ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses how the designers used decoration to address consumer ‘desires’ within the framework of emerging modernism. The pottery manufacturers of Stoke-on-Trent, the traditional centre of industrial ceramic production in Britain, approached modernism with a sceptical pragmatism, often finding themselves at odds with the theorists of European modernism. The chapter focuses on the complex relationship between modernism, decoration and gender in British industrial ceramic design during the 1930s. Gender, particularly femininity, forms the subtext of this discussion given that decoration was equated with femininity in the writings of several important modernist theorists in the early years of the twentieth century. In marked contrast to the cold, spare industrial imagery which characterized European modernist design, Paul Nash’s designs, like those by Susie Cooper, Clarice Cliff, Freda Beardmore and Millie Taplin, sought to ‘accommodate the past in the new forms of the present’ in order to produce goods for the 1930s middle-class home.
