Writing about an industry and material defined by fragility, Susanne Marchand insists that Central European porcelain was all about Glanz (splendor). Marchand's sweeping cultural-economic history of eighteenth-century Europe's “white gold” traces Mitteleuropa's special relationship with the material, revealing how fine ceramics integrated “backwards” Germany into stronger luxury markets in the West. Central Europe's particular obsession with the spell of its lustrous perfection and the economic potential it represented takes center stage throughout the book. In the eighteenth century, porcelain-making served to shore up princely or noble prestige; in the nineteenth century, in catering to middle-class markets, porcelain production became tethered to regional and national identities, as manufacturers showcased technical and artistic prowess through exquisite Prunkstücke (luxury showpieces) shown at world's fairs or the ubiquitous displays found in department stores. In the twentieth century, porcelain became enmeshed with domestic stability as the “family meal took on renewed symbolic value” in the face of total war and foreign occupation (390). Theoretically, Porcelain takes inspiration from cultural historians like Leora Auslander and Daniel Roche on the importance of everyday objects as historical evidence, although the author is notably unconcerned with studies of materiality and aesthetics.
Beginning in Saxony, where in 1708 alchemist Johann Böttger (Augustus the Strong's “real-life Rumpelstiltskin” [35]) first approximated East Asia's translucent, hard-paste porcelains, eighteenth-century German porcelain-making followed a distinct pattern. Engaging in industrial sabotage, German princes competed with each other to establish state-sponsored manufactories, both for the purpose of cultural prestige and to boost mercantilist economies vis-à-vis English and Dutch imports. By the 1760s, however, princely manufactories in Saxony (Meissen) and Prussia (Königliche Porzellan Manufaktur-Berlin) stagnated against the challenge of English entrepreneurs like Josiah Wedgwood, renowned for his promotion of neoclassical design and pioneering methods of marketing whereby goods were promoted by royal “influencers” like Queen Charlotte (rather than the German model of direct royal patronage). German manufacturers launched campaigns to recapture artistic leadership, founding schools to train painters and modelers and luring skilled artisans away from other high-end production centers like Sevres and Vienna (Europe's second manufactory founded outside of Saxony). Anticipating marketing strategies used by luxury brands today, firms like Meissen navigated a two-pronged branding strategy. Sales of more quotidian cups, plates, and saucers, like the moderately priced Blue Onion service (1738) imitating East Asian pomegranate motifs, sustained the production of the less-profitable but highly visible figurines for which the firm remains renowned and celebrated in literary accounts like the Bruce Chatwin novella Utz. In an entirely different guise, the eighteenth-century model of courtly patronage would resurface during the NSDAP period with the Führer's fondness for Nymphenburg porcelain, a predilection furthered by his decorator Gerty Troost. A bizarre twist on Rococo patronage patterns, Hitler's feudal “princes” followed the Führer's artistic lead.
As an economic-cultural history, Porcelain focuses on production over marketing and consumption. As a complement to the literary and epistolary accounts Marchand commands, the reader wishes for more coverage of advertising, style guides, and periodicals that would help unlock porcelain's cultural meaning in the manner of Michael Yonan and Alden Cavanaugh's The Cultural Aesthetics of Eighteenth-Century Porcelain (2010) or Elizabeth Kowalski-Wallace's Consuming Subjects: Women, Shopping and Business in the Eighteenth Century (1999). The author is at her strongest in chapters like “Making, Marketing, and Consuming in the ‘Golden Age’,” which integrates perspectives from the history of consumption and production (including fascinating glimpses at the hierarchical socio-economic distinctions enjoyed by porcelain workers) with analyses of changing dining patterns and new commodities like coffee, tea, and sugar, which not only necessitated new types of household objects but ushered in new forms of sociability reflected in afternoon tea-time or more intimate dining rituals, like service à la française in comparison to older forms of medieval banqueting. Marchand convincingly argues that porcelain remained tethered to court society rather than middle-class sociability, for example in England, where female purchases of this “white gold” became a trope for unbridled consumption and sexual desire. Female consumption in Central Europe followed different trajectories, with middling women commanding comparatively smaller disposable incomes. The chapters on expanding production through the Biedermeier and Wilhelmine eras provide similarly fascinating insights on the universality of porcelain in the German home, which had now, the author argues, moved firmly from the display shelf or cabinet (with far less demand for gallantry objects) and onto dining tables for new rituals like breakfast and afternoon Kaffeekränzchen. Private manufacturers in regions like Thuringia effectively competed with Meissen in producing so-called Türkenkoppchen (Turkish cups) for the Ottoman market. But even as porcelain became increasingly tethered to the everyday, new forms of regularized gift exchange centering on holidays and weddings—direct precursors of the department-store registry—harkened back to eighteenth-century traditions of diplomatic gift-giving.
As an economic-business history, Marchand's work is a landmark achievement but as a work of cultural history its success is more uneven. The author's treatment of porcelain's gendered and aesthetic dimensions constitutes an Achilles heel for an otherwise superb book. Marchand includes women's longstanding linkages to porcelain as makers and consumers but in a sometimes peremptory manner raising more questions than answers. The reader is intrigued by Marchand's insights that the “relatively weak participation” of Central European women in luxury markets was a critical factor slowing eighteenth-century porcelain consumption, in contrast to middling women's robust participation in British commercial markets (115). But by the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the reader is faced with familiar clichés on female consumption and domesticity, and is left wondering what transpired in the interim. The reader welcomes Marchand's discussions on the advent of female labor in the manufactories and house industry system, even as it lacks more comprehensive perspectives on the gendered divisions of labor characterizing ceramic production, like the one found in Cheryl Buckley's pioneering Potters and Paintresses (1990) on women in the Staffordshire potteries.
Among the questions left unanswered is how such low-skill labor intersected with the upper-middle-class amateur pursuit of china painting: a practice so entwined with femininity that Central European schools of applied art offered special women's courses on porcelain painting (these were flooded by upper-class women despite such schools’ artisanal-class linkages). Without sources specifically illuminating porcelain's meanings to female consumers, the author's arguments that interwar female consumers spurned figurines of “new women” and instead preferred more conventional representations stand on shaky ground. Likewise, when the author argues that design reformers and manufactories attempted to guide public taste, whereas the public desired stylistic eclecticism, the author seems to be unaware of a larger literature on consumption critiquing the patriarchal nature of design and marginalizing the power of female consumer desire. Penny Sparke's theories on “pink consumption” might have buttressed Marchand's arguments on the German consumer's longstanding preference for the Rococo.
At the same time, the reader is confused by the author's inclusion of stylistic issues—chapter subsections reading as tangential to the broader narrative—given that the introduction states the book is largely unconcerned with aesthetics. The theories of the German Werkbund—a professional organization known for endorsing the collaboration of art and industry and embracing serial production—are unhelpfully lumped together with Semper and the Wiener Werkstätte, which turned on a completely different model of finely crafted individual objects. Josef Hoffmann is introduced as “a great industrial designer” (351) and his Melon Porcelain Set for Viennese Manufacture Augarten included under the heading of functionalism although the Wiener Werkstätte co-founder, in privileging fine handcrafts over industry and ornamentation over function, would have balked at such designations. In discussing the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century style, the author unhelpfully dismisses Austrian art historian and curator Alois Riegl's Kunstwollen (will-to-form) theories, stating that porcelain embodies far more than a unitary worldview but without grasping that Riegl's theories on artistic transmission might have, in fact, served her argument. Readers are less than convinced by her insistence that orientalism was not central to eighteenth-century porcelain production and that an obsession with East Asia's “white gold” became far less pressing once Europeans had mastered the alchemists’ secrets themselves. The reader might wish that the author omit the aesthetic component entirely, or devote more attention to guiding readers through her arguments visually. How specifically did Rococo sculpture differ from Neoclassical variants? How did the Nazis’ preferences for simplicity in everyday objects intersect with modernist Werkbund ideals and a newfound classicism?
Despite such minor shortcomings, Porcelain is a monumental achievement in scope and breadth in illuminating porcelain's European beginnings and its increasingly fragile position in the markets of the present.
