Word: enamels
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...hallmark of the Kohler Co. ever since 1873, when Herbert's grandfather John Michael Kohler and a partner opened a foundry to make farm implements in a small town north of Milwaukee. In the early 1880s, Kohler had the idea of coating cast-iron horse troughs with enamel and offering them to farmers as bathtubs...
Soon the company was importing top craftsmen from Europe to design elegant plumbing fixtures. In 1929 several Kohler products, including a black enamel lavatory with a marble counter top, were displayed at New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art. In the mid-1960s, the company brought bold colors to the bathroom with tubs and toilets in deep shades of red, blue and avocado. Nonetheless, when Herbert Kohler became chairman in 1972, he decided that plumbing had not reached its potential. Says he: "I felt we could innovate with shapes and colors to change the whole function...
...have to dress, but we do have to eat," complained a woman waiting in a long line at one downtown Warsaw supermarket. When shoppers there reached the white enamel butcher's counter, they found that the popular zwyczajna sausage had gone up from 40 to 190 zlotys (51? to $2.42 at the official exchange rate) per kg. A small canned ham had jumped from 200 to 600 zlotys ($2.55 to $7.75). A white-haired woman who had been hovering on the edge of the meat line turned away with only a loaf of brown bread in her wire basket...
Still, if Claes Oldenburg dribbled sticky floods of enamel over his hamburgers and plaster cakes in the '60s. he did so in homage to Pollock. If a sculptor like Richard Serra made sculpture by throwing molten lead to splash in a corner, or Barry Le Va scattered ball bearings and metal slugs on the floor of the Whitney Museum, the source of their gestures was not hard to find. Distorted traces of Pollock lie like genes in art-world careers which, one might have thought, had nothing to do with his. Certainly Pollock scorned decor. He was not interested...
...York offer was withdrawn before any offical proposal was made to Harvard, Putnam said. He refused to estimate the value of the work, but said single Segal figures were selling for more than $50,000. The "Gay Liberation" piece, intended for outdoor display and made of white enamel and bronze, has four figures--a pair of men and a pair of women--and two park benches...