Ambacht Volendam Frank Carpay Vase MCM Vintage

Description: Ambacht Volendam Frank Carpay Vase MCM Vintage, see bio below. 6" tall wonderful mid century design. No chips or cracks. Please note the base has what looks to me as a shaved area which I have pictured. The area is very smooth as if done at the factory but you be the judge, does not look like it was damaged. Probably quite underrated in the scheme of New Zealand designers is Frank Carpay (1917-1985). He was born in Holland, where he studied at technical school. Before the age of 30 his talent had ascended him to director of design at prestigious ceramics company Ambacht Volendam. Post-war he headed to France. Here he befriended Pablo Picasso who introduced him to potter friends and encouraged him to focus on ceramics. Carpay returned to the Netherlands in 1950 and established a ceramics business which was a failure. He immigrated to New Zealand in 1953, a fortuitous time, as Crown Lynn had strategized to move away from imported goods and develop their own division of specifically Kiwi designer ware with ceramic artists like Ernest Shufflebotham. The goal was a high end product with a focus on contemporary art. Tom Clark, who was leading the project, hired Carpay who executed radical linear patterns on pre-existing Crown Lynn shapes. The pieces were signed ‘(Hand) WERK’ with a line drawing of a hand for the first word. The ranges produced under this division were critically well received but too ‘modern’ for the New Zealand public’s rather conservative tastes. We now look at Carpay’s pieces and they seem aesthetically pleasing and certainly not jarring, outrageous or conceptually hard to grasp. Nevertheless the Crown Lynn venture was a commercial failure and it was over by 1956. Over time Carpay also worked as a graphic designer for textiles, and clients like TEAL and Innes. This also did not go well, and he supplemented his income as a teacher. It was his beachwear brand, which grew from his post Crown Lynn screen-printing business, which was a moderate success for a few years into the early 1970s. Because of the small window of three years Hand WERK was produced, as well as the extreme rise in interest of mid-century design made specifically in Aotearoa, pieces are now considered very desirable.

Price: 95 USD

Location: Broken Arrow, Oklahoma

End Time: 2025-02-03T11:16:39.000Z

Shipping Cost: N/A USD