Byron Temple, Romantic Pragmatist   1      2      3      4      5      6      7      8      -      PRINTER VERSION

>> sense of being modern, part of his time and part of his culture. As in his work, nothing was left to chance; everything was considered.

He adopted this strategy of selling by catalog after his experiences at the early craft fairs. He was one of the founding members of the American Craft Council's (ACC) Fair at Demarest. He came away from that experience feeling that many of the potters at the fair, who were employed as full-time instructors within the university system, looked at his cups and saucers and other tableware as passČ and without any artistic merit. Rose Slivka, the editor of Craft Horizons, had only recently published in Craft Horizons her seminal article "The New Ceramic Presence" in which she argued that function should be discarded in favor of expressive interests and that clay should be treated like paint. Modern craft, as we have come to know it in the United States, was barely ten years old when Slivka's article was published. Temple felt as if the rug had been pulled out from under him. Now, suddenly, he was seen as anachronistic, a maker of objects that could no longer lay any serious claim to cultural importance. It was ironic, however, that it was his own field and not the fine arts that marginalized his work. He had been a friend with the British sculptors John Milne and Barbara Hepworth while he had lived in St. Ives and both were sympathetic to his ideas. When he moved to New Hope he met the modern dancer and choreographer Jose Limon. Temple was teaching at Pratt and Limon was the head of dance at Julliard and they would carpool into New York together. Limon would talk about how movement in dance could convey feeling and meaning, an idea that was completely new to Temple. Limon also made the analogy to pottery and how its movement on the potter's wheel could be used to create the same kind of feeling within a given form. Limon, Temple said, never consider pottery an inferior expression, below that of dance or painting. The modernist paradigm of the artist as a loner, a renegade working outside the mainstream of his discipline and at odds with the established views of the culture of his times is an image that does not, at first spring, to mind when on looks at Temple's career, but as time would show, it is a model that fits extremely well.

Some consumers of my clay objects consider that they are art; others merely handmade pots for the kitchen table. In our mechanized and depersonalized society I am not a craftsman of necessity. I cater only to a small segment of our society. A craftsman of necessity to a few; maker not of palace objects.       —Byron Temple

Temple decided to look for a new audience rather that abandon his ideas and cater to the demands of the craft fair audiences. He began to actively seek out those who wanted what he wanted. His use of catalogs was one strategy he developed, but he also directly approached shops and stores like Neiman Marcus and Bloomingdale's in New York, who normally did not handle handmade pottery. His best account was a shop that specialized in modern design on the upper east side of Manhattan called Sointu. He had walked by it on a number of occasions and loved its sensibility. It contained only industrially produced objects, but he decided to approach the owner anyway. He made an appointment and brought in samples of work from his catalog. The owner liked the clean, spare feeling of the work and how it stood up next to his industrial designed objects and agreed to include it. He advertised Temple's work heavily in design, fashion and home publications creating a new audience entirely outside of the craft world. Like so many other instances in his career, Temple had the courage to act on his intuition.
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