Untitled,

1970s

I remember my first encounter with Takaezu’s work: a seniors-only outing in 1967 to her studio in Clinton, New Jersey, its floor-to-ceiling shelves crowded with bowls, plates, and wheel-thrown closed forms with tiny vestigial spouts. On my way back to Princeton, my mind’s eye was alive with the palette of her glazes: pearl white, burnt cream, burnt umber, ocher, rust, black, and the deepest cobalt blue I had ever seen—all brushed and dipped and dribbled on her surfaces with the expressive panache of her Abstract Expressionist contemporaries.

Many years later, I was not surprised to learn that in the development of her signature closed form, Takaezu had been looking for “a natural pure form,” and that the astonishing complexity of her glaze effects had been inspired in part by painters like Robert Motherwell. Though she painted in glaze on

plates and tiles, her closed forms are experientially cinematic. As we move around them, our memory of what we’ve just seen informs our anticipation of what’s to come. In her words, “It took years before I was able successfully to merge the glaze as painting to the form, so that the two . . . became one total and complete piece.”