The first publication to focus on individual designers in ceramics over the whole 20th century. Covers all the major female designers with up to date findings. Also some male designers previously almost undocumented.

This guide -- the first to cover a wide range of 20th-century North American and British ceramics factories in detail -- explores over 200 factories, covering pre-war designers, the innovative designs of the 1950s and 1960s and collectables of the future. Ellen Paul Denker is a museum consultant and researches, plans, and coordinates exhibitions all over the USA.

Employing numerous examples of classic British design, Designing Modern Britain delves into the history of British design culture, and thereby tracks the evolution of the British national identity.

An explosion of new ceramic design in the late 1920s and early 1930s introduced vibrant colours and dramatic angular shapes to the breakfast tables of Britain and the world. This book includes information on how to identify and date ceramics at a glance and features all the major designers including Clarice Cliff, Susie Cooper and Charlotte Rhead.

James Tower (1919-88) is widely regarded as one of the most distinctive figures in post-war British ceramics. Since his death over 20 years ago, his work has been often cited for its dramatic visual qualities, its subtle exploration of the boundaries of art and craft, and its lyrical integration of references to nature and the cosmos into an essentially abstract language of form and surface decoration. This is the first single publication to be devoted to his work and will reveal to a new audience the extraordinary range and quality of his achievement. Tower's career was unusual in inhabiting the worlds of fine art and ceramics which, in the 1950s and 1960s, still had only a low level of inter-penetration. Teaching at Corsham brought him into contact with some of the pioneering painters of post-war abstraction, including William Scott, Peter Lanyon and Howard Hodgkin, and as a potter Tower showed his work alongside Bernard Leach and Lucie Rie, contributing to a re-definition of modern craft. During the 1960s and 1970s he worked in white terra cotta and bronze, representing a diversity of sculptural practice during a period in which sculptors such as Anthony Caro and Phillip King were experimenting with new materials. From the late 1970s until his death, Tower concentrated again on glazed ceramic forms and was a highly original contributor to the 'New Ceramics'. This book provides a comprehensive visual document of Tower's work, incorporating a complete illustrated catalogue. It includes a detailed and authoritative biography, setting Tower in the social and artistic context in which he lived and worked.

Although usually associated with the 1920s and the '30s, in fact the Art Deco style had begun to emerge in France prior to the advent of the First World War. But it was during the interwar years that the style, reaching full maturity, was adopted by the international elite as the perfect expression of modern opulence and elegance, and to this day Art Deco designs are redolent of the age of Jazz, cocktails, the Charleston, speakeasies, Hollywood glamour, New York skyscrapers and, above all, style. The '20s was also a period of great technological advances in engineering and transportation, and the perpetual modernity and futuristic aura of Art Deco are evocative of this too. Here, BBC Antiques Roadshow expert Eric Knowles provides a lavishly illustrated guide to this most alluring and timeless of styles.