Eureka 437: The Matisse Collection by East Fork Pottery

0:15You're listening to Eureka on Monocle Radio, brought to you by the team behind the entrepreneurs, the show all about inspiring people, innovative companies and fresh ideas in global business. I'm Tom Edwards. Alex Matisse is the founder and CEO of East Fork, a pottery company based in Asheville, North Carolina, that's become one of the most influential ceramics manufacturers in the United States. The great-grandson of a certain Henri Matisse, Alex was born into a rich artistic heritage. Rather than follow the path laid out by his lineage, though, he trained under potters in rural North Carolina, focusing on a craft grounded in utility, tradition and materiality.

0:54Now, for the first time, he's embracing that legacy with East Fork's latest collection, a collaboration with Les Héritiers Matisse, the estate and foundation overseen by his brother, Georges. So what does it mean to inherit a creative legacy? And how do you carve out your own identity when your name comes with built-in expectations? Well, here is Alex with more.

1:24East Fork is a company that I founded in and around 2009 in the mountains outside of Asheville, which is a little town in western North Carolina. And I founded it as a potter, a very classically trained potter, firing a large wood-burning kiln. I went through a sort of long apprenticeship process for a few years before going out on my own. Did that for a few years, and then a friend joined, and my wife became more involved, and we pivoted the business from kind of making one-off pieces of pottery that people collected to producing this line that was gas-fired. It was like a very sharp pivot, and now we have about 115 people that work in the organization.

2:17We make about 650 ,000 pieces of pottery a year, which is not a massive factory, but it's not a small factory. We have collectors and fans all over the world that refer to themselves as potheads. They have, you know, buy-sell-trade communities. They get together. They have potlucks. they kind of control the secondary marketplace in this very interesting way where if somebody comes in and they're asking too much for something people kind of jump all over them so they sort of self-police this community but they're just, they're so, so, so supportive of what we do and just keep filling their cabinets with all of the colors and the shapes it's amazing

3:09The Matisse Collection is our focus right now. We've been working on this project for about two years. The family, my family, has always held the work very close. My brother George lives in Paris. He runs L 'Ezère et Tia Matisse. They control the copyright. They work with museums that are doing shows. They authenticate art. But they've never done very much licensing at all. And as time passed, that sort of has loosened up a little bit. Connie and I have been talking about doing something for years and years. The timing was never right because East Fork was developing its own voice, its own place in the world.

3:54That was really important to me when I founded it. I left Matisse out of the name. I really was kind of running away from it, from that legacy. so much so that I moved out into the mountains of Western North Carolina to kind of find myself, find my way. And East Fork emerged. And so only kind of now that East Fork really stands on its own and so many people that love this brand, love our work and what we do, they have no idea that Matisse is sort of back in there in the history of it. and so it felt like it was a good time. It was a good time to kind of welcome him back in for me as well. So we worked with George to pick the artwork and then to figure out how to execute it in a way that would get his approval as the person who's really kind of controlling the integrity of that work to match the blue perfectly, to get the resolution of the brushstrokes.

4:59All of the work in this collection is from kind of later in his career, sort of late 40s into the 50s, which is when the cutouts were done. So all of it is very strong. It's very sort of like, it's classic Matisse. The collection is out in the world. It's pushed, I think, all of us kind of to the brink at one point or another through it, but it looks beautiful, and the team has done such an amazing job of honoring that legacy. I'm really proud, really happy to see it out there.

5:34The mug itself is a very iconic East Fork product. And what we put on the mug, it was a very, very large cutout, women with monkeys, and it fit the shape beautifully. It wrapped around it. It was like the perfect size. And I think that that sort of, it's obviously, it's a later work. It's a cutout, so it's very kind of iconic Matisse work. But the mug itself is the product, I think, that really embodies East Fork from our approach to form, from our approach to comfort, how it's made, how it sits in the hand, the weight of it. So that, to me, is kind of probably the most iconic one. The side plates that we have, this kind of intermediate size, this 8-inch side plate, have these beautiful aquatints, these portraits, which are maybe less known.

6:31But for me, I've always really connected with them. They're so beautiful. They're so simple. They're so strong. To get that into the world, we actually ended up having to bring all of the decaling process, the last part of the process in-house, kind of at the 11th hour. So we've been teaching our staff that. We've been installing new kilns. It's been this beautiful, it kind of reminds me of old school East Fork where suddenly you just get together and you've got to solve the problem and everybody jumps in. So that's been beautiful to see. In the spring, later on, we've got some new colors coming out.

7:06We've got some beautiful new seasonals coming. And that continues all into the fall. And then we'll expand this collection as well. We'll expand the Matisse collection. We'll introduce some more artwork on some new forms. That will take some time. I don't know when exactly those will come into the world. This is one of the first collections that we've done that is not seasonal. It's like, it's here to stay. And that'll be a very sort of new thing for us. And so we'll then expand upon it. But we've got so much, so much fun stuff. And then also, this is the first time we brought surface decoration back into the work.

7:42Our primary expressive outlet has been color, the color of the glaze. this is the first time we brought some surface decoration in so now this is going to be sort of a jumping off point for some new collections that are not matisse related but have surface decoration which is something that i used to do and was known for when i was a potter so we're working on some beautiful brushwork collections that'll be hand painted but that to me that's what's so fun about this is it's really like kick-started this whole new expressive outlet and a place for that energy to go.

8:28That was Alex Matisse, the founder and CEO of East Fork. And you can learn more by heading to eastfork.com. And that's all for this episode of Eureka. We'll be back at the same time next week. The program was produced by Laura Kramer with audio editing by Jack Dewars. Listen again and find out more at the new and improved monocle.com. That's where you can, as before, join the club and subscribe to Monocle magazine. If you'd like to contact the team, do email Laura on lrk at monocle.com. I'm Tom Edwards. Goodbye, and thanks for listening to Eureka.