The Ceramics of Gertrud and Otto Natzler

Prudence F. Roberts

“I love to control what cannot be completely controlled, what nature creates – the accidental and, at times, the impossible.”¹ — Otto Natzler

From the moment they first exhibited their work, Gertrud and Otto Natzler found critical success: sales at a prestigious gallery in Vienna and a silver medal at the 1937 World Exposition in Paris, just four years after their partnership had begun. So focused were the couple that they barely skipped a beat when they were forced to flee German-occupied Austria in 1938 and make their way to Southern California. Their belongings, including a small electric kiln, a potter’s wheel and 100 of their best pots, arrived in a few months. They lost no time in setting up their new studio. In 1939, they received first prize at the prestigious National Ceramic Exhibition at the Syracuse Museum of Fine Arts, New York, and their work was included in a show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1940.

For nearly four decades – until Gertrud’s death in 1971 – the Natzlers’ collaboration produced what many consider to be among the most important ceramics of our time, but the combination of Gertrud’s ineffable forms and Otto’s elemental glazes produced objects that really have no equivalent in ancient or in modern eras. Seeing a number of their pieces displayed together – as in this exhibition – allows one to explore the myriad, albeit quiet, variations they achieved within a deliberately limited repertoire of shapes. Here, lyrical colors, crystalline patterns and glazes look like the floor of a lava field applied to pieces ranging from exquisitely thin and delicate bowls to vessels with massive, perfectly proportioned walls.

Largely self-taught, the Natzlers were drawn from the start to the age-old alchemy of clay, what Otto would term the “magic commingling” of earth, water and fire. They first developed their ideas at a time and place in which two aesthetics were dominant: the colorful and decorative Arts and Crafts influence of the Wiener Werkstätte and the cool simplicity of the Bauhaus, where artists worked with hand and machine to produce elegant, well-made objects for the marketplace. While they avoided the extremes of each style, their work evidences an awareness of the importance of handwork as well as the unadorned shapes of modernism. For the most part, their forms are functional – the bowl, the vase, the bottle and the chalice – and modestly sized. Many can be cupped between two palms. Thus, their impact lies in an absolute mastery of material and technique and a perfect match of glaze with form.

Gertrud was known for her ability to achieve walls as thin as eggshells and to make shapes so unified that there is frequently no interruption between base, body and lip. They flow into one another with the certitude of a beautiful line drawing. In writing about her process, she spoke of knowing when to stop so that “the curves will appear to be held in motion – be motion itself.”² Critics often noted that certain vessels seem to leave the horizontal plane: to levitate, as it were. Such is the case with the Untitled oval bowl (c. 1940s, Ceramic with Pompeian glaze, 3.75 × 5 × 1.5 inches, Collection of Carol and Seymour Haber, page 3). Made by bending a round bowl while the clay was leather-hard, it was a form Gertrud used frequently, particularly early in her career. The irregularity of the glaze, which pools in the base of the vessel, is deliberate – designed to allow the clay to be visible – and to emphasize the connection between glaze and clay, both derived from the earth’s elements and transformed through firing.

In his meticulous records – notes for some 25,000 pieces – Otto described the details for more than 2,000 glazes developed over the years through careful research and observation. Just as Gertrud chose to focus on the simplest of forms, going back to the fundamentals of ceramics, so too did Otto reject commercial, ready-made products. First consulting his chemistry textbook from high school, he began to learn the properties of materials he could use to mix his own recipes. Admittedly, disaster after disaster ensued before he finally achieved a consistent, smooth glaze. Ironically, Otto found himself more fascinated by his failures. “Instead of working toward a smooth surface, I tried to increase the blisters, make the pockmarks, the holes and craters more pronounced, get away from those bright shiny colors,” he later wrote.³ Thus were born some of the Natzlers’ trademark glazes, with names that suggest geothermal forces like “Pompeian,” “Lava” and “Crater.”

When Otto applied these concoctions to Gertrud’s pots, “the results were strange indeed. They certainly did not look like any of the ceramics one could see in stores.”⁴ And indeed, an object such as the Untitled bowl (date unknown, Ceramic with Crater glaze, 1.25 × 4.75 inches diameter, Collection of Carol and Seymour Haber, page 4), with its raspy Crater glaze, still seems as exciting and fresh as it must have when primordial finishes first appeared in the 1940s. The rich complexity of the surface, with its gaseous bubble marks and warm earthiness, makes the piece seem ceremonial – even monumental – despite its delicacy and diminutive scale.

As he learned to control – or at least to predict the likely outcome of – his process, Otto also learned the value of the accident: of letting the force of fire become one of his materials rather than simply the fuel for a kiln. By the mid 1940s, he was working with reduction firing, in which oxygen is removed from the kiln by burning various substances, from wood to paper to plant materials. This alters the colors of both glaze and clay; smoke, ash and flame also leave their marks on the vessels. Fissures, iridescence, wrinkles and skinning are some of the expressive side effects of reduction firing.

In looking at the Natzlers’ work, it is interesting to note how little their aesthetic changed over time. Whether making thin-walled pots or so-called massive ones (Untitled massive bowl with recessed rim, date unknown, Ceramic, 3.5 × 7.75 inches diameter, Collection of Carol and Seymour Haber, page 3), Gertrud’s absolute purity of form is never obscured by a busy or obtrusive glaze. Their quest was always for the perfect combination of refinement and accident: the miraculous and unpredictable side of ceramics.

In spite of their remarkable influence, the Natzlers had few students and few friends in the art world. They pursued their vision privately and eschewed the aesthetics that surrounded them, first in Vienna and later in Southern California. Instead, they focused on pushing simple materials and techniques as far as they could without violating them. It is telling that they worked with local clay and that they fired the majority of their pieces in the kiln they brought with them from Vienna. Because they never followed trends, their glazes and their forms are timeless.

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1. “Interview with Otto Natzler,” conducted by Ruth Bowman, _Gertrud and Otto Natzler:
Collaboration/Solitude_ (New York: American Craft Museum, 1993), 43.
2. Quoted in Otto Natzler, “Immortal Clay: The Exploration of a Medium,” Form and Fire: Natzler Ceramics 1939–1972 (Washington, D.C.: The Renwick Gallery of the National Collection of Fine Arts, Smithsonian Institution Press, 1973), 19.
3. Natzler, Otto, “The Beginning of It All,” Gertrud and Otto Natzler Ceramics: Catalog of the Collection of Mrs. Leonard M. Sperry and a Monograph by Otto Natzler (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1968), 25–26.
4. Ibid., 26.

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