VAART - Bruin, Jan de & Garth Clarck & Edo Dijksterhuis & Arjen Ribbens: — Jan van der Vaart. Master potter.

11 2025, (24 x 30 cm), 256 pp. English text, ca. 250 ills., hardcover. This is the first major publication on the Dutch artist Jan van der Vaart since 1991. He professed to hate clay and called himself "that man of the flower vases." Yet, no one left such a mark on post-war Dutch ceramics as Jan van der Vaart (1931-2000). Using geometric shapes as his starting point and a small palette of glowing glazes, he created thousands of vases and other utilitarian objects. Designs of timeless, sensual beauty, with a recognizable signature. He, the self-proclaimed "potter," had no interest in art with a capital "A." To make his vases, flower towers, and candlesticks accessible to a wide audience, he began mass-producing them, a choice despised by fellow ceramists and collectors. His innovative and unconventional approach remains relevant today, if only because Van der Vaart, himself self-taught, trained more than a hundred ceramists as a long-standing academy lecturer.