Recently two beautiful wine decanters, designed by Weston in midcentury, were returned to us. I date them at the late fifties or early sixties because the wine decanters were phased out of the production line by the seventies, to my recollection, as the wild life sculpture line and other functional designs became predominately featured.

The form is understated in its simplicity. There are other forms of the midcentury or mid-century inspired era based on a bulb with a thin elongated neck but this form predates most of them. There are forms going back to antiquity based on a bulb with an elongated neck and yet I have never seen one that resembles the particular design choices made by Weston when he created this form for the first Andersen Design line to be marketed to the public.

The cast and fettling of these two decanter-vases is perfectly executed, bringing out the finer sensibilities of the design. The fullness of the bulb is anchored toward the ground. The bulb elongates, curving inward in both upward and downward directions. The downward curve is shorter for security at the base. The bulb elongates upward and tapers to an reserved degree before it expands outward again, without extravagance, toward the heavens, like a bulb flowering from earth to sky.

The glaze and the application of the glaze is accomplished with the perfection of skilled craftsmanship. The white glaze differs from the andersen signature look. It is a glossy white rather than a matte. The glossy white compliments the sensuality of the forms curvature.

The Blueberry glaze is perfectly applied. The surface is smooth, embedded with deeper tones in speckled variegations. As the decanter was turned during the glaze application, the glaze flowed together on two sides, producing two elegant streams of a deep blue color. One stream is subtle and the other pronounced. The tactile surface is uninterrupted and smooth to the touch. The glaze meets the bottom of the form evenly with only one discretely present bubble aligned with the contrasting coloring where the glaze streamed into itself producing a darker tone. One must look closely to perceive it.

These two beautiful decanters began their lives like Siamese twins, bonded together in the kiln by a happenstance of placement when loading the kiln. They were placed too close together and were joined together during the transmutational process of heating and cooling.

There after was an attempt to separate the pair which created two matching holes around the center of the bulbs. The holes did not bother me but rather seemed a part of the union lasting for over half a century, a bond made stronger by history, one at birth and inseparable ever since, even after a forced attempt was made to separate them.

In the early twentieth century Marcel Duchamp reacted to the concept of art as created for the viewing with the eye, only, referring to the prevailing concept of art as "retinal art'. Duchamp was one of the most influential artistic and intellectual minds of the twentieth century. His first controversial art work was The Nude Descending the Staircase, created at a time when nudes were commonly depicted in art as rendered realistically in the style of Renaissance Art, but Marcel was interested in deconstructing and reordering thinking about art. It was a time when science was breaking old concepts of nature as defined by the most common human senses to discover an underlying dimension in which the laws of nature in the quantum domain contradict the laws of nature sustained in the classical paradigm. Heisenberg's uncertainty principal introduced what Bohr called, "the end of what we can know" as it became apparent that the act of observing was affecting the observed and that position (space) amd momentum (time) could not be measured simultaneously. The Nude Descending the Staircase expresses the new revolution in man's perception of nature and reality as it attempted to transcend a portrait anchored by classical time-space co-ordinates and depict a quantum superposition. I do not know if all of that was transpiring in Duchamp's mind but the idea that art transcends the intent of its maker was inherent to Duchamp's thinking about art as a conceptual process in which the artist could chose a work of art, rather than making it and the artist surrendered control of the work of art to other factors.