January 10, 2023
Honorable Mention
Signed photograph of Maija (Majlis) Grotell (1899-1973), ca. 1920s. Photographer unknown. Image courtesy of Wikimedia.
To kick off my new series spotlighting artists who have lived and worked in Michigan, I’m starting with the Finnish-born ceramicist and educator, Maija Grotell (1899-1973) who taught at Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, outside Detroit. Cranbrook Academy of Art’s reputation for craft in architecture was built by Grotell, the first woman and longest-serving head of Ceramics at the Academy. In fact, Grotell is responsible for changing the title of the program from Department of Pottery to Ceramics, “where the focus was not just an object, but the development of materials, processes, and the ability to enhance spaces”(“The Potter Who Helped Shape Cranbrook Architecture”-MetropolisMagazine).
Maija Grotell, Vase, ca. 1950. Glazed stoneware, signed MG, 14.5 x 8 in. Image courtesy of Wright: Auctions of Art and Design.
Grotell became known for her radical experimentation with glazes creating shades that ranged from intense blues to bright oranges, seen in the glazed blue stoneware Vase (ca. 1950) pictured. Although a number of women played important roles in the art pottery movement in the early twentieth-century, Grotell was one of only a few female ceramists active between the first and second World Wars. Often described as the “Mother of American Studio Ceramics," Grotell was influential in bringing European pottery kick wheel techniques to the United States.
Maija Grotell, Vase, ca. 1942. Albany slip over glazed stoneware, 20 x 11 1/8 in. Collection of Cranbrook Art Museum. Image courtesy of Cranbrook Art Museum.
Early Life
Born Majlis Grotell in Helsinki, Finland, on August 19, 1899, Grotell (1899-1973) was the athletic daughter of a sculptor and woodcarver mother who created Renaissance-style sculpture and wood carvings. Her father, a businessman, died in 1914. As a teenager, Grotell studied at the Ateneum, the only art school in Helsinki and where her mother had also studied. However, her artistic ambitions of making pottery were not supported by the Ateneum teachers who favored her mother’s work and compared the two.
Grotell’s training included painting, sculpture and design. She supported herself during school by drawing for the National Museum and working as a textile designer. Upon graduation in 1920, Grotell completed six years of graduate work in ceramics with the artist-potter Alfred William Finch, the only professional ceramics teacher in all of Finland in the 1920s, who encouraged her talent with the potter’s wheel. Unable to find work in Helsinki, where there was little opportunity for innovation, teaching, or marketing of ceramics, Grotell left Finland for New York in 1927 at the age of 28.
Education
In America, Grotell enrolled in a summer-school ceramic studies course at New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University in Alfred, New York, where she met the founder of the school, Charles F. Binns in 1927. Grotell clashed with Binns on his teaching methodology, preferring the potter's wheel to Binns's constructive method. At the time, wheel-thrown ceramics were not common in the United States. Instead, American potters used the methods of coiling, slip casting, or slab building. In the 1920s and 1930s, there were minimal ceramic facilities in the United States, and pottery was considered either an industry or a hobby. To sustain her career, Grotell was often asked to demonstrate her techniques with the potter’s wheel and she found work teaching throughout New York City while exhibiting and selling her own ceramics.
A Diploma from the 1929 Barcelona International Exposition and a Silver Medal at the Paris International in 1937 were among the first of twenty-five major exhibition awards Grotell was to receive over the next thirty years, including six from the Syracuse Ceramic National Exhibitions and the Charles Fergus Binns Medal from Alfred University in 196I. From 1936 until 1938, she was the first art instructor and research assistant at the School of Ceramic Engineering at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey.
Maija Grotell, 1947. Photographed by Harvey Croze. Copyright Cranbrook Archives. Neg. P39. Image courtesy of Cranbrook Academy of Art.
Cranbrook Academy of Art, 1938-1966
In 1938, Grotell accepted a position as head of the ceramics program at Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. A year prior, in 1937, she had been turned down for the post because of her gender. She was also hesitant to take the position for fear of losing her independence and fear that credit for any success would be attributed to male colleagues. However, when the post was offered to her, Grotell accepted and left Rutgers for Cranbrook. Her move to Cranbrook marked a turning point in her career. It was while teaching there that she created her finest work. With access to a large kiln, she could throw pots on a scale far grander than previously and she developed a sophisticated, geometric style. Grotell worked primarily with stoneware clay bodies and high-fire glazes. Throughout her long career, including twenty-eight years at Cranbrook, Grotell was an avid experimenter, investigating a variety of glaze chemistries, kilns, and clay.
Maija Grotell with Pot, March 1941. Published in the 100 Treasures catalog. Image courtesy of Cranbrook Archives, Cranbrook Center for Collections and Research, Cranbrook Archives Digital Collections.
Maija Grotell, Vase, 1940-1942. Stoneware, Albany Slip over unglazed clay, 21.5 x 8.25 in. Collection of Cranbrook Art Museum. Image courtesy of Cranbrook Art Museum.
Influence and Legacy
As an educator, Grotell was an innovative and dedicated instructor. She discouraged imitation and urged her students to develop their own individual aesthetics. In the early 1960s, Grotell developed a muscle condition that limited her ability to throw clay, impacting her creative production. Yet, by the time she retired from Cranbrook in 1966, Grotell had developed the ceramics department into one of the most prominent and influential in the United States. Today, Grotell’s work is in twenty-one museum collections, including the American Craft Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York as well as the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Cleveland Museum of Art and, of course, the Cranbrook Academy of Art Museum.
Maija Grotell, Jar, ca. 1944. Glazed stoneware, signed MG, 11 in. high. E. John Bullard Collection. Image courtesy of The Marks Project.
Grotell’s groundbreaking glaze formulas paved the way for the use of ceramics in architecture. Particularly after her colleague, the Finnish-American architect and industrial designer Eero Saarinen (1910-1961), used her glazes on the exterior of the General Motors Technical Center in Troy, Michigan, completed in 1956 and since designated a National Historic Landmark. Grotell’s glaze techniques made the colored bricks suitable for commercial use. One of her glazes, an intense blue-green shade called “Grotell blue” was also used on the walls of Cranbrook Academy of Art’s Williams Natatorium designed by Tod Williams and Billie Tsien in 1999. Elsewhere, the Cranbrook Kingswood Middle School for Girls, completed in 2011, uses a green glaze palette inspired by Grotell. Grotell died in 1973 at the age of 74 at her apartment in Pontiac, Michigan.
I hope you have enjoyed today’s Michigan artist profile. Stay tuned for more Michigan history lessons and artists who have (or had) connections to Michigan.
Maija Grotell, Vessel, ca. 1946. Glazed stoneware, signed MG, 7 3/8 x 7 7/8 x 7 5/8 in. The Art Institute of Chicago. Image courtesy of The Art Institute of Chicago.