Axel Salto

Hostler Burrows, New York

Acquired from the above by the present owner

Axel Salto, Salto's Keramick, Copenhagen, 1930, n.p (for a woodblock print of a related example)

In this early vase design, made at Royal Copenhagen using an original mold, we see Salto fusing the representational approach of his earlier paintings and prints with a newly emergent language of abstraction. The composition is densely populated with incident – birds, branches, and blossoms. It is in effect a landscape in the round, anticipating other significant works such as The Road to Grasse (1936), which in turn have affinities to Sung Dynasty ceramics that symbolize sacred mountains. Salto also associated the glaze used on this pot with that historic context. In his 1946 essay “The Nature of Ceramics,” he wrote of his deep respect for this tradition: “The Chinese, who kept a thousand kilns in a thousand cities firing for a thousand years, took the path of patience and perseverance and ended up knowing absolutely everything about clay.”

Glenn Adamson