Charles L. Burdick, a watercolorist and inventor living in Madison, Wisconsin, received a patent in May 1892 for a “paint distributor” that looked like a pen attached to a cup affixed in front of a nozzle controlled by a trigger that when pressed resulted in a fine spray. This device was first shown at the 1893 Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition.

Branding it “aerograph” Burdick opened a shop in London. The aerograph, aka “air brush” quickly became the commercial standard for applying a micro thin layer of glaze that was highly cost effective. By the mid-1920s, the German ceramics industry, then the largest in the world, applied aerograph technology, called Spritzdekor (spray decoration), to its everyday ceramics. The public loved the triangles, circles, dots, squares, rectangles, in bright and muted colors and by 1930 some 90 manufacturers had industrialized spritzing on old and new forms in Germany. The industry blossomed. After 1933, the National Socialists quickly politicized it, banned its production, called it degenerate, and by late 1937 this every-person Deco-Modernism had died.

In this talk about Degenerate Ceramics you will see degenerate forms with flat, hard edge to fade decoration inspired by artists such as El Lissitzky, Martha Katzer, and Eva Zeisel, among others.

Rolf Achilles is an Art and Architecture Historian with an interest in historic preservation of interiors and their decorative arts. Rolf was also an Adjunct to the Historic Preservation Program at The School of the Art Institute for over 20 years. His interest in German airbrushed ceramics began many years ago while viewing the Tillman Budensieg Collection exhibition at the Cooper Hewitt, New York City. Rolf’s main focus has been on the widely popular airbrushed ceramics produced in Germany and Czechoslovakia. German airbrushed ceramics were declared degenerate and ordered destroyed by governmental decree in 1936, resulting in them being rare, with some forms and decorations unique survivors.