GLAZE OF GLORY

Always borrowing, American artists are the greatest cultural debtors on Earth. And few among them owe the world more than potters do.

Over the years, potters have rummaged the cupboards of virtually every mud-baking civilization--often extending their slippery reaches overseas and into the grave--to come up with what we like to think are innovations in modern ceramic form.

Not too long ago, this appetite for the foreign and the dead was considered a weakness--a sign of American timidity and immaturity in the arts. In the 1950s, noted English potter and author Bernard Leach said that this "disadvantage of having many roots" inclined American potters to follow "many undigested fashions." Yet he also acknowledged that the resulting freedom to choose gave Americans an unparalleled openness and hunger for the new. Two shows, a retrospective of Paul Soldner's ceramics and a showing of recent ceramics by Kurt Weiser, offer vivid glimpses of what American potters have done with that freedom in the past 40 years.

At 71, Soldner, who lives in Colorado, belongs to the generation of rebels who took pottery out of the kitchen and put it on a well-lighted pedestal in the salon. Bridging the old and the new, Soldner's finest works give subsequent generations of potters a clear view of where in the bedrock of tradition his efforts are anchored.

A student of Peter Voulkos--long considered the leader of that troublesome gang--at Los Angeles County Art Institute in the 1950s, Soldner has been credited with innovations that are now the stuff of every potter's upbringing. He was one of the earliest and most talented American practitioners of raku, a Japanese method of firing ware, which he improvised from a description in one of Leach's books. Like the ceramics of Voulkos, Soldner's large, pummeled pots helped ceramists adjust the scale of their work to its new and increasingly visual purpose. And his free-flowing surface designs helped to relieve the austere grip of those stoneware fundamentalists who commanded, "Thou shalt not decorate pottery." He didn't do much to brighten or broaden the earth-colored glaze palette of the 1950s. But his preference for the accidental and spontaneous helped to steer the modern potter's wheel away from the deadening perfection of "good design."

Any one of these was enough to knot the underwear of the devout, utilitarian craftsmen and -women of the day. Yet the striking aspect of the earlier of the 65 works in Soldner's show at Arizona State University Art Museum in Tempe is how tame and elegant they now seem. As if--like the Beatles, who hang in my grandmother's memory as those excessively well-mannered Brits with tidy hair--they have been made cozier by all that has been done since in the name of free expression.

That isn't to say Soldner's early forms and decorations aren't lumpy or raw or painted with a broad, sloppy brush. They are. In his series of "Floor Pots" from the late 1950s, he did little to hide or to refine the remnants of the means he used to make them. This was the modern twist on pottery's historical and somewhat magical effort to make transitions of abstract shapes and volumes appear seamless.

The heavy throwing rings, the rumpled seams where pottery sections join and the matter-of-fact splatters and drips of glaze all say, "I am a modern pot." But they say it in a Zen-inspired voice that whispers sweet acceptance of ceramic imperfections.

One of the luckiest of these effects is the glowing halo line around the dark brush strokes, drips or finger dabs on some of his raku pots. It gives the surfaces of pieces such as the vase from the Marer Collection at Scripps College (1965) and the elongated vessel with the reclining woman (1973) the rich gradation of toned black-and-white photographs. It also gives them a detail whose precision seems to be a gift from nature. These works and several of the smaller raku vessels from the early 1970s are far and away the strongest examples from Soldner's productive career. They exemplify his remarkable resourcefulness in using old techniques to enrich new forms. They also suggest that he didn't stray as far as some enthusiasts say he did from the formal artistic values of traditional pottery. They are undeniably fatter and lumpier than the gravity-defying Chinese Sung and T'ang Dynasty models that defined ceramic elegance through the 1950s. But they follow the basic classical format of a small base surmounted by a larger, spherical or flaring body.

This is even true of the more recent "Pedestal Pieces." Built with jagged slabs of elaborately textured clay--flaring up and away from precariously small bases--these are substantially larger than the earlier pots. But they don't feel larger. The reason for that is that Soldner flattened and reduced the walls of the forms to two-sided clay reliefs in his effort to turn their textured surfaces into a kind of sculpt-a-pot. It's ambitious stuff, but too literal, and too full of the effort to leap a chasm rather than to cross a bridge. If Kurt Weiser, who teaches at ASU, hasn't crossed that bridge, he, at least, has gone to the edge and taken a good, long look. At 42, he comes from the generation that has inherited the ceramic freedom that Soldner's won. But as the cold warriors used to say, it's freedom with a price.