Jonathan Adler molds passion for clay into line of playful designs

GANNETT NEWS SERVICE

America "hearts" Jonathan Adler. The potter-turned-designer-turned-cheeky taste pooh-bah has become a national design mascot.

He can put breasts on a vase and we'll buy it; turn a giraffe into a lamp, and modern moms want it for the nursery; slap "Prozac" on a jar, sell it for $78, and we all sigh, "J'adore."

There's an affordable Adler line for the masses at Bed Bath & Beyond, a new Adlerized hotel for the upper design classes in Palm Springs, Calif., and Jonathan Adler scented candles.

His official aesthetic is "happy chic," and this means he has a bust of Michael Jackson in his New York apartment, puts Liza Minnelli on needlepoint throw pillows and believes passionately in the power of Krylon orange spray paint.

"My work, whatever the medium, is about making design that is unimpeachably chic but not off-putting or cold," Adler says via e-mail. "I want my stuff to make people feel good."

Joie de Jonathan

The Adler look is a wild melange of things he loves: from Pop Art and poodles to Palm Beach. It's 1972 and 1992 and 2002, all at the same time. It is iconically but irreverently modern. He offers prissy houndstooth pillows and platinum vases with the same vigor that he shows cushions covered with the seven deadly sins.

His inspirations include rap music, "The Shining," Madonna, Kiki de Montparnasse and "The Terminator."

"I am widely influenced," says Adler, 40. "I think snobbism can close one's eyes to some really great stuff. I think that a soupcon of vulgarity is a great thing — sort of like Diana Vreeland saying that bad taste is like a dash of paprika."

"Pothead'

Jonathan got his hands into clay at summer camp when he was 12. In 1979, for his bar mitzvah, he pleaded for a potter's wheel, and his parents obliged. The coolest thing about being a potter in high school, he jokes in his book "My Prescription for Anti-Depressive Living" (Regan Books, 2005, $34.95), was that he got to make his own bongs.

(Now, his friends swear, he is a tea-drinking, lap-swimming, smoke-free health loon. They can't imagine that he'd ever need Prozac.)

Come college time, he officially studied art history and semiotics at Brown University in Providence, R.I., but, he says, often absconded to the nearby Rhode Island School of Design to play with clay. He also was told there that, officially, he had no talent.

So Adler tried the movie business: an assistant to "harpyish shrews," but after three years, he gave in to the call of the vase.

"I assumed I was sacrificing any hope of fame or fortune to pursue my passion for clay," he says. "I imagined a life hawking my wares at rain-soaked craft fairs, and that was fine. Finding an audience for my work was my idea of success."

It happened quickly: In 1994, he showed his creations to a buyer for Barneys New York and design minds across the country swooned.

In the beginning, Adler made everything himself. Pots and mugs bearing his fingerprints and signatures are collectors' items and "hoarded," Gordon says — you never see them on eBay.

When Adler decided he needed help, when his pieces were shown in magazines and everyone wanted more, more, more, he went to Aid to Artisans, a nonprofit organization that links designers with artisans in less fortunate countries. Soon enough, he was supporting a small village in Peru, where they throw his pots to this day in a workshop by the sea.

"He built this, and he built it on his own," says Rima Suqi, shopping editor for New York Magazine and a longtime design journalist. "And he doesn't really advertise it. He's not like, "Look at me, I'm so great, I'm doing this for these people in Peru.' But because of him, there are one or two towns that are kept alive by making his stuff. Though I do miss knowing he made the things himself and wrote funny things on the bottom."

Posted by the Ocean County Observer

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