Most of my work comes from play; playing with the clay. And that’s the most creative thing you can do—play.
Ruth Duckworth
Take a walk through center city Philadelphia, you’ll find evidence of Jane Korman’s vision all around you: on Arch Street, the innovative textile studios and galleries at the Fabric Workshop and Museum will be abuzz with creativity, with thought-provoking exhibitions on view. On Walnut Street, you’ll pass the Jane & Leonard Korman Respiratory Institute at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital—an initiative inspired by her own experience as a lung cancer patient who never took the ability to breathe for granted. Each November at the nearby Pennsylvania Convention Center, the Philadelphia Museum of Art Contemporary Craft Show welcomes thousands of eager shoppers whose purchases support both the livelihoods of the artists displaying their work, and the Museum’s ability to acquire important works of contemporary craft. Korman was a longtime supporter and member of the Board of Directors of this annual event through the Women’s Committee of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where she also served on the Modern and Contemporary Art Committee. And if you venture a bit further afield to the northwest corner of the city, you’ll reach the Morris Arboretum of the University of Pennsylvania, where Korman was a Trustee and chair of the Fine Arts Committee. There, she spearheaded the creation of a permanent installation for children called Out on a Limb: A Tree Adventure Exhibit, complete with a nest of giant robin’s eggs and a Squirrel Scramble. It was designed as a fully accessible place for children and adults to explore and revel in nature, and to help them see that “we need trees, and trees need us.”
These efforts have something important in common...for Jane Korman, art, life and nature were not separate entities, but deeply intertwined facets of a life well lived.
These efforts have something important in common: breathing deeply and enjoying nature in every season, celebrating art and creativity in all its forms, and sharing the wonder of exquisite craftsmanship with the historic city she loved, all demonstrating that for Jane Korman, art, life and nature were not separate entities, but deeply intertwined facets of a life well lived. The diversity and exceptional quality of the works of art in this important sale speak to this sense of interconnectedness, and reflect her eye for idiosyncratic beauty and adventurous form. From the playful wit of Judy Kensley McKie’s furniture to the trompe-l'œil everyday objects created in clay by Marilyn Levine, Korman’s collection demonstrates reverence for material mastery, an appreciation for originality and non-traditional forms, and enjoyment of the unpretentious humor that animates craft’s whimsical side. It also offers proof of her artistic foresight: McKie’s Table With Dogs was featured in the American Craft Council’s exhibition New Handmade Furniture: American Furniture Makers Working in Hardwood back in 1979.
She believed that like food and nature, works of art, craft and design are part of our shared feast, and should be enjoyed, not tucked away for “someday.”
Korman was well known as a connoisseur and philanthropist, but she was also a gallery owner and published author. Her 2010 book Splendid Settings: The Art + Craft of Entertaining captured the spirit of her much-beloved collection. On the cover, a bouquet of peonies keeps company with a pair of elegant champagne flutes and three brilliantly glazed works by Toshiko Takaezu; this could only be Jane Korman’s table. Born in Philadelphia, she earned a BA in fine arts from Arcadia University, married Leonard Korman in 1957, and they raised three daughters together. In 1977, she established a gallery dedicated to contemporary American craft called Sign of the Swan in Philadelphia’s Chestnut Hill neighborhood. She later opened Swan Gallery near Rittenhouse Square, overseeing both spaces until 1989. Her passion for craft and expertise only grew as she became a trustee of the American Craft Council, and the Museum of Arts and Design, both located in New York, among other organizations. Splendid Settings explains how her varied passions overlapped: nearly 70 recipes, both her own and those shared from friends and artists, are presented against the vibrant backdrop of tables featuring Korman’s collections. She believed that like food and nature, works of art, craft and design are part of our shared feast, and should be enjoyed, not tucked away for “someday.”
To build a collection that encompasses works from such a wide array of genres, time periods, and materials suggests that Korman was inspired by something akin to artistic hospitality. Her collection includes quite a few greats: delicate vessels by George Ohr, vibrant and modern forms by Lucie Rie and Ruth Duckworth, and luminous Toots Zynsky bowls that seem to radiate color and light from their fused glass threads. Rudy Autio’s Blue Horse and Rider shows a woman clinging to the side of a vessel as though it were a wild steed, linking the two distinct forms of pottery and sculpture as though they couldn’t live without one another. Also striking is the number of works obtained directly from the artist, or even commissioned specifically for the Kormans, like Wendell Castle’s sculptural sets of dining tables and chairs.
Jane Korman admired beauty, but didn’t insist on a narrow definition of it.
Jane Korman admired beauty, but didn’t insist on a narrow definition of it. She felt a kinship with artists, being one herself, and understood them through a shared language. Many of the works in her collection are straightforwardly lovely, like Wayne Higby’s serene Landscape Bowl from 1980 or Harvey Littleton’s nearly-edible Ruby Sliced Descending Form from 1985. Others possess a kind of rugged beauty that can only be truly appreciated with an understanding of artistic intent and preternatural skill. Observers might have glanced at Marilyn Levine’s 1984 KCP Bag and seen an ordinary useful object—sturdy, but worn a bit past its prime. Jane Korman saw Levine’s artistic devotion to capturing the contours and details of a personal item freighted with meaning, something that deserved to be realized through careful attention and virtuosic skill. Like nature, artistic inspiration takes infinite forms, and what strikes most people as traditionally beautiful represents just a narrow band of human creative endeavor. As long as a work of art was a triumph of technique, keenly observed, and authentically inspired, it was welcome at Jane Korman’s table.
Sarah Archer is a design writer based in Philadelphia who has authored several books and contributed essays to exhibition catalogs for the Print Center New York, the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution, the Portland Art Museum, the Milwaukee Museum of Art, and the Museum of Arts and Design. She served as senior curator at the Philadelphia Art Alliance from 2011 through 2014 and was the 2017 Jentel Visiting Critic at the Archie Bray Foundation in Helena, Montana.
Ruth Duckworth 1919–2009
Ruth Duckworth was born Ruth Windmüller in Hamburg, Germany in 1919. She began drawing at a young age and left Germany for England in the mid-1930s, fleeing the Nazis. She attended the Liverpool College of Art from 1936 to 1940, studying painting and drawing. Throughout the 1940s, she took various jobs as a puppeteer, tombstone carver, working in a munitions factory and even spent some time working in Lucie Rie’s ceramic studio.
In the early 1940s, she enrolled in the City and Guilds of London Art School, shifting her focus to sculpture; explaining the change, Duckworth later said that “there’s no material that so effectively communicates both fragility and strength.” In the late 1940s she continued her studies at the Anglo-French Art Center in Kensington, where she met her soon-to-be husband, sculptor Aidron Duckworth. They worked on their first commission together in 1948, creating fourteen bas-relief limestone carvings for St. Joseph’s Church in New Malden, England.
Duckworth's early sculptural work was representational but she soon turned to abstraction and organic forms that were influenced by both prehistoric and modern imagery, as well as nature and human relationships. Inspired by a museum exhibition she saw of Indian pottery, she continued her studies at the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London from 1956 to 1958, turning more seriously to porcelain ceramics. At the time, ceramics in England were still quite traditional in style and functional in form, and her organic, hand-shaped, surrealist works were misunderstood by audiences at-large, but celebrated by fellow artists and ceramicists.
In 1960 she had her first solo show at Primavera Gallery, London and was shown in the exhibition British Studio Potters with Lucie Rie and Hans Coper. Her work was gaining attention and prestige among the ceramic community. In the early 1960s, she had several shows in Chicago, taught at University of Chicago in 1964 and in 1965 the Congregation Solel synagogue in Highland Park, Illinois commissioned her to design a menorah. After the positive reception of her work in the United States, Duckworth permanently relocated to Chicago in 1966 feeling there would be better opportunities for teaching and commission work.
During her twenty-three-year tenure teaching at University of Chicago, Duckworth brought some excellent public art to the university and the city, including the mural Earth, Water and Sky (1967-68) in the Geophysical Sciences Building, Clouds Over Lake Michigan (1976) at the Chicago Board Options Exchange Building, and large bronze works at various college campuses. Duckworth had proven that she was adept at making both monumental works and small, intimate pieces. She retired from the University of Chicago in 1977 but continued to actively show and teach around the world throughout the 1970s and 1980s.
In 2005, The Museum of Arts & Design in New York hosted a retrospective of her work, Ruth Duckworth: Modernist Sculptor and had solo shows at institutions such as the Cranbrook Museum of Art (2005), Bellas Artes Gallery, Santa Fe (2010, 2013) and the Minneapolis Institute of Art (2006). Her work is held in the permanent collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C. In 1993 she received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Museum of Women in the Arts, the gold medal from the National Society of Arts and Letters in 1996 and the gold medal for Lifetime Achievement from the American Craft Council in 1997. Duckworth passed away in 2009 in her adopted home of Chicago.
Auction Results Ruth Duckworth
Photographs
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