This dissertation explores a constellation of interrelated, and under-investigated, French and Japanese ceramics spanning the period between 1866, the year that marked the production of the first ceramic set that came to be known as japoniste, and 1904, the year of the St. Louis World’s Fair, where contemporaneous Japanese and French ceramics shared a common vocabulary. The historical data I collected in France and Japan and its analysis, through qualitative and quantitative sociological tools, led me to conclude that Japonisme represented a tightly knit social network in which ceramics were used as currency to broker unprecedented links within and between the central binaries of the nineteenth-century French art world: academic/ avant-garde, art/ craft, fine art/ decorative art, painting/ other mediums, intrinsic/ instrumental, representational/ self-referential, and tradition/ innovation. Until now, most attention to Japonisme has been concentrated on the ukiyo-e woodblock prints used instrumentally by the Modernist practitioners of what Duranty called the “new painting.” My study turns our attention to a medium in which cultural power relationships were more evenly balanced, and in which, therefore, we can trace how two cultures can interact productively. Japanese ceramics taught French collectors and artists how to begin to discern between Chinese and Japanese traditions and to “read” the cultural references embedded in Japanese decoration. Also, French collectors’ antiquarian interest in Japanese ceramics was readily matched by French potters who reformed their practice and altered hierarchies of medium by drawing on the European arabesque tradition, the Rococo Revival, and the Japanese aesthetic of playfulness. In return, Meiji- and Taisho-period Japanese potters and porcelain manufacturers emulated European japoniste ceramic vocabulary in what constituted a renegotiation of the balance between tradition, on the one hand, and imported technologies and new global markets, on the other. Their ceramics reflected several rounds of exchange between the Japanese and French art worlds. These objects demonstrated just how complexly two social networks from two previously distinct cultures had been influencing each other in a medium they both valued, ceramics. I call this phenomenon “uroboric” Japonisme because it most fully illustrates the circular nature of transcultural exchanges and the central role that such exchanges play in the renewal of aesthetic and sociocultural identities.

The ceramic forms in this thesis project represent a study of the sculptural and figurative qualities of the ceramic process. This study includes a search for a personal form language, development of the slab construction technique, and development of a glazed surface appropriate to the work. The subject of the work is the human torso, with the vessel-like forms focusing on the core of the body as a metaphor for the core of the human spirit.

Single crystals with composition Lu3Al5O12 were synthesized using Czochralski and micro-pulling-down melt growth techniques. Polycrystalline ceramics of the same composition were synthesized by vacuum annealing of powders prereacted using a citrate-nitrate combustion technique and by spark-plasma-sintering of powders prereacted using a flame-spray-pyrolysis technique. Single crystals and polycrystalline ceramics are activated with Ce3+ or Pr3+ or doubly activated with Ce3+ and Tb3+ ions. Cerium-doped Czochralski-grown single crystals were compared to cerium-terbium codoped Czochralski-grown and micro-pulling down single crystals. Cerium-terbium codoped single crystals are also compared to similarly-activated polycrystalline ceramics sintered under vacuum using combustion-synthesized prereacted powders. X-ray diffraction analysis and fluorescence characterization were used to determine successful formation of single-phase LuAG and successful incorporation of doping species. Absorbance, fluorescence, radioluminescence, and scintillation decay analyses were used to compare synthesis processes and activator selection.

Single crystals with composition Lu3Al5O12 were synthesized using Czochralski and micro-pulling-down melt growth techniques. Polycrystalline ceramics of the same composition were synthesized by vacuum annealing of powders prereacted using a citrate-nitrate combustion technique and by spark-plasma-sintering of powders prereacted using a flame-spray-pyrolysis technique. Single crystals and polycrystalline ceramics are activated with Ce3+ or Pr3+ or doubly activated with Ce3+ and Tb3+ ions. Cerium-doped Czochralski-grown single crystals were compared to cerium-terbium codoped Czochralski-grown and micro-pulling down single crystals. Cerium-terbium codoped single crystals are also compared to similarly-activated polycrystalline ceramics sintered under vacuum using combustion-synthesized prereacted powders. X-ray diffraction analysis and fluorescence characterization were used to determine successful formation of single-phase LuAG and successful incorporation of doping species. Absorbance, fluorescence, radioluminescence, and scintillation decay analyses were used to compare synthesis processes and activator selection.

No description available.

Thesis (M.F.A.)--Rochester Institute of Technology, 2008. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaf 19).

Thesis (M.F.A.)--Rochester Institute of Technology, 2008. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 34-35).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Lehigh University, 1997. / Includes vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 218-227).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, 1992. / Vita. Abstract. Includes bibliographical references. Also available via the Internet.

Thesis (M.F.A.)--Rochester Institute of Technology, 1987. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaf 32).