This 1937 article from California — Magazine of Pacific Business captures California pottery at the moment it was becoming a national phenomenon. Written when color was still the great selling point, it presents the industry as both modern and distinctly Californian: technically innovative, design-conscious, and built around manufacturers such as Bauer, Vernon Kilns, Pacific Clay Products, Gladding, McBean, and Metlox. The tone is very much of its time, but the article is especially useful for showing how quickly California pottery moved from gardenware and utility pieces into fashionable dinnerware, helped by new glazes, lighter bodies, national advertising, and a growing appetite for bright, informal table settings.

California Manufacturers Lead the World in Beauty of Design and Coloring

Black and white photos by Maurice Lanfre, Gladding, McBean & Company

California’s pottery not only surpasses in beauty and utility similar products from the Orient and Eastern United States, but also by its very texture, weight and finish this new product has rendered obsolete the accepted dictionary definition:

“Pottery: Ware made from certain earthy materials, usually clay, molded, and hardened by heat; specif., the coarser vessels so made; earthenware.”

Pottery has achieved a new significance. Thanks to ceramic engineers, artists and production experts, when you think of pottery today, your mind’s eye envisions not red clay flowerpots, crude, painted mixing bowls or jardinieres which decorate patios and sweeping lawns. True, these things belong to the pottery family; but, because colors have been improved, weight lightened, body made stronger and advertising effective, your mind goes immediately to dinnerware—cups and saucers, plates and platters, serving bowls and coffeepots.

This is not a development of chance. The “Big Five” of California—more about them later—have consciously sold retail buyers and ultimate consumers on the idea of accepting pottery in the dining room. Pottery dishes, no longer crude, are equally at home during the serving of a formal meal or at a lawn fête. So much at home, in fact, that manufacturers will turn out $2,000,000 worth of pottery dinnerware this year; ware which eight years ago was virtually unknown.

As for the definition, what constitutes pottery depends upon with whom you talk. One manufacturer, turning out heavy clay-base ware in solid colors, considers his to be the only true pottery. Another, producing light weight wares containing a large percentage of talc, argues for the new form. One embodies the older conception; the other, the new. Both are pottery.

California’s revolution in pottery commenced scarcely a decade ago, when color was first introduced. Since that epochal event, which occurred when Bauer Potteries in Los Angeles injected six colors into their lines, change has been constant. Where once colors were painted on the outside of crude, red pieces, today colors are applied before final firings and become integral parts of the ware. Hand decorations, new bodies which neither craze nor crack, colors which the most skilled artisans among ceramics makers of China could not achieve in mass production—these developments have brought California pottery before the world.

Big news at the moment is this: The California Pottery Guild, division of the Clay Products Institute, has undertaken a campaign of national advertising, pushing California pottery and plugging the theme, “We originated beautiful colors in pottery, and we lead the parade today.”

This campaign is unique among potters, for competing firms have joined forces in recognition of the fact that Southern California is the West’s pottery center, that California has created the new vogue, that individual manufacturers of Zanesville and East Liverpool may compete, “but we will pull together.”

Why does California lead the parade? “Because,” as J. J. Stein, guild executive secretary, points out, “our plants are not geared up as in the East. While we desire profit, we also take pride in achievement. Many of our lines are built upon beauty of color and novelty of design and decoration. Since novel dinnerware lines cannot be manufactured on ‘in line’ production, California plants need not be torn down for changes.”

“The California vogue,” added W. P. Rodman, Heinz-Pickering account executive in charge of the campaign, “has gone over because of our pride in craftsmanship. We may suffer price disadvantages, due to long hauls and our combination of hand-machine production, but we certainly face no artistic disadvantages.”

Broadly, California pottery is quality merchandise—the kind you buy in art and department stores, not in low-price establishments. Its success depends further upon the fact that pottery in any form, no matter what its age or purpose, holds a great fascination for layman and collector alike.

Beginnings of pottery are buried in the dim past. From all historians have learned, it is probably fifty thousand years or more since some stone-age ancestor found that clay, the sticky earth of a river bank, when strongly heated in the campfire, became a hard, durable substance instead of merely mud. Since that far-off day, pottery has developed from the making of crude but practical utensils to exquisitely fine objects of art.

Until the ceramic engineers of Gladding, McBean & Co. in recent years began experimenting with talcs, the only medium potters knew was clay, combined in various formulas to produce different types of bodies. Then the new medium, talc, found in California mountains, in combination with other raw materials, gave a body which not only is lighter but is tougher than any known by the ancients. Aside from color, use of talc marks the most significant change in pottery manufacture yet developed.

To understand the significance of these developments, it should be explained that clay is a silicate of aluminum combined with several molecules of water. In firing, these water molecules are lost, the clay shrinks and changes from its plastic state to the hard substance commonly known as earthenware.

Talc, on the other hand, is a silicate of magnesia and is non-plastic. To make the body of a fine California pottery, as Franciscan Ware, it is preheated and finely ground. Then it is mixed with certain chemicals to give it plasticity, and also with an amorphous flux that softens in the firing and binds the particles of talc into an exceptionally tough and durable mass. This mixture will mold just like a clay body. Moreover, it will take a glassy coating, or glaze, just like earthenware.

“Unlike earthenware,” explained Larry Pendroy, superintendent of pottery production for Gladding-McBean, “the glaze on talc will not craze (crack) or leak, and it develops splendid texture and luster in clear, fresh colors.

“There’s another trick to firing these talc bodies. Their glazes must have the exact coefficient of expansion as the fired body, or the glaze will craze or peel. One cause of crazing lies in the fact that fired clay gradually reabsorbs part of the water lost in the kiln heat, thus changing its chemical composition and its coefficient of expansion. In the talc body, a cementing zone merges body and glaze, thus giving a durable ware of great beauty.”

Durability alone is not enough, as all potters know. There must be new forms, new colors, constant change. Smaller potteries, of which there are some forty in the state, not faced with constant and heavy overhead charges, can afford to experiment, moving swiftly from one line to another. Consequently, from some of these come novelties of great beauty which follow or lead style changes, decorative pieces seldom attempted by the larger firms.

Space forbids a detailed discussion of these. In passing, however, a few “cases in point” might be mentioned. Brayton Potteries at Laguna Beach, for example, whose hill-billy figures and opera singer, superb caricatures, have found wide acceptance. Padre Potteries in Los Angeles, through whose dinnerware you cannot drive a nail. Hollywood Kilns, Winfield Potteries, La Canada Potteries, Tudor Potteries of Southern California, all of whose decorative and utilitarian wares evoke interest—and sales—from Pacific to Atlantic.

As for mass production, California’s pottery story belongs to five manufacturers—Bauer Potteries, Pacific Clay Products Company, Gladding, McBean & Co., Metlox Potteries and Vernon Kilns.

These potters approach the manufacturing and marketing problems with slightly different points of view. One thinks pottery should approximate the dictionary definition, another thinks it should portray a typically Spanish-California atmosphere, another that it should approach fine China in weight and texture.

Bauer Potteries, owned by W. E. Bockman, has lived the history of California pottery—the modern era, that is. Whereas other potters have adopted the talc body, Bauer uses both clay and talc as bases.

In 1909, Bauer started making red clay flowerpots, continues to turn them out at a rate of 20,000 daily. Sometime subsequent to that date, this firm commenced manufacturing household stoneware, yet until 1927 Bauer confined their attentions to the brick-red color, meanwhile adding stoneware for packers and chemists to their lines.

It was in the latter year—exactly ten years ago—that Bauer decided to add some color to their lines. That decision marked the beginning of a revolution in pottery manufacture and decoration which today is shaking Eastern markets, which has won for some companies as large a market west of Denver as is enjoyed on the Pacific Coast. Oddly, Bauer is not one of these; largely for the reason this company centers its sales efforts on the western side of the Rockies.

Colored mixing bowls—red, green, yellow and blue—brought Bauer definitely out of the garden into the kitchen. Colored vases followed, then jardinieres, next kitchenware, and, three years later, dinnerware. Today, selling all over the United States, Canada, and in Hawaii, Bauer specializes in plain colors, particularly Monterey blue, yellow, white, green, orange, burgundy, mottled brown and turquoise.

At the other end of the range in decoration we find Vernon Kilns, which not only produces distinctive designs of form and color, but also signs the names of their artists to individual pieces.

Vernon came into existence in 1916, and after two corporate changes came into possession of F. G. Bennison in 1931. Prior thereto Vernon had produced an inexpensive line. “Immediately,” said Mr. Bennison, “we abandoned slapstick production methods and moved to artistic creation.”

Bennison changed from clay to talc body. This necessitated glaze changes. Two ceramic engineers adapted glazes to body. Meanwhile, such artists as Gale Turnbull, Harry Bird, Jane Bennison, May and Genevieve Hamilton produced original and exclusive designs. Meanwhile, also, Vernon decided upon another breathtaking move: in order to achieve a higher class of trade, every account on their books must be sacrificed and a new group of outlets be sold on the new pottery.

Inlaid glazes and underglaze decorations, some so tedious of application that a girl can apply the decoration to only four plates during a work day, were developed. As a result, Vernon is known today by the artists it keeps; by the flowers, fish, two-tone effects and other designs in the inlaid and underglazes.

In the Vernon plant may be seen graphically the combination of handwork and mass production in modern kilns which produce for California fine pottery which neither machines nor hands alone could achieve.

Although yet scarcely ten years old, colored pottery has its roots in sewer pipe—which certainly is no pun—and other prosaic products of clay, as far as Pacific Clay Products Company is concerned. Pacific, which started fifty-five years ago as the Douglas Sewer Pipe Company, jumped into tableware pottery five years ago as a depression measure.

Pacific had been manufacturing gray stoneware and, finding this line losing popularity, sought “something new.” M. J. Lattie was appointed manager of the art department, and within a short time kilns which had been turning out heavier, less-decorative lines, were burning colored tableware. Only half a decade has passed since Lattie gazed admiringly on the first three-time-fired overglazed cup, yet today Pacific sells throughout the nation, in the Philippines, Bolivia, Argentina, Canada and Hawaii.

Pacific started with four “loud” colors—red, yellow, blue and green. Apricot, white, turquoise and delphinium blue have since been added. Recently, although the older and more vivid colors are gaining strength with purchasers, four pastels have been brought into Pacific’s line.

“Buyers, both retailers and consumers, at first choose brighter colors,” Lattie told me, “and later change to pastels. This helps immensely to carry pottery from the kitchen to the front of the house.”

And makes sales for California’s dinnerware.

Pacific employs an overglaze process on decorated ware which requires three trips through the kilns, but following the third firing the pieces not only are ovenproof, but also crazeproof. California fruits, wheat and poppies are among their most popular items.

A products-expansion program brought Gladding, McBean Company into the pottery field in 1934. Under the management of Frederic J. Grant, Franciscan Ware was the first of the California potteries to be sold and promoted in the Eastern states.

The line comprises three basic styles of dinnerware, covering various degrees of formality in conception. The color range offers the widest choice of any dinnerware service on the market, and includes eggplant, celadon, Chinese Flambé, matt gray, coral and turquoise, in addition to many others. Exquisite underglaze hand decorations have been newly incorporated in the line which tie in with the harmonious combinations of solid colors. In the art lines shapes and colors have been blended into lovely objects of beauty.

In recent months, Gladding, McBean has acquired Catalina Pottery which was among the first of the California potteries. With its romantic background, this pottery helped blaze the trail of color.

What a far cry from the Mexican handmade type of heavy painted pottery, to California’s newer types. Take Franciscan’s Chinese Flambé, a ruby which in the past could not be fired. Here we find one key which has unlocked national markets for the California product, and promises continued leadership.

Until 1935, a true red glaze on pottery was considered impossible of achievement. Such was the teaching in schools. Yet in that very year, efforts were being made to fire a true red. Among experimenters, Lee Bennett, a Gladding, McBean ceramist, was endeavoring to perfect a true fired red. In his early work, he found the materials he was using were vaporizing and boiling long before they reached the commercial firing level. Also the color itself would turn out anywhere from black to gray and white.

Clever Ceramists

Without inquiring too closely into the methods and process, both of which are closely guarded trade secrets, it may be sufficient to say that Bennett at last achieved the true color, and today it is being produced in quantities along with the blues, yellows and other standard shades. Further, it may be pertinent to remark that in China to this day only a few from many pieces fired come true to the desired color. Darned clever, these Chinese; more clever, American ceramists.

Metlox, oddly, turned from Neon signs to tableware. For years, this plant produced signs and other decorations, when President Will Prouty decided to try for a slice of the growing market. He hit upon the novel idea of naming his line “Poppy Trail,” after Evelyn White’s popular book. To bolster sales by lower manufacturing costs, he patented several special machines which speed production, and further patented the ingredients entering the compound which serves as the Metlox base.

Metlox, in common with the other majors, emphasizes dinnerware, but also produces a comprehensive line of art and gift wares which show the French and Chinese influence. Whereas the Poppy Trail ware is round, and public tastes change, this company now has introduced a square ware, called “Pintoria.” Metlox makes no decorated wares yet, but endeavors to keep ahead of the procession with a new shape.

Here we have the historical picture. Suppose we walk back stage for an intimate view of the production process.

California pottery may be either cast or shaped on jigger wheels, after which it is fired in a periodical furnace or a continuous tunnel kiln. Method depends upon the shape of the individual piece and type of furnace already available. But I am moving slightly ahead of the production story.

Let’s suppose, for purposes of discussion, you possess adequate finances or credit and decide to manufacture pottery. You arrange plant equipment, engage artists, chemists and others skilled in the production of this sort of ware. Your designers present sketches for a cup and a plate, let us say, which you approve. Where do you go from there?

From the artist’s conception a model in plaster of paris is made. If the model embodies any ornaments or elongations, these are built up oversize with non-drying oil modeling clay. This model must be built 15 per cent larger than the finished product to allow for shrinkage, which invariably occurs on pottery.

After the model is completed, you make one mold, and discard the model. From this mold you now shape a reverse mold, from which other molds may be created. Proceed to make as many molds as may be needed, which may be only 100 or may run up to 1,000, depending upon the probable popularity of the piece you plan to manufacture.

While this work of creation has been proceeding, you must have been preparing the raw materials which will form the principal ingredients of your new product. Your “base” will be either a clay or a talc, depending upon the characteristics you wish to preserve in the finished product.

It will be necessary to pre-fire some of the body materials at a temperature of possibly 2,500° F. in order to burn out all impurities. Chemists call this process “calcining.” After this burning, each material used is ground separately and screened, thus finally removing any impurities not burned away.

Excepting English ball clay and certain glasses, such an authority as Pendroy would inform you, you will be able to obtain most of your raw products from California sources. Clay and raw talc are the principal ingredients, and both are mined in California. What is known as bisque is also used.

What is bisque and why? It appears that the body shrinks as much as seven-eighths of an inch for each foot, in the absence of some material to allay such shrinkage. Further, shrinkage produces cracks; and you cannot sell cracked pottery at any price.

In order to reduce shrinkage, you should take some of the body which has been previously fired and grind it into a fine powder. Now we’re arriving at an understanding of bisque. It is ground tile or fired clay. Nothing more. But by adding it to your mix, you will find shrinkage reduced one-quarter, and the physical quality of the resulting product vastly improved.

Remember that pottery may be jiggered or cast. For jiggering, the clay must first be soft as putty. Hence several important steps, commencing first with blending the batch, adding of water until the mix reaches the consistency of thick cream. From that stage, the mix is put through a filter press, which removes impurities introduced with the water or in mixing and yields large, flat pieces of putty-like clay.

The filter reduces the mixture from liquid consistency to a mushy clay. From the filter press, the flat cakes go to what is called a pug mill. In essence, this is a combination huge sausage grinder and vacuum chamber. Clay is forced by means of large spiral blades into the vacuum chamber where all air is removed and on out the end as a six-inch column. If this air is not removed, it causes pinholes and pits in the finished ware. These columns, cut off in two-foot lengths, are fed to the jigger wheels.

On the jigger wheel, a mold forms either the inside or the outside of the piece to be made. For instance, in making a plate, a flat, round disk of clay is slapped down on the outside of a mold, and the bottom is formed by a tool as the mold revolves some 200 times a minute. In the case of a cup, the jiggerman presses a tool down against a blob of clay inside the mold. In two seconds, the new piece of pottery takes shape.

For certain types of piece, the casting method is preferred. Here the batch is kept in liquid form. This liquid, known as “slip,” is poured into molds and allowed to stand from thirty minutes to two hours, depending upon the thickness wanted in the finished piece. The longer the clay stands in the mold, the more it contracts against the side and thus increases thickness. At the end of a predetermined time, the slip yet in liquid form is poured out, leaving the piece in the mold.

After the liquid is removed, the mold continues to absorb moisture from the piece, until at last the piece shrinks away from the mold and is removed. From this point on the process is the same for both jiggered and cast pottery.

From the jigger wheel the piece goes to a drying room. Combination of absorbing power of the plaster of paris mold and heat dry the body so that in two hours it may be removed from the mold. In the case of objects requiring handles, as cups, these pieces are cemented onto the parent bodies with liquid clay. When fired, the handle becomes an integral part of the cup. Meanwhile, skilled women inspect and finish each piece; trim rough edges, rub with damp sponge.

Tin Makes White

Following inspection, when the piece is twenty-four hours old, it goes to the glazing room. For most glazes, the piece is merely dipped into glaze solution which has the consistency of thick cream.

Now the glaze is a highly refined clay to which have been added various metal oxides. These produce the many colors. Remember, too, glaze must be applied at an average thickness of ten thousandths of an inch.

This glaze material is a very highly refined clay ground fine in ball mills which are nothing but cylinders or churns half-filled with rocks. A ball mill is revolved anywhere from twelve to thirty-six hours until such color elements as chromium, tin, uranium, copper, cobalt are ground to dust.

Incidentally, you may be surprised to learn that tin produces white, chromium oxide produces greens, various copper oxides yield blues and green, cobalt gives blues, manganese oxide produces greens, tans and browns. Uranium produces yellows, orange, and Chinese reds.

Manufacture of glaze materials offers greater technical troubles than any other step in the production chain. Newer technique, largely for reasons of economy, requires that all colors, types, sizes and sorts of pottery be fired at the same temperature. One firm has found the kilns must be maintained constantly at 2,000°. Hence, all glaze materials must be formulated that they will yield desired colors at that heat level.

Glaze may be applied by dipping, as in the case of a tumbler whose vertical walls permit it to drain evenly. Plates which do not drain readily, must be sprayed. Bear in mind that the sprayer must apply the glaze at ten thousandths of an inch thickness—plus or minus one thousandth of an inch. Thus he has a tolerable allowance of two thousandths.

How’s that for accuracy? How, for that matter, do they know whether they hit ten thousandths on the head? Answer: A thickness gauge applied to samples at frequent intervals. Reason for split-hair accuracy: Color varies with thickness.

In the past pottery has been fired in periodical kilns, built like beehives. This meant each kiln must be loaded, fired, cooled and unloaded. Today larger potteries are moving to continuous production kilns. Now, instead of waiting days or weeks to see the fruits of firing, a piece enters one end of a long kiln and eighteen hours later it emerges, glazed and cooled, ready to be shipped.

If the temperature varies as much as 10°, some glazes will vary in color. Orange glaze when overfired 15° turns black along the edges. Overfired turquoise becomes richer and deeper, leaning toward blue. Ruby glaze will vary in color when the heat changes only two degrees.

For these very good reasons, the kilns and appurtenant equipment are checked every twenty seconds by automatic electric machines. Should the temperature rise, the gas is automatically shut off; when the kiln cools, on goes the heat again.

Fire schedule may vary from eighteen to thirty-two hours, depending upon size of furnace and heat conditions. In any event, the pottery moves scarcely faster than one inch a minute through a tunnel kiln. As a purely physical aid to the electrical recorders and controls, small cones of highly refined clay are placed at intervals on the small individual kilns making up the train. Their melting points are known, and if one should melt on its way through, the operator who watches them from the point of ingress knows his fire is too high and must be cut down.

On the other hand, if certain cones fail to melt, he knows the heat must be stepped up. Fires may be reset a dozen times between dusk and dawn, these changes depending upon outside temperatures and other factors.

At last, the finished ware rolls slowly through the exit, cool, brilliant in hard-baked colors, ready to be shipped to the corners of the earth.

You’d think, to observe the passage of colored pottery through a kiln that here mechanical controls very largely govern the quality of this product. Not so. California pottery has entered a mechanical age, but these superior wares continue to carry a personality which can only be imparted by the deft fingers of skilled craftsmen.