Axel Salto

Antik, New York

Acquired from the above by the present owner, 2002

Salto and his colleagues at Royal Copenhagen called the beautiful glaze featured on this piece “Blue Mussel,” and indeed it has the aqueous quality of an undersea scene. The variable thickness of the mottled glaze, while it results from unpredictable flows in the kiln, clearly picks out the pictorial design, which is grafted on to the rather formal profile of an upright classical vase form. The piece is reddish in appearance where the underlying clay body shows through, and a deeper cobalt blue where the glaze pools thickly on the surface, as at the base and in the interstices between the individual motifs. These do suggest shells but could also be interpreted as seedpods and leaves. Salto’s naturalism was purposefully promiscuous, intended to suggest the abstract idea of bursting fecundity: not a “still life,” but rather its opposite. 

Glenn Adamson