France and, eventually, England. Yet the Rococo Revival in the mid-nineteenth century made old-fashioned Meissen chic again, and collectors clamored for signature eighteenth-century models regardless of their authenticity and age. Into the twenty-first century, no tourist to Meissen has left without a porcelain souvenir that is inevitably in the eighteenth-century taste.
Although a white porcelain body had been perfected by 1710, the year of Meissen’s founding, the only viable production until 1713 was the so-called red porcelain invented by Johann Friedrich Böttger and Ehrenfried Walter von Tschirnhaus. Ranging in color from a deep terracotta red to brown to iron gray, depending on the firing temperature and the composition of the clay, this short-lived production was an acceptable alchemical by-product of the pursuit of the arcanum. Actually a very hard, fine-bodied stoneware, Meissen’s “red porcelain,” sometimes called “Böttger stoneware” (above), mimicked both the Chinese Xixing ware exported to Europe from the seventeenth century onward and the fabled terra sigillata of the ancient Roman era, which inspired centuries of spinoffs, particularly in Germany. The recipe for Böttger stoneware, which had been discontinued in 1713, was rediscovered in the 1920s, and it remains in production today, very occasionally, being mostly unloved by the Meissen community. Shechet was nevertheless determined to work with it—she wished to respond to the entire range of the Meissen production during her residency— and she eventually persuaded the manufactory to supply her with the “red” paste (opposite).
White porcelain has nonetheless been the focus of the factory’s production from 1713 on, and it was Shechet’s focus as well, three hundred years later. From 1710 until about 1730, the factory was populated by craftsmen who were skilled at converting two-dimensional designs on paper and three-dimensional models in various media, including ceramics, metalwork, wood, ivory, and stone, into plaster molds for casting exact copies in Meissen porcelain. Any painting or gilding on these early models was executed outside the factory by specialists in Dresden. Within a few years, however, royal court artists were hired to establish and direct “separate but equal” painting and sculpting studios at Meissen, forging an uneasy alliance that persists today (a painter, after all, wants a flat surface to decorate, while a sculptor wants to give form to the clay). Thus, the factory could, by about 1730, design, manufacture, and decorate its production entirely in situ, in a carefully orchestrated collaborative process that Shechet experienced firsthand in 2012–13.
Shechet’s output in white Meissen porcelain reflects a number of impulses and opportunities. For one series (opposite), she took a set of large, shapely vases of traditional form, which a painter would be inclined to treat like a canvas, and collaged them with slip drawings, oddball reliefs from her foraged tableware molds, architectural moldings, and hand-built flowers, recalling the famous “Schneeball” vases beloved of Frederick the Great, which are covered in a viburnum-blossom motif called Schneeball (“snowball” in German). For another series, she constructed smaller sculptures from fragments—a foot here, a lid or a handle there, a crinoline skirt, maybe a flower—and from spouted cups and other utilitarian vessels used in the porcelain casting process. Some of these works evoke small monuments or garden follies.
One day during my visit, when Shechet had already started working in this vein, she and I toured the Porzellansammlung, located in the palatial orangerie in Dresden known as the Zwinger, and viewed the collection of Japanese porcelain obsessively assembled by Augustus the Strong before he founded Meissen. Some works in the Japanese collection — in particular, a bowl with a landscape form, possibly a scholar’s rock, modeled inside it — reminded Shechet of the small, hybrid works on which she had already embarked at Meissen. This was a remarkable precedent to have found for her work.
In a curious historical twist, more than two hundred of the Japanese vases and bowls in the king’s collection were actually shipped to the Meissen manufactory in 1728 at the behest of an unscrupulous French merchant named Rudolphe Lemaire and his collaborator, Count Karl Heinrich von Hoym, former Saxon ambassador to France and, from 1729, director of Meissen, who planned to supply Lemaire’s Parisian customers with forgeries of the Asian rarities they coveted. When the king learned of the deceit, he seized the copies and deported Lemaire; von Hoym was sent to prison. Yet a number of fakes had already been made and exported, and they were so elegant and timeless, and convincing, that whatever reached France was easily sold and influenced porcelain production at the Chantilly manufactory outside Paris and even at the Chelsea manufactory in London. Furthermore, the models remained in production at Meissen, albeit with variant decoration that could never be mistaken for Asian.
Another of Shechet’s Meissen series, which she calls her “molds of the molds,” includes porcelain castings of the plaster molds used to produce the fluted bowl and the bottle-shaped vase from Lemaire and von Hoym’s surreptitious production. For these works, Shechet selected plaster molds she wished to remake in porcelain, as part of her overall project to celebrate the industrial production as sculpture, and made molds of them; then, she poured liquid porcelain clay into the cavities and proceeded with firing. As a result, and fully intentionally, these works inherited the scars from the original molds’ functioning life, presenting evidence of their use and history. The straps used to hold the separate puzzle-like parts of the mold together during the casting process were mostly retained in the finished forms as horizontal bands in relief, and the large numbers that were incised into the originals to indicate the historical Meissen models hidden within are preserved and even highlighted. Beyond merely casting the molds in porcelain, Shechet ennobled them with overblown versions of the classic Meissen “onion” and “red dragon” painted patterns, introduced around 1730 after Japanese precedents, as well as with lustrous gilding.
As should be evident from the range of images in this volume, accepting and exploiting what greeted her at Meissen was the key to Shechet’s reimagined oeuvre. Stepping into the factory and embracing its past sparked intense experimentation with conventional materials, models, and patterns of decoration. The results have already made eighteenth-century Meissen more interesting and comprehensible. Building on a noble tradition, Shechet has succeeded at making the old new again.