Every Day Is Saturday

She was the strangest lady on Fifth Avenue. Her face looked a little like a reduced version of Elsa Lanchester's, her flower-covered, tubular body was rooted in the ground, and for a hat she wore a fragment of a vase full of spreading greenery. She looked like Maud who had finally come into the garden and been left there too long. The lady was all clay, and the creation of Denmark's Bjorn Wiinblad (rhymes with keen blot), one of the brightest ceramists in the business.

A one-man show of Wiinblad's work last week transformed the third floor of Georg Jensen Inc., the Manhattan emporium of Scandinavian good taste, into a strange place, half fairyland and half Punch cartoon. Puckish faces were everywhere, and they bore a remarkable resemblance to the artist--bright-eyed, point-nosed, with an expression of gaiety rampant. The show included chummy centaurs bearing candles, chubby wood nymphs lurking in the shrubbery, birds that never were, sinuous but homey maidens, and friendly eggheads sprouting flowers. One Stolen Nymph, her navel flower-decked, sat sidesaddle aboard a centaur, who was chiefly interested in some birds. She looked piqued.

Though they might easily be insufferably cute, Wiinblad's figures are always redeemed by a caricaturist's humor and a painter's technical skill. Also in the show: textiles with Wiinblad faces that look like otherworld creatures peering from flying saucer portholes, and a collection of bright, bold posters (Wiinblad has done them for everybody from Danish music societies to the Marshall Plan). Standout poster: an exhortation to Danes to be musical ("Play Yourself"), showing a sprightly young lady playing a bow across strands of her hair, an almost perfect illustration of a famed T.S. Eliot line ("A woman drew her long black hair out tight / And fiddled whisper music on those strings").

Artist Wiinblad, 35, was a struggling painter of children's portraits who worked as a typesetter to round out his diet during the Nazi occupation of Denmark. Friends at the Arts and Crafts School introduced him to ceramics. Fascinated, he defied the Nazi curfew to slip into the school at night to work at the kilns. After his first ceramics show proved a critical and popular success, he started his own shop with three kilns and two helpers. They worked long and seriously through the week. But on Saturday they had fun, making spontaneous, gay pieces. Since then, these have become the regular product of the Wiinblad kilns. Says Wiinblad: "Now every day is Saturday."

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