Notes

Dorothy Hafner's (1952- ) ceramic designs of the 1980s, both handmade and industrially produced are highly sought after as icons of their time.

In 1981 Hafner, already well known for her riotously patterned square porcelain plates, bowls and tea sets, decided to create a completely new set of shapes to carry her ever more aggressively patterned decorations.

The result was a completely new collection of shapes titled “Fred Flintstone, Flash Gordon and Marie Antoinette”, a complete range of triangular plates, square coffee cups, and hexagonal shaped coffee and tea sets, all handmade and hand painted in Hafner’s Manhattan atelier.

Unfortunately, the series proved to be prohibitively expensive to produce by hand so Hafner sought out an affiliation with an industrial manufacturer with whom to collaborate on production. As luck would have it, the work quickly won the eye of Rosenthal Studio Line, the prestigious German manufacturer of tablewares, and quickly a deal was struck between the two studios. Hafner would design and Rosenthal would produce and distribute. The resulting collection, fine tuned for industrial production, was titled “Flash”. It was introduced in 1984 and quickly won both critical and commercial success worldwide.