I stopped making functional pots, but the idea of function became what the art was about.
Betty Woodman
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.
Betty Woodman 1930–2018
One of the most important ceramists of the 20th and 21st centuries, Betty Woodman was raised in Massachusetts and studied at the renowned School for American Craftsmen in Alfred, New York from 1948-1950. She had become enamored with ceramics after taking one course in high school, which convinced Woodman to make it her life’s work. After completing her studies at Alfred she took a job as a production potter and by 1951 had saved enough money to travel to Italy. It was this initial trip abroad that would forever alter her future.
Woodman made her way to Fiesole where she ended up in an unplanned apprenticeship in the studio of Giorgio Ferrero and Lionello Fallacara. The apprenticeship, and her wider travels in Italy, exposed her to both traditional majolica as well as new ways of approaching clay. She would return to Italy many times in the 1950s and 60s amidst other travels and found inspiration among the diverse cultures she encountered. Woodman returned to Florence in 1966 and just two years later she and her husband George, whom she had married in 1953, purchased a farmhouse in Antella, Italy where they would spend a significant amount of time working and raising their family. Her work from these decades is characterized by traditional forms such as pitchers, cups, and trays, with her signature exuberant lines, forms, and colors exhibiting inspiration from a vast array of cultures and time periods.
Though she had begun her career making predominantly functional objects, by the 1970s she abandoned this approach for a more experimental path. Woodman’s vessels expanded into multi-part, non-functional sculptures and installations. With deft hands and a keen mind, she synthesized sculpture, painting, and ceramics in an entirely unique and visually bold way, building a recognizable visual vocabulary all while provoking the viewer to ponder the interrelationship of gender, modernism, craft, architecture, and domesticity. Woodman observed no boundary between art and craft, explaining her creations as “a conduit of the memory of a painting, a landscape, architecture, or some other visual stimulus.”
In addition to her artistic pursuits, Woodman taught at the University of Colorado, Boulder from 1978-1998 where she later became Professor Emeritus. She was the recipient of numerous awards including National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships in 1980 and 1986, and a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship at the Bellagio Study Center, Bellagio, Italy in 1995. Her work was the subject of numerous solo exhibitions worldwide during her lifetime, chief among them a 2006 retrospective at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York—the first time the museum dedicated a survey to a living female artist. Woodman received honorary doctorates from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in 2006, University of Colorado in 2007 and Rhode Island School of Design in 2009, as well as the Brooklyn Museum Modernism Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2008, and completed major commissions at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing for the State Department’s Art in Embassies program in 2008 and the U.S. Courthouse in Jefferson City, Missouri through the General Services Administration in 2012.
Following her death in 2018, Woodman left behind an extraordinary legacy as one of the most important voices in American postwar art and craft. Her work is included in more than fifty public collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris; and Museu Nacional do Azulejo, Lisbon.
Auction Results Betty Woodman
