ABSTRACT
During the 1930s, as Susie Cooper established and developed her pottery company, her roles as manufacturer and designer were interpreted in two quite distinct ways by contemporary commentators and critics. Each group prioritized and identified different qualities: one stressed the ‘essential femininity’ of her work, whilst the other emphasized its ‘progressive modernity’. One put her in a separate ‘feminine’ category, the other aligned her with a group of mainly male modernist pottery designers. The source of the first explanation of Cooper’s work and increasing success was from within the pottery industry-from its foremost trade journal, the Pottery Gazette and Glass Trade Review, whereas the modernist analysis came in the writings of a number of increasingly influential critics, some of whom worked in Stoke-on-Trent or were associated with pottery. Foremost amongst these was Gordon Forsyth who discussed her work in his important survey book 20th Century Ceramics and in numerous articles, as well as Harry Trethowan, Vice-President of the China and Glass Retailers’ Association and DIA (Design and Industries Association) member who wrote articles on pottery including an influential one in The Studio in 1932. Other important writers, based outside Stoke-on-Trent, included Nikolaus Pevsner who described Cooper’s use of lithographs in his seminal work An Enquiry into Industrial Arts in England. It is the aim of this paper to examine and account for these conflicting interpretations of her role as a pottery manufacturer and of the designs that she produced.
