Rudolf Staffel

Rudolf Staffel (born 1911 San Antonio, Texas - 2002 Alfred, New York) was an American ceramic artist and arts educator.

Rudolf Staffel initially wanted to be a painter, and early on attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. While there, an exhibition of Wiener Werkstätte at the Field Museum of History, captivated him with its glass art. Staffel briefly moved to Mexico to study glass blowing, and while there fell in love with ceramics at The National Archeological Museum in Mexico City. His early ceramics were in a mid-century studio style, with traditional forms and glazes, although sometimes with social commentary and often with references to Native American, Asian and Scandinavian ceramic traditions. In the 1940s, he studied with Hans Hoffmann in New York, who instilled in him a strong sense of "push/pull" pictorial content that would later come to maturity in his Light Gatherers. Circa 1954-55, Staffel turned from stoneware to porcelain as the result of a dinnerware commission he was given.

By the late 1950s, Staffel worked exclusively in porcelain. His Light Gatherers, as they would become known, would occupy Staffel for the rest of his career. The ability of a work to hold and transmit light was the most important quality for him. "Even when I was a painter, I was always interest in light," he said. "Something about light coming through glass, wax, or snow. I wanted to achieve a passage of light." Staffel made his own porcelain compositions in an effort to achieve the maximum translucency, the same as with glass or paint. He also manipulated the material via piercing, stretching, folding and even engraving. His works are almost exclusively white, are rarely glazed, and when he occasionally adds color it is limited to blue, green or, rarely, red tones that come from metal oxides.

Rudolf Staffel taught at the Tyler School of Art in Elkins Park, Pennsylvania from 1940, until his retirement in 1978. While there, he mentored artists including John E. Dowell Jr..

His daughter is writer Megan Staffel.

Staffel has his first one-person museum exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Crafts (now the Museum of Art and Design) in New York, in 1967. From 1976 he showed regularly in one-person and group exhibitions at Helen Drutt Gallery in Philadelphia. He was the subject of the retrospectives Rudolf Staffel: Selected Works, 1935-1989 at Temple University, Philadelphia in 1989; Transparency in Clay: The Work of Rudolf Staffel at Museum voor Het Kruithuis, 's-Hertogenbosch, The Netherlands in 1990; and Rudolf Staffel: Searching for Light; A Retrospective View, 1936-1996 at the Museum of Applied Arts, Helsinki, in 1996 and which travelled to the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1997.

...
Wikipedia