ALL FIRED UP

Jonathan Adler at MAD — a potter's way with puns and commerce

- BOB MORRIS

At the Museum of Arts and Design at 2 Columbus Circle in New York in early June, Jonathan Adler, the potter and founder of the home furnishings company that bears his name, looked up at a blue and white ceramic apothecary jar he had designed in 2018. It had wavering stripes and the letters LSD on it.

"It's a nod to my love of Delft pottery and reimagined as if the potter was on an acid trip," Adler said, adding that he does not partake.

Around him, an opening night party for the show he had assembled from the museum's extensive ceramics collection and his own work raged and raved. Adler, 58, moved among family, friends and vitrines spotlighting notable ceramic art works that had inspired him since he was a pottery-obsessed "nerd" growing up in New Jersey. He often took the train to the institution then known as the American Craft Museum and located on East 53rd Street.

Many of the 300 or so objects on display — divided into categories including animals, erotica, optimism, metallica and more — offered a provocative lesson about humour and irreverence in the history of ceramics. In a section about Americana, Adler's grenade vases and rocket decanters (inspired by euphemisms for inebriated like "bombed", "blasted" and "tanked") sat in dialogue with Howard Kotler's American Supperware from the late 60s. Kotler's plates depict flags and the White House in states of collapse.

"His work spanned so many different ideas and not only mixed materials but mixed art with commerce," Adler said.

A section devoted to erotica took in Adler's porcelain breast-patterned vases and his suggestive banana versions, playing off Marvin Lipofsky's glass lips from 1967. In a section concentrating on animals, Adler admired a 1994 cast bronze Monkey Chair with primate faces and bodies as arms and swirling tails as the back.