GEORGE OHR IN HIS NINETEENTH-CENTURY CONTEXT:
THE MAD POTTER RECONSIDERED
BY
ELLEN LIPPERT
Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements
For the degree of Doctor of Philosophy
Dissertation Advisor: Dr. Henry Adams
Department of Art
CASE WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY
January 2009 CASE WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY
SCHOOL OF GRADUATE STUDIES
We hereby approve the thesis/dissertation of
______
candidate for the ______degree *.
(signed)______(chair of the committee)
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(date) ______
*We also certify that written approval has been obtained for any proprietary material contained therein. TABLE OF CONTENTS
List of Illustrations 4
Abstract 9
Introduction 11 Chapter Discussion 22 Previous Scholarship and Theory 27 Larger Issues of Method 33
Part I: Ohr the Man 41
Chapter One: The Rediscovery of George Ohr 41 The First Generation—The Ohr Legend Is Born 44 Significance of the Mad Potter 46 Ohr as a Prophet 48 Revisionist Writing 49
Chapter Two: Biography and Early Literature 57 Childhood/Early Life 57 Later Life 66 Contemporary Reception of Ohr 72 Positive Reviews 80 Fairs and Expositions 84 Social Influences—Diversity 85 The Midway 89 Visual Display 93 Architecture 98
Chapter Three: Ohr, Advertising, and the Artistic Persona 101 James McNeill Whistler 104 The Emergence of Mass Media: Ohr and Elbert Hubbard 111 Ohr and Barnum 116
Chapter Four: Ohr as a Southern Character 120 Southern Humor 126 Southern Characters in Northern Periodicals 133
Chapter Five: Socialism and Individualism 135 Socialism 135 Socialism in Mississippi 139 Sumner Rose 144 J. A. Wayland 146 Fairhope, Alabama 148 William Morris and the Arts and Crafts Movement 149
Chapter Six: The Beauty of the Grotesque 155 J. K. Huysmans 157 Oscar Wilde 160 Omar Khayyám 163
Part II: Ohr as a Potter 169
Chapter Seven: American Pottery in the Nineteenth Century: Its Three Traditions 169 Ohr’s Experience as a Traveling Potter 172 New Orleans Art Pottery and Newcomb Pottery 175 Joseph Meyer 179 The Woodward Brothers 181 New Orleans as Cultural Center 189 The Process of Making Pottery 192 Turning or Throwing Pots 194 Glazing 197 Construction of a Kiln and Firing 199 Similarities and Differences Between Ohr and Folk Potters 202
Chapter Eight: Ohr’s Pottery, Its Types, and Its Development 204 The 1894 Fire and the Dating of Ohr’s Work 205 Types of Pots 208 Early/Derivative Forms 208 Functional Pots 209 Trinkets 210 Art Pottery 213 Common Motifs 217 Crumpling 217 Ruffling 218 Twisting 219 Tubing 220 Snakes 220 Types of Glazes 221 Metallic Glaze Pots 224 Unglazed Pots 225 Spontaneity, Strategy, and Working Practices 227 Issues of Social Class 231 Classic Forms 234 Shapes 240 Imagery 247
Conclusion 251 Experiencing His Oeuvre 254
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Illustrations 260
Appendix I: Listing of Northern Artists Who Worked in the South 295
Works Consulted 297
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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Figure 1. George Ohr, vase, c. 1895-1900, 6 ½ inches.
Figure 2. George Ohr, footed vase, c. 1895-1900, 7 ½ inches.
Figure 3. George Ohr, pitcher with snake, c. 1895 – 1900, 7 inches.
Figure 4. Vase by Van Briggle, c. 1900, 8 inches.
Figure 5. Vase by Teco, c. 1900, 8 ½ inches.
Figure 6. Vase by Rookwood, c. 1900, 12 inches.
Figure 7. Vase by Grueby, c. 1898-1902, 10 inches.
Figure 8. Vase by Newcomb Pottery, c. 1900, 8 inches.
Figure 9. George Ohr, feces creamer, date unknown, approximately 3 inches high, 2 inches across.
Figure 10. George Ohr, vase, c. 1898, 6 ½ inches.
Figure 11. George Ohr, two double-necked bisque (unglazed) vases, c. 1898-1910, 7 ¼ in (left), 5 ¾ inch (right).
Figure 12. George Ohr, unglazed vase, c. 1892-94, 4 inches.
Figure 13. George Ohr, teapot, c. 1902, 6 ½ inches. Example of pink bubble glaze.
Figure 14. George Ohr, tall vase, c. 1895-1900, 13 ½ inches. Example of metallic glaze.
Figure 15. George Ohr, handled vase, c. 1895-1900, 8 7/8 inches. Example of ruffling.
Figure 16. Peter Voulkos, untitled plate, 1995, 5 inches high and 20 inches in diameter.
Figure 17. Peter Voulkos, Noodle, 1996, over 47 inches.
Figure 18. Jasper Johns, Ventriloquist, 1983.
Figure 19. Vase by James Pottery of Chester County, 1824 (left), vase by George Ohr, c. 1895-1900 (right).
Figure 20. Vase by Anthony Baecher of Winchester, VA, c. 1870-89 (left), vase by George Ohr, c. 1898-1907(right).
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Figure 21. Vase by George Ohr, c. 1895-1900 (left), vase by Christopher Dresser, c. 1879-92 (right).
Figure 22. George Ohr, collection of coin banks, various dates, ranging from 3 inches to 5 inches.
Figure 23. George Ohr, “brothel tokens,” various dates.
Figure 24. George Ohr, pig flask, 1882.
Figure 25. Cornwall Kirkpatrick, pig flask, 1871.
Figure 26. Ohr’s first studio, c. mid 1893.
Figure 27. Ohr’s second studio, c. late 1890s.
Figure 28. George Ohr, c. 1900.
Figure 29. Pots Ohr sent to the Smithsonian in 1889.
Figure 30. George Ohr, umbrella stand, c. 1900.
Figure 31. Interior of Ohr’s studio, 1896.
Figure 32. Ohr’s studio, mid 1905.
Figure 33. Ohr at the Cotton States Exposition, 1884.
Figure 34. Ohr at the Cotton States Exposition, 1884.
Figure 35. George Ohr, “vagina bank,” date unknown.
Figure 36. George Ohr, puzzle mug, date unknown.
Figure 37. George Ohr, assortment of novelty items.
Figure 38. Front view of the Ho-o-den building at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, 1893.
Figure 39. Caricature of Whistler, c. 1868.
Figure 40. Illustration from cover of Mary Tracy Earle’s The Wonderful Wheel, c.1896.
Figure 41. Ohr’s ad in the Philistine, 1901.
Figure 42. Caricature of Elbert Hubbard from The Philistine, c. 1910.
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Figure 43. Ohr c. late 1880s.
Figure 44. Ohr, c. 1890s.
Figure 45. Pot signed with just the word “Biloxi.”
Figure 46. Pot inscribed “mud from the channel of Biloxi water,” 1906.
Figure 47. Ohr’s studio with banner reading “Welcome Miss. S.P.A.,” c. 1901.
Figure 48. Sign from Ohr’s studio.
Figure 49. Photograph of Ohr as “Art Potter,” c. 1892.
Figure 50. Vase from Sung Dynasty, 960-1280 (left), Ohr vase c. 1895-1900 (right).
Figure 51. Greek vase, fifth century (left), Ohr vase c. 1900-1905 (right).
Figure 52. Bernard Palissy, platter, c. 1510.
Figure 53. William Woodward, drawing, c. 1889.
Figure 54. William Woodward, watercolor, c. 1890.
Figure 55. Joseph Meyer, pitcher. Decorated by Gertrude Smith, c. 1915, 10 inches.
Figure 56. Example of Newcomb Pottery’s trademark design, c. 1900, 8 inches.
Figure 57. Ohr with donkey mill c. 1896-97. Harry Portman stands in the background and Ohr’s “killed babies” are along fence.
Figure 58. Puzzle jug, 10” high, date unknown.
Figure 59. Ring jug, c. late 1770s.
Figure 60. Monkey jug, c. 1990.
Figure 61. Examples of face jugs, c. 1890s.
Figure 62. Examples of salt glazing.
Figure 63. Example of alkaline glaze pot, c. 1870, 16 inches tall.
Figure 64. Ohr’s kiln after the 1894 fire.
Figure 65. Backyard of Ohr’s pottery, April 1896.
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Figure 66. Photograph of Ohr with unglazed functional ware on ground and “killed babies” on the fence behind him, c. 1895.
Figure 67. George Ohr, three handle loving mug, c. 1900, 8 inches.
Figure 68. George Ohr, teapot, c. 1895-1900, 7 ¾ inches.
Figure 69. George Ohr, teapot, c. 1895-1900, 10 inches.
Figure 70. George Ohr, codagon teapot with double spouts, c. 1895-1900, 8 inches.
Figure 71. George Ohr, codagon teapot, c. 1898-1907, 5 ½ inches.
Figure 72. George Ohr, vase, c. 1895-1900, 5 ½ inches. Example of crumpling.
Figure 73. George Ohr, footed vase, c. 1895-1900, 7 3/8 inches. Example of twisting.
Figure 74. George Ohr, vase, c. 1898-1907, 7 ¾ inches. Example of tubing.
Figure 75. George Ohr, handled vase with snake, c. 1895-1900, 4 1/8 inches. Example of snake motif.
Figure 76. Japanese pottery with asymmetry, late 1800s.
Figure 77. George Ohr, vase, c. 1898-1907, 8 ¾ inches.
Figure 78. George Ohr, vase series, c. 1898-1910.
Figure 79. George Ohr, vases, c. 1895-1900, 6 inches (left), and c. 1895-1900, 7 ½ inches (right).
Figure 80. Example of fake Ohr pot.
Figure 81. George Ohr, pitcher series, c. 1895 – 1907, 3 inches (top left), 3 5/8 inches (top right), 3 ½ inches (bottom left), 3 inches (bottom right).
Figure 82. George Ohr, ring jug, c. 1900.
Figure 83. Example of folk pottery pitcher.
Figure 84. George Ohr, early pitcher in folk pottery design, c. 1885.
Figure 85. George Ohr, small pitcher, c. 1895-1900, 3 ¾ inches.
Figure 86. George Ohr, pitcher, c. 1895-1900, 8 5/8 inches.
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Figure 87. George Ohr, pitcher, c. 1895-1900, 9 inches.
Figure 88. George Ohr, tall handled vase, c. 1895-1900, 10 ¾ inches.
Figure 89. George Ohr, vase with Victorian stylings, 1894, 14 ½ inches.
Figure 90. Example of Sung Dynasty celadon glaze.
Figure 91. Example of Sung Dynasty oil spot glaze.
Figure 92. George Ohr, tall vase, c. 1895-1900, 17 inches.
Figure 93. Vase by Van Briggle vase, c. 1900, 9 ½ inches.
Figure 94. George Ohr, vasec. 1895-1900, 3 7/8 inches high.
Figure 95. George Ohr, teapot, c. 1897-1900, 6 ¾ inches.
Figure 96. George Ohr, large pitcher, c. 1897-1900, 7 ½ inches.
Figure 97. George Ohr, two pots, c. 1897-1900, 7 ¾ inches (left), 6 inches (right).
Figure 98. George Ohr, bank, c. 1897-1900, 4 ½ inches.
Figure 99. George Ohr, teapot and coffeepot, c. 1900.
Figure 100. Trick photographs of Ohr standing on his head, c. 1890s.
Figure 101. George Ohr, two tiles, “Biloxi Waterfront Scene” (left) and Log Cabin (right), c. 1907.
Figure 102. George Ohr, artist’s palette, c. 1897-1900, 1/12 inches high, 5 ½ inches wide, 7 ¼ inches long.
Figure 103. George Ohr, tree trunk and reptile trinket.
Figure 104. George Ohr, wicker basket trinket.
Figure 105. George Ohr, five bisque objects, c. 1895-1900.
Figure 106. George Ohr, two views of bowl, c. 1897-1900, 3 ½ inches high.
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George Ohr in His Nineteenth-Century Context: The Mad Potter Reconsidered
Abstract
by
ELLEN LIPPERT
George Ohr (1856-1917) was regarded as an eccentric in his lifetime but has
emerged as a major figure in American art since the discovery, in 1965, of thousands of
examples of his work. Since that date research on Ohr has increased exponentially as has his cult figure status. Scholars and collectors alike are attracted to his manipulated and
deformed pots as much as to his eccentric personality and legendary rediscovery. As a
result Ohr has come to be canonized as a prophetic and mythical figure untouched by late
nineteenth century societal and cultural concerns of both Biloxi, Mississippi and the
United States.
Ohr’s career (1880-1908) was coincident with the last quarter of the nineteenth
century, which was a time of cultural, social and spiritual upheaval. This dissertation
examines specific issues of this time period with which Ohr was most likely involved.
In response to the development of new forms of advertising and visual display
some artists created personas with which to attract attention to their work. James
McNeill Whistler and Elbert Hubbard are apt examples. Ohr also adopted this strategy
and portrayed himself as an eccentric, uneducated, and uncultivated potter. Ohr’s
persona was specifically fashioned to establish himself as a Southern character in order to
appeal to his dominant Northern client base.
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Also in response to a changing economy which had enabled citizens to claim vast accumulations of wealth over a short period of time, evidence suggests that Ohr embraced the notion of socialism and the importance of the individual. Ohr was particularly attracted to this humanitarian side of socialism. Related to this idea is the somewhat subversive empowerment of the grotesque popularized by the Symbolists and such writers as J.K. Huysmans and Oscar Wilde. Ohr’s highly individualized pots, I argue, are abstractions of abject nature – his forms, of which he proclaimed there were
“no two alike,” appear to ooze and melt with glazes that suggest bodily fluids, disease and decay.
After studying the ways in which Ohr related to specific issues of his nineteenth- century milieu, this dissertation uses these conclusions to provide a new interpretation of
Ohr’s art. Rather than viewing his works as purely formalist, his pots become expressions of his sensitivity to underlying tensions of late nineteenth- and early twentieth- century culture. His art explored very similar, essentially parallel themes to those of his life: the divide between crude craft and “real art,” between the salable commercial commodity and the priceless work of art, between the common or low-class and the refined, between the ugly and deformed (or even the obscene) and the beautiful.
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Introduction
“This classically American hero, practically without ancestors or heirs, rode into town, shot up the place, and rode away.” ——Peter Schjeldahl (1994)
George Ohr (1856–1917) was regarded as an eccentric in his lifetime but has emerged as a major figure in American art since the discovery in 1965 of thousands of
examples of his work. Almost fifty years after Ohr’s death, James Carpenter, the owner
of a barbershop and a part-time antiques dealer, made his annual trip to the Ohr Brothers
garage in Biloxi, Mississippi, in search of antique cars and car parts. Carpenter had
apparently been visiting the brothers for a while but was unaware of their father’s pots
until they offered to show them to Carpenter’s wife. According to gallery owner David
Rago, and Carpenters own testimony, it was only when Carpenter brought his wife along
that they were willing to show the pots, thinking that she would have a greater
appreciation for his works. Carpenter eventually bought the vessels from Ohr’s sons for
an undisclosed amount of money and made history by obtaining by far the largest known
collection of Ohr pottery.1
Even today Ohr’s pottery looks strange and unconventional, and it must have
seemed even more so in the mid 1960s. Most American art pottery of the nineteenth century was pure and serene in form, often borrowing its shape from the most esteemed pottery forms of the past, such as Chinese or Greek vases. Ohr’s pottery was very
Epigraph. Said of Ohr in Peter Schjeldahl, “Ceramics and Americanness,” American Ceramics 11, no. 2 (1994): 40. 1 Information from interview with David Rago, 5 April 2006. The price Carpenter paid for the Ohr cache of pots is rumored to be as high as several million, though $50,000 is the number on which most Ohr scholars agree. The figure of several million is probably what Carpenter made from his investment. 11 different, with eccentric, folded, floppy forms, and strange bulges, similar to cancerous growths (Figures 1-3). While most of his creations bore a generic relationship to traditional forms, such as cups, bowls, teapots, vases, and so forth, they often seemed poorly suited for their purpose: the cups were hard to drink from, the teapots did not pour well, the plates often had deep crevices that would trap food. Alongside the idyllic and traditional forms and colors of potters and potteries such as Adelaide Robineau, Susan
Frackleton, Rookwood, Teco, and Newcomb (Figures 4-8), Ohr’s pots appeared deformed. Although at times Ohr used traditional shapes, he manipulated them with crinkles, ruffles, or slumps. Rarely solid and proud, his vessels appeared to melt and collapse before one’s eyes.2
At times Ohr’s works were bawdy and irreverent, even obscene. One notorious
category of object that he made—now avidly collected—is a creamer with a dollop of clay shaped like feces in the bottom (Figure 9). Many of Ohr’s banks bore shapes similar to feces or genitalia (or at least their loose construction and fleshy coloring inclined one’s thoughts in that direction). One vase appears to be a set of red, inflamed labia atop an engorged phallic form (Figure 10).
Ohr’s surfaces were also unusual. Most nineteenth-century American art pottery featured beautifully tinted surfaces, whether celadon glazes based on Sung ceramics, or
(as with Rookwood pottery) decorative multicolored designs, modeled on Japanese
2 For more information on nineteenth-century pottery and pottery figures who were Ohr’s contemporaries, see Edwin Atlee Barber, The Pottery and Porcelain of the United States (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1901); Garth Clark, American Ceramics: 1876 to the Present (New York: Abbeville Press, 1987); Paul Evans, Art Pottery of the United States: An Encyclopedia of Their Producers and Marks (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1974); William Percival Jervis, The Encyclopedia of Ceramics (New York: Blanchard, 1902); Suzanne Ormond and Mary E. Irvine, Louisiana’s Art Nouveau: The Crafts of the Newcomb Style (Gretna, LA: Pelican, 1976); John Ramsay, American Potters and Pottery (Clinton, MA: Colonial Press, 1939); Philip Rawson, Ceramics (London; Oxford University Press, 1971); John Spargo, Early American Pottery and China (New York: D. Appleton-Century, 1926); Ruth Irwin Weidner, American Ceramics Before 1930: A Bibliography (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1982). 12 sources or replicating European paintings. Ohr’s surfaces, on the contrary, had the roughness of folk pottery. At times he did not glaze at all, simply featuring the rough clay that he had dug out by hand from the banks of the Tchoutacabouffa River (Figures 11 and
12). When he did use glazes they were often rough and bubbly, creating an effect that was fascinating but far from elegant. His colors and textures—crusty pink, metallic gray, blood red, bright blue, putrid green—seemed to enhance the deformities of his shapes
(Figures 1-3, 13, 14, 15). In short, Ohr’s pots looked radically different from anything being marketed at the time and were not easy to categorize. His work did not look like traditional folk pottery, for its forms were too peculiar; but it did not look like traditional art pottery either.
In 1965, Carpenter’s investment must have seemed a risky one. Not only had no one ever heard of Ohr, but prices were relatively modest for pottery of any sort.
Significantly, however, the moment of Carpenter’s purchase roughly coincided with a major shift in the appreciation of handicraft. Traditionally crafts such as pottery were valued because the objects served a practical purpose. The fact that they were handmade and beautiful was viewed as a kind of dividend. Beginning in the 1950s, however,
American potters such as Peter Voulkos began making objects of clay that challenged normal notions of practical use: platelike slabs of clay that were too heavy, cracked, and rough to serve any practical function (Figure 16), or towers made from such slabs that became “sculpture” (Figure 17). By making objects that no longer served any practical function, Voulkos asserted that pottery could be viewed as art. Indeed, he seems to have deliberately mimicked some of the qualities of Abstract Expressionist painting, such as large scale and rough, expressive texture and color, as if to assert that pottery should be
13 judged in the same terms. By the 1960s, potters such as Voulkos were not only gaining media attention, but were starting to attract the interest of serious art collectors and to sell their work for significant sums.3
Interestingly, while Carpenter was essentially a junk dealer, he seems to have immediately recognized that Ohr’s work could be promoted as “art.” Not only did he approach New York art dealers, but he even commissioned a book on Ohr that promoted him as a seer and clairvoyant—not only a visionary precursor to the studio craft movement but one who anticipated cutting-edge artistic styles ranging from Abstract
Expressionism to Funk. Interestingly, some of the early collectors of Ohr’s work were figures at the cutting edge of modern art, such as Jasper Johns and Andy Warhol. Johns has even featured Ohr’s work in his painting Ventriloquist (Figure 18). Indeed, the expansion of the market for Ohr’s work closely parallels that of the growth of the market for provocative modern styles such as Pop in the 1960s and 1970s. Ohr’s creations, which he sometimes could not give away in his lifetime, now sell for as much as $100,000 a pot.
In a similar way, objects of Pop art went from being modestly priced jokes to artistic icons worth millions. As the price of his work rose, Ohr’s artistic reputation has soared from oblivion to amazing heights. As noted, he has been viewed as the forerunner of a range of quite different, almost mutually contradictory movements of modern art. He has even been called “America’s first and foremost art potter.”4
The fact that Ohr’s work was picked up by avant-garde collectors, and began to
bring big prices, has certainly encouraged research into the background of his work. But
3 Rose Slivka and Karen Tsujimoto, The Art of Peter Voulkos (New York: Kodansha International, 1995). 4 Garth Clark, “George E. Ohr: Avant-Garde Volumes,” Studio Potter 12 (1983): 19. The book James Carpenter commissioned was Robert Blasberg, George Ohr and His Biloxi Pottery (New York: J. W. Carpenter, 1973). 14 it has also colored the tone of scholarship, encouraging extravagant claims about his genius, and perhaps discouraging a more sober analysis of the actual context in which he worked. Only three book-length studies of Ohr exist to date, along with some shorter booklets. By far the most substantial and influential of these studies is The Mad Potter of
Biloxi (1996) by Garth Clark, Eugene Hecht, and Robert Ellison, all three of whom have been actively involved in art dealing and collecting. Clark is probably the preeminent
New York dealer in handmade American ceramics; Ellison has assembled one of the three largest collections of Ohr’s work in the world. This background has obvious benefits, most notably access to great numbers of Ohr’s pots that are not in public collections and have never before been reproduced. The authors have assembled much useful documentation, and the illustrations in their book provide the foundation for any serious analysis of Ohr’s achievement. From the standpoint of interpretation, however, the book is unsatisfying. While it inventories many of Ohr’s activities and artistic sources, it does not particularly illuminate the process by which he transformed these seemingly mediocre models into a form of art that was so radically inventive.
Furthermore, though sources are cited, their significance is only cursorily explored.
Frequently these writers fall back on an explanation that does little to illuminate the Ohr phenomenon: they present Ohr as a genius completely ahead of and displaced from his time. Such a view is illuminating in its way. Certainly Ohr was quite unusual. But surely also, his unusual qualities were a response to the world in which he lived. Ohr has yet to be considered as a product of his late-nineteenth-century American and Biloxian context.
The goal of this dissertation is to provide such a view. In other words, even if Ohr
15 appeared to be a seer of some sort, his “clairvoyance” was based on the experiences he had in his own lifetime, not on time travel into the future.5
Ohr’s genius as an artist presents a seeming paradox. He does not appear to have
been very well educated, as one can infer from his peculiar grammar and spelling, and he
was apparently isolated in Biloxi, Mississippi, far from major artistic centers such as
Paris or London, or even New York, where most notable painters, sculptors, and
craftsmen of the time congregated. In fact, at this time many viewed the South as an
artistic and cultural backwater. How is it possible, with such disadvantages, that Ohr
produced work that is now considered by some as the most advanced and innovative
work by an American potter of the period?
The answer to this question, I will propose, is that in interesting ways, Ohr
combined a provincial and a cosmopolitan outlook. While seemingly isolated he had
access to the new social, philosophical, and artistic ideas of the period through a variety
of means. Because of his unique, presumably provincial vantage point, Ohr was able to
absorb these new ideas in unusually creative ways.
This dissertation will propose that Ohr was particularly sensitive to the tensions
and oppositions embedded within late-nineteenth-century American culture and that, for
all his formal originality, his art should not be viewed in purely formal terms but as an
5 Garth Clark, Robert Ellison, and Eugene Hecht, The Mad Potter of Biloxi: The Art and Life of George E. Ohr (New York: Abbeville Press, 1989). Ellison has recently published George Ohr, Art Potter: The Apostle of Individuality (London: Scala, 2006), which has added to the visual library that was previously only available in The Mad Potter of Biloxi. Because Ellison remains private regarding his compilation of Ohr pots, comments regarding the size and ranking of Ellison’s collection are based on logic and observance. From my April 2006 visit with Ellison I know that he has at least several hundred Ohr pots and the financial means to afford many more. Furthermore, other Ohr scholars with whom I visited, Eugene Hecht and Garth Clark, suggested as much. While others have published articles on Ohr, Clark, Ellison, and Hecht are virtually the only three scholars to have studied Ohr. Richard Mohr, author of Pottery, Politics, Art: George Ohr and the Brothers Kirkpatrick (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003) is the exception. His study and theories will be discussed in-depth later in the paper. 16 expression of deeper messages. Or, to give this a slight twist, the formal originality of his art was a reflection of his sensitivity to the underlying cultural tensions of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As an individual, he probed the tension between the sophisticate and the “rube”; between the commercial huckster and the selfless artist uninterested in gain; between the socialist and the individualist; and between the old- fashioned craftsman of “folk art” and the divinely gifted “artist-genius.” His art explored very similar, essentially parallel themes to those of his life: the divide between crude craft and “real art”; between the salable commodity and the priceless work of art; between the common or low class and the refined; between the ugly and deformed (or even the obscene) and the beautiful. This dissertation will explore how these themes were acted out in Ohr’s life, and it will argue that they are also manifest in his work—in short, that the “meaning” of his work resides in the highly creative, unorthodox way he confronted these opposites. In the vein of previous scholarship this dissertation will continue to emphasize Ohr’s nonconformist behaviors and creations, but will explore them as reactions to his specific late-nineteenth-century context/milieu, rather than as inexplicable side effects of his genius.
What was the context in which Ohr’s work appeared? The last quarter of the nineteenth century, when Ohr was developing and maturing his style and pottery business, is often termed the Gilded Age. The phrase, which was devised by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner in their novel of that title, nicely suggests the wealth and extravagance of the period, but also its frequent lack of depth, since gilding is a thin covering over a baser material such as wood or plaster. The period has also been given many other sobriquets, including “The Brown Decades,” “The Mauve Decades,” “The
17
Victorian Period” (a phrase often used for American developments as well as English ones), “The Ante-Bellum Period” (the war in question being the American Civil War of
1861-65), “The Age of the Robber-Barons,” “The Age of Avarice,” and so forth.6
The Gilded Age was the period that witnessed the beginning of large-scale corporations and mass production, as well as the advent of modern mass culture—that is, of new forms of advertising, new forms of commercial display, and a proliferation of newspapers, magazines, and books. Somewhat paradoxically, however, this period of increased material well-being was also a period of social turmoil and spiritual and social crisis. Various forms of individualism sought to combat the increasing mechanization of society. Various forms of socialism sought to redress the increasing inequality of wealth.
New scientific theories, such as Darwinism, undermined traditional religious beliefs, yet figures such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau struggled to restore spiritual values to daily life. In the artistic sphere, “decadents” such as Oscar Wilde, J. K.
Huysmans, and the Symbolists, rejected classicizing idealism and projected a more disturbing view of reality, which focused on irrationality, corruption, and the strange beauty of diseased things.
Needless to say, this dissertation does not attempt to present an over-view of The
Gilded Age, which has already been the subject of a great many full-scale studies. But it does draw on this body of literature to identify issues which must have affected Ohr. For surely Ohr was affected by large-scale cultural changes of his time. Since modes of cultural expression do not have clear outlines, but tend to blend into one another, we need not pretend that such changes can be reduced to a single tidy list. But a number of key
6 See Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner, The Gilded Age: A Tale of To-Day (Hartford CT: American, 1903). 18 issues come quickly to mind. For example, the role of artists, and modes of visual and commercial display changed in this period; the role of the Southerner was redefined by the defeat of the South in the Civil War and the emerging industrial and cultural power of the North; the role of handicraft was altered by the growth of mass production; the exploitation of the worker gave rise to new forms of social thought, such as communism and socialism; and the collapse of old ideals gave birth to new conceptions of morals and of beauty. The purpose of this dissertation is to examine some of the ways in which Ohr reacted to these changes, following approximately the order that has just been given.
While not financially, socially privileged, or well educated, Ohr was able to absorb this new culture in a variety of ways: through travel around the United States, which exposed him to the new developments in pottery of his time; through participation in international expositions (world’s fairs), where he both learned from the other exhibits and developed creative techniques of promotion and marketing; and from engagement with the proliferating newspapers and magazines of his time, which he both read and at times contributed to. A major goal of this dissertation is to trace these connections.
Notably, Ohr developed his career in a different arena from that of most fine artists, since he had little contact with art galleries or museums (although his brief contacts of this sort are richly illuminating). As will be seen, his desire to make art that served as a form of popular entertainment, whether at his workshop in Biloxi or at world’s fairs, had a profound effect on the form it took, as did his engagement with self-promoting gimmicks such as trick photographs of himself, which he seems to have made for promotional
19 purposes, or bizarre letters and statements that he published in both craft and popular magazines.7
Unfortunately, documentary evidence about Ohr’s life is spotty. Most of his
voluminous writings were destroyed by his son; as a result we have only a few
documents about his life—among these, notably, a brief but fascinating biography. In
many instances it is possible to demonstrate that Ohr was interested in a particular person
or artistic precedent. For example, we know some of the potters with whom he associated
early in his career, and in these instances it is possible to pinpoint a specific way in which
they influenced his work. In other instances, however, we must trace broader patterns.
Thus, for example, it is clear that in some fashion Ohr absorbed some of the methods of
the avant-garde artists of his time, and created an artistic persona fashioned on their
techniques. Precisely how Ohr absorbed this information, however, is not easy to trace
from documentary sources. In such cases, it seems appropriate to discuss figures of
whom Ohr must have been aware, such as James McNeill Whistler or Oscar Wilde,
whose antics were extensively covered in the publications of the time—to such an extent
that their personas permeated even popular culture. Thus, while it is not possible, for
example, to prove whether or not Ohr closely followed the career of Whistler, Whistler
certainly introduced many of the artistic and promotional devices that he used. To
understand what Ohr was doing, figures such as Whistler and Wilde serve as useful
7 For information on mass media and advertising during this period see Burns, Inventing the Modern Artist; William Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture (New York: Pantheon Books, 1993); Jackson Lears, Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America (New York: Basic Books, 1994); Leonard S. Marcus, The American Store Window (London: Architectural Press, 1978). 20
reference points, whether or not Ohr learned his promotional flair from the masters
themselves or from their successors and imitators.8
I will use Ohr’s own words, actions, and/or documented associations to illuminate
his perceptions of many of the essential nineteenth-century developments discussed
above. In addition, through research of nineteenth-century journals produced in Biloxi as
well as those to which Ohr subscribed and/or contributed, I have been able to trace
popular thought among groups in which Ohr would have been interested if not directly
involved, and that would have contributed to his ideas and opinions. When Ohr’s own
words are not available I have also turned to studies of specific locations where Ohr lived
and worked, and specific events in which he participated. Ohr’s small town of Biloxi,
often written off by Ohr scholars as unsophisticated and isolated, was actually in some
respects quite progressive economically, commercially, and politically. Further, Ohr’s
participation in many international expositions in the U.S., his brief residence in New
Orleans, and close relationship with Newcomb College and William and Ellsworth
Woodward exposed Ohr to artistic, cultural, commercial, and professional revolutions
occurring across the country and the world.9
Much of the biographical information in this dissertation is drawn from previous
scholarship, but it is interpreted in a significantly new and different way. Rather than
being used to demonstrate that Ohr was remote and isolated, it will be cited to indicate
8 For information on the extent to which Whistler and Wilde permeated popular culture, see Arthur Jerome Eddy: Recollections and Impressions of James A. McNeill Whistler (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1903); Philip Hoare, Oscar Wilde’s Last Stand: Decadence, Conspiracy, and the Most Outrageous Trial of the Century (New York: Arcadia, 1998); James McNeill Whistler, The Gentle Art of Making Enemies (New York: Dover Publications, 1967); Mary Warner Blanchard, Oscar Wilde’s America and Burns, Inventing the Modern Artist. The final two titles will also provide further reading on artists performing their identity. 9 Journals that were produced in Biloxi and those that Ohr contributed and/or subscribed to include the Biloxi Daily Herald; Fairhope Courier; Memphis Commercial Appeal; Brick; Glass and Pottery World; Art Interchange; China, Glass and Pottery Review; The Grander Age; The Clay Worker; Illustrated Buffalo Express; Crockery and Glass Journal; The Philistine; and New Orleans Times-Picayune. 21 his connection to major developments of his time, and to demonstrate his active participation in the cultural dialogue and controversies of his time. This dissertation also uses stylistic analysis in a somewhat different way from previous authors. While I will consider issues of dating and stylistic development, I also recognize that establishing dates and stylistic categories is merely a first step to considering the larger issue of how
Ohr drew upon and reconfigured the ceramic models that were familiar to him. In other words, Ohr’s shapes, glazes, and processes make reference to the different sorts of ceramics to which he had been exposed. His artistic choices—his highly unorthodox combination of techniques from both folk and art pottery—represent a process of cultural negotiation, in which he both asserted and challenged the artistic assumptions of his time, to forge distinctive modes of expression. While at times tracing what informed Ohr will take us far afield, to places such as Paris, London, or Buffalo, New York, the basis for these investigations is always specific and concrete. Ohr’s biography, his statements, and the objects that he made provide a starting point in every instance.
Chapter Discussion
The early literature on Ohr stressed the remarkable way in which he seemed to
anticipate many developments of modern pottery or modern art, but it did not illuminate
the process by which he achieved this feat, other than characterizing him as a prophet and
a genius. While the term “genius” has a profuse and complex history, it is used by Clark,
Hecht, and Ellison to imply that Ohr’s abilities were essentially inexplicable and perhaps
God-given skills; that he existed outside of and was misunderstood by common society;
that his ability to anticipate future art movements was essentially magical and had a
22 quality of clairvoyance; and that his work was not constrained or determined by its social context. The goal of this dissertation is to bring Ohr back to earth and to explore how his artistry drew on themes within nineteenth-century culture but combined them in unusual ways.
The first section looks closely at the events of Ohr’s life, and the critical comments made about him and his work by contemporary writers, to uncover clues about his motives. Briefly stated, it appears that Ohr was a boundary crosser— a figure who combined “high” and “low” traditions in an unusual fashion. He combined folk pottery and art pottery approaches; he combined commercial hucksterism with ideas about how high art is the expression of individual genius; he challenged traditional hierarchies by proposing that crude, seemingly aberrant colors and shapes were more “beautiful” than monotonous, machine-made forms. Once we understand these themes we can look at
Ohr’s pottery in a new way, seeing how, for example, his choice of clays and glazes was not simply a formal decision but embodied cultural and social messages that challenged the status quo.10
Chapter One examines the rediscovery of George Ohr by Carpenter, and the
literature that followed this discovery, which established his current reputation.
Commonly, the whole bibliography of a dissertation is treated in the introduction, but in
this case the contemporary literature on Ohr is so closely associated with the
circumstances of his dramatic rediscovery that it makes sense to explore the two
phenomena together in a chapter that forms a unit of its own.
10 For more information on the complex history and meaning of the term “genius,” see Ernst Kris and Otto Kurz, Legend, Myth, and Magic in the Image of the Artist: A Historical Experiment (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979), and Andrew Saint, The Image of the Architect (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983). 23
Chapter Two presents Ohr’s biography, and the contemporary literature which lays out what we know about his life. Essentially, these two initial chapters establish the foundation for this study. At this point we move on to three interpretive chapters.
In Chapter Three, I explore Ohr’s extremely eccentric artistic persona and argue that it was based on modern modes of advertising and self-promotion, as exemplified both by modern artists such as James McNeil Whistler, and pioneers of modern commercial advertising such as Elbert Hubbard.
In Chapter Four, I examine how Ohr’s eccentric persona played up qualities that
Northern visitors to Biloxi, Mississippi would have recognized as Southern. He thus presented himself as something exotic and primitive, and essentially different from
Northern producers.
In Chapter Five I examine the evidence that Ohr was a supporter of socialism, as we know from some inscribed clay vessels that he made and from a sign he put up in his studio. I also examine Ohr’s connections with socialist figures in Biloxi, such as Sumner
Rose, as well as with a nearby socialist community, Fairhope, Alabama. Finally, I examine the links between socialism and the Arts and Crafts movement, in the writings of figures such as William Morris.
In Chapter Six I explore the issue of the grotesque in nineteenth century aesthetics—the idea that one could find beauty in ugliness, that the grotesque could be beautiful. There were hints of this attitude in the writings of American Transcendentalists such as Emerson and Thoreau, but it was most powerfully expressed in the works of the decadents of the late nineteenth century, such as J. K. Huysmans and Oscar Wilde. While
Ohr is not known to have directly paid tribute to Wilde, he did adorn his studio with
24 references to one of the cult books of the aesthetic movement, the Rubáiyát of Omar
Khayyám, translated by the English poet Edward Fitzgerald. Notably the verses of the
Rubáiyát repeatedly refer to a potter and his pots, using the potter as a metaphor for God and the pot as a symbol for human existence.
The second section of the dissertation applies these themes to Ohr’s work, looking closely at the visual form of his pottery and their references to visual traditions.
Chapter Seven, “American Pottery in the Nineteenth Century: Its Three
Traditions,” discusses the three traditions pottery could be divided into at the time Ohr was working: mass-produced ware, folk pottery, and art pottery. A close examination of
Ohr’s early life shows that he was aware of all three traditions, and also aware of historical forms such as the pottery of China, that of classical Greece, and that of the eccentric sixteenth-century French potter Bernard Palissy. Ohr began in the folk tradition, working with figures such as Joseph Meyer, but also became familiar with art pottery at
Newcomb Pottery in New Orleans.
In many respects Ohr followed the approach of folk potters. He dug his own clay, constructed his own kiln, and used rough-looking glazes and handmade, irregular shapes.
Some of his pieces closely resemble standard folk pottery forms; others are similar to folk forms, although with special deformations and twists. Of Ohr’s work, his trinkets, such as the brothel tokens, are related to low-class folk forms and clearly were mass-produced and sold for a low price as souvenirs. But Ohr was clearly aware of art pottery as well— and aware that art pottery both sold for higher prices and brought more prestige. Most art pottery of this period was in an Art Nouveau style, which stressed biomorphic forms exhibiting principles of natural growth. Ironically, however, in this period most art
25 potters—Rookwood, Teco, and Van Briggle, for example—used mass-production techniques such as casting for their shapes and devoted most of their attention to painted decoration. Essentially, Ohr took the Art Nouveau principle of organic form and used it to create an ever-expanding repertory of unusual shapes.
During Ohr’s lifetime many of the leading American potters, such as Charles
Fergus Binns or Frederick Rhead, detested his work, considering it vulgar and low-class.
Evidently they were put off by the folk character of Ohr’s craftsmanship, as well as by his crude, often bawdy humor. If we start with the notion of Ohr’s pottery as a kind of mutant folk art, we have a good foundation for analyzing his work.
Chapter Eight, “Ohr’s Pottery, Its Types and Its Development,” builds on the realization that Ohr generally started his experiments with standard folk or Victorian shapes. In some cases he seems to have deliberately made reference to classic forms, such as Greek vases or Chinese porcelain, but then to have treated them with garish glazes or twisted the forms in unexpected ways. An important principle of his work is that his shape experiments generally begin not with the raw clay but with some classic finished form, which he then subjected to further deformations. In other words, he was not working purely abstractly, in a world without established forms and boundaries, but was making an implicit reference to an established cultural norm when he created his unusual shapes.
26
Previous Scholarship and Theory
In the early 20th century art historians tended to examine the object itself, and to consider such matters as connoisseurship or formal arrangement. Interestingly, this approach paralleled developments in other fields. In the study of literature, for example, proponents of “The New Criticism” insisted that students of literature should examine the text alone, without bringing in supposedly extraneous matters such as biography.
In recent years, methods have gradually shifted. Over the last few decades, art historians (as well as scholars in literature and other fields) have increasingly attempted to place works of art in a larger cultural context. This dissertation follows this larger tendency in the field. It explores the complex web of connections between the works of art that Ohr produced and the culture in which he lived.
Not surprisingly, as the range of cultural material held up to examination has increased, it has become necessary to employ an ever-expanding arsenal of methods. This dissertation successively explores how Ohr and/or his work fit within nineteenth-century structures and hierarchies of art-making, advertising and marketing, regional identity, social class, and concepts of the beautiful (and the grotesque). Each of these areas draws on a rich body of interpretive literature. Thus, it makes sense to discuss the methods employed for each chapter individually before stepping back and considering the large- scale assumptions and methods that run through the project as a whole.
As noted, Chapter One is essentially a summary of the artworld’s discovery of
Ohr and recent writing on his work, while Chapter Two is an account of his biography
27 and contemporary accounts of his career. Neither of these two chapters require any theoretical explanation.
Chapter Three, which explores Ohr’s artistic persona, and marketing techniques, might be said to draw on two general bodies of scholarship, although at times these two schools intersect. On the one hand it draws on writers who look at art-making in social and economic terms. In the American field, the path-breaking study of this sort was Neil
Harris’s The Artist in American Society, which examined not works of art per se, but how artists obtained support and patronage for their work, and created social networks and institutional structures, such as art exhibitions, magazines, and academies, to further these objectives. A very large body of literature examines the Gilded Age in such social terms, and deals directly or obliquely with the support of the arts. Because Ohr did not exhibit often in conventional artistic settings, such as art galleries or art museums, much of this literature is valuable chiefly for providing background material. But because Ohr exhibited primarily in world’s fairs, I have made extensive use of material on world’s fairs, including both contemporary articles and reports, and more recent studies, such as
Robert Rydell’s book All the World’s a Fair: Visions of Empire at American
International Expositions, 1876-1916 (1984), which examines how world’s fairs promoted colonialist ideas, and concepts of cultural hegemony. I have also drawn from a large literature on nineteenth-century advertising and sales techniques, including an important early book on store display by L. Frank Baum, the author of The Wizard of
Oz.11
11 For more information on the Gilded Age, see Christopher Benfey, The Great Wave: Gilded Age Misfits, Japanese Eccentrics and The Opening of Old Japan (New York: Random House, 2003); Mary Warner Blanchard, Oscar Wilde’s America: Counterculture in the Gilded Age (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998); Sarah Burns, Inventing the Modern Artist: Art and Culture in Gilded Age America (New 28
In addition, I have relied on an emerging body of literature that explores how artists or other individuals devised their social personas. A fairly recent, post-modern development in scholarship has been the notion that identity is not intrinsic to a person but is a cultural creation—a theme explored in works such as Stephen Greenblatt’s
Renaissance Self-Fashioning (1980). In the American field the most distinguished book of this sort is Sara Burn’s Inventing the Modern Artist: Art and Culture in Gilded Age
America. Identifying the artist as a salesman who has a product to sell, Burns outlines the methods by which artists, like other producers, attempt to call attention to and create a demand for their work. She particularly focuses on James McNeill Whistler, whom she proposes devised a new sales approach to the marketing of art: that of deliberately cultivating eccentricity and courting controversy, in order to separate himself from run- of-the-mill artists, whom he implied were merely drudges. Ohr would develop similar techniques as will be discussed. Interestingly, Ohr seems to have been particularly fascinated with Elbert Hubbard, the founder of an arts and crafts community in Aurora,
New York, who was also a pioneer of modern advertising. Through the character of
Hubbard, this theme of “self-fashioning” circles back to the themes of advertising and salesmanship that were just discussed.12
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996); Sean Dennis Cashman, America in the Gilded Age: From the Death of Lincoln to the Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, 3rd ed. (New York: New York University Press, 1993); Paul A. Carter, The Spiritual Crisis of the Gilded Age (DeKalb; Northern Illinois University Press, 1971); Janette Thomas Greenwood, The Gilded Age: A History in Documents (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); Lewis Mumford, The Brown Decades: A Study of the Arts in America 1865–1895 (New York: Dover Publications Inc. 1971). Original edition in 1931; Milton Rugoff, America’s Gilded Age: Intimate Portraits from an Era of Extravagance and Change 1850–1890 (New York: Henry Holt, 1989); Joel Shrock, The Gilded Age: American Popular Culture Through History (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2004); John Tomsich, A Genteel Endeavor: American Culture and Politics in the Gilded Age (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1971); Robert Walker, The Poet and the Gilded Age: Social Themes in Late 19th Century American Verse (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1963). 12 Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: from More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). 29
Chapter Four focuses on a specific aspect of Ohr’s artistic persona, and one which distinguished him from any other major nineteenth-century American artist: his emphasis on a regional Southern Identity. For an understanding of stereotypes of
Southerners and the South I have drawn on Carol Boykins’s insightful essay “Sut’s
Speech: The Dialect of a ‘Nat’ral Borned’ Mountaineer” (1965). This explores the popularity of Southern characters such as Sut Lovingood, noting that many of the misspellings of Sut’s dialect were introduced not for phonetic purposes but to reinforce the “dumb southerner” stereotype which he embodied. For a broader understanding of the qualities of the South, and of the ways in which it was often described inaccurately, I have turned to books such as W.T. Couch’s Culture in the South (1934), Richard Gray and Owen Robinson’s The Literature and Culture of the American South (2004), and
John Lowe’s Bridging Southern Cultures: An Interdisciplinary Approach (2005). In actual fact, Biloxi, Mississippi differed from the rest of the South in interesting ways, as has been explored in Charles Sullivan’s and Murella Herbert Powell’s The Mississippi
Gulf Coast: Portrait of a People (1999).
Chapter Five explores Ohr’s connections with socialism. I have been primarily concerned not with the merits of socialism as a theory, but in explicating how it would have been known to a figure of Ohr’s time. Thus, I have concentrated on popular socialist writings such as Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888) and William Morris’s
News from Nowhere (1890). Since Ohr was a potter, I have devoted particular attention to the close connection between socialist ideas and the Arts and Crafts Movement, as exhibited in the writings of figures such as William Morris and Elbert Hubbard.
Furthermore, the socialism that arose in the United States was not like the socialism Marx
30 and Engels had envisioned. It was adapted to America’s specific needs at the time and seemed to focus mostly on utopian ideals of cooperation and fairness. Ira Kipnis’ The
American Socialist Movement, 1897-1912 (1968) and Howard Quint’s The Forging of
American Socialism: Origins of the Modern Movement (1953) were key in understanding the American version of socialism as it existed within Gilded Age America. Finally
Stephen Cresswell’s studies of socialism within Mississippi and Biloxi provided insight into how socialism affected Ohr on a local level.13
Chapter Six explores the ways in which Ohr explored the beauty of things that are
grotesque or even disgusting. This idea has already been explored by Richard Mohr, in
his book Pottery, Politics, Art: George Ohr and the Brothers Kirkpatrick (2003), in which he proposes that we should view Ohr’s art in psychoanalytic terms, and that his pottery expresses a fixation with bodily issues and a fascination with excrement, defecation, and other processes that involve things that are abject or disgusting. Mohr’s approach, in turn, grows out of a large body of literature that explores the aberrant psychology of artists, a tradition largely initiated by the famous German art historian
Ernst Kris, in his studies of psychologically aberrant artists, such as the sculptor
Messerschmitt.14
While provocative, Mohr’s argument moves towards a realm of discussion that
easily becomes subjective, that of Ohr’s inner psychology. I have chosen to move this
argument outward, towards the society of the time, and have examined how Ohr must
13 Stephen Cresswell, “Grassroots Radicalism in the Magnolia State: Mississippi’s Socialist Movement at the Local Level, 1910-1919” Labor History 33 (1992): 81-101 and Cresswell, Multiparty Politics in Mississippi, 1877-1902 (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1995). 14 Ernst Kris, “A Psychotic Artist of the Middle Ages,” in Modern Perspectives in Western Art History: an Anthology of Twentieth-Century Writings on the Visual Arts, ed. Eugene Kleinbauer (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1971), 285-292. 31 have been influenced by nineteenth-century writers such as J. K. Huysmans and Oscar
Wilde, who were fascinated by the beauty of things that were deformed and grotesque.
Indeed, an interest in the ugliness of nature and the human body is a theme that was explored in the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry Thoreau, as has been discussed by Joel Porte in his book Consciousness and Culture: Emerson and Thoreau
Reviewed (2004).
Implicitly, this chapter engages writings on the nature of the grotesque by figures such as Julia Kristeva and Michail Bakhtin. In Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection
(1982), Kristeva noted that the abject—things such a pus, vomit, blood and excrement— are all things cast off from our bodies, but are also the product of things which are crucial to our survival. Thus, the abject has a paradoxical character. It is disgusting, something to separate ourselves from, but it also is something we can recognize as once part of our body, and in this sense we value it, even see it as beautiful. Interestingly, Kristeva extends this understanding of the abject, and notes that the concept also applies to the cast-offs of society, such as the disabled, prostitutes, and minorities.
Kristeva’s discussion provides a means of relating Ohr’s deformed pots, which dramatize the abject, to issues of both bodily identity and social class. Indeed, this link between the abject and social issues has also been explored in Mikhail Bakhtin’s
Rabelais and His World (1936), in which he argues that modes of discourse or expression that flaunt the abject or the obscene are a form of political subversion that empowers the folk, or lower classes. If we accept this conclusion, then surely Ohr’s interest in the socially abject was linked to some degree with his interest in socialism, the subject of the previous chapter.
32
Larger Issues of Method
As should be apparent from this brief summary, this dissertation draws on a
variety of theoretical approaches, ranging from sociological and Marxist techniques of examining issues of commerce and social class to psychoanalytic methods of examining concerns of the abject and bodily identity. In between these two extremes are a variety of more narrowly defined methods for closely examining a particular artwork or text, such as connoisseurship, or analysis of different dialects in a written text. When viewed as a
whole, however, the dissertation presents not a series of disconnected pieces but a
forward-moving argument, as should be apparent when we reduce it to a brief outline.
And the clarity of this outline in turn suggests that these various methods can be summed
up as the application of a coherent, over-arching procedure.
Essentially, the dissertation moves across the various modes by which Ohr
achieved self-expression, from his eccentric persona to his eccentric pots, and explores
the cultural references embodied within these achievements. When we do this, we
discover that he employed similar strategies within each of these different realms.
Essentially, Ohr was turning things upside down, taking conventional social and artistic
standards and inverting them. At the risk of slightly over-simplifying the underlying
concepts in question, it is helpful to organize what Ohr was working with into two
columns under the headings of “good” and “bad.” According to conventional wisdom at
the turn-of-the-century, the contrasts would have come up with something like this:
33
Bad Good
Crazy behavior (and attire) Normal behavior (and attire)
Southern (i.e. provincial, ignorant) Northern (sophisticated, educated)
Poor Rich
Abject, Grotesque Beautiful
Irregular Regular
Useless Useful
Such a list could easily be expanded. For example, as applied to pottery, words like “irregular” suggest similar although not-quite-identical terms such as “badly made,” or “unprofessional,” which might be used to describe the same object but attach just slightly different categories of judgment.
If we contrast the top and bottom of this list we discover that we are dealing with concepts that are obviously different. But if we look at adjacent terms on the list, in some contexts they could be used as virtual synonyms. For example, at the turn-of-the-century, to one accustomed to Northern modes of behavior, Southern modes of behavior often appeared as something very close to “crazy” (as is indicated by the humorous literature of the period). By the same token, pottery that is “irregular” could also often be described as
“grotesque.” The concepts at the top of the list tend to match more closely with aspects of
Ohr’s persona as an artist, while those at the bottom fit better with his art. But significantly, all the concepts, with just a little twisting, could be applied to both his personality and his art—the two modes of expression merge into each other.
34
It should be evident that the method presented here is closely analogous to that presented by the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss in his famous essay “The Structural
Study of Myth,” in his book Structural Anthropology (1963). The procedures of
Structuralism, as applied to art or literary criticism, can often be confusing, since the method is often applied rather loosely, in a way which is far from systematic, but leapfrogs across cultural boundaries. The essential idea, however, is rather simple.
Structuralism proposes that the artifacts and modes of expression of a culture have a symbolic aspect – that taken as a whole they indicate a scheme of symbolic relationships.
Structuralism began by seeking to draw parallels between culture and language. It proposes that like the words in language, the objects of culture convey underlying meanings, and that these meanings have a structure, similar to grammar in language, and likewise based on organizing principles which are inherent in the human mind.
Structuralism thus seeks to reveal a hidden layer of meaning, and of relationships between things, in the expressions of human culture. To a Structuralist, the power of such human constructions as art or myth is dependent not simply on formal qualities but on the fact that they vividly embody and express fundamental principles of the culture which gave birth to them. Generally speaking, the objects of culture are arrayed according to a scheme of “binary oppositions,” or “opposites,” and the ways in which these “binary oppositions” are defined establishes a scheme of cultural values.
To grasp how Structuralism can be used to analyze a myth, it is helpful to turn to
Claude Levi-Strauss’s classic elucidation of the Oedipus Myth. In this classic demonstration, Levi-Strauss presents a chart of the Oedipus myth that goes as follows:
35
Cadmus seeks his sister Europea, ravished by Zeus. Cadmus kills the dragon. The Spartoi kill one another. Labdacos (Laios’s father) = lame (?)
Oedipus kills his Laios (Oedipus’ Father, Laios father) = left-sided (?)
Oedipus kills the Sphinx.
Oedipus marries Oedipus = swollen his mother, Jocasta foot (?)
Eteocles kills his brother, Polynices
Antigone buries her brother, Polynices, despite prohibition.
If we read this table from left to right, we get the story, like a text, while if we read down the columns, one after another, we get the underlying structure of the myth. In this case, the first column gathers together relationships in which there is an exaggeration of kinship ties, as in incest. The second column reverses this relationship, where there is under-valuation. The third column denotes relations where there is a denial of the autochthonous origins of humanity (the destruction of monsters), while the fourth, referring to various impediments to walking, affirms these origins. In brief summary, some of this analysis may be difficult to follow. But for present purposes, we need not
36 grasp Levi-Strauss’s analysis in detail. What is significant is that the myth can clearly be analyzed as a set of elements that are balanced against each other in binary pairs. These various terms express mutually incompatible relationships, but they achieve a kind of harmony through their balanced position and relationship with each other within the myth.
Broadly speaking, this dissertation follows the method outlined by Clause Levi-
Strauss. But it is even closer to two of Levi-Strauss’s followers, Edmund Leach and Mary
Douglas, who studied the phenomenon of taboos, and who argued that the human mind organizes material according to what Leach has described as “a discriminating grid,” organized in multiple dimensions. While Levi-Strauss tends to emphasize what he terms
“binary oppositions,” the scheme of cultural relations that Ohr worked with and challenged seems to have been more similar to a ladder of hierarchies, of the sort described by Leach and Douglas. And as Leach and Douglas have shown, culture often attaches inordinate significance to things that do not easily fit within the scheme of normal relationships, and thus become ambiguous – or taboo.15
One of the basic problems with this Structuralist method, of course, is identifying
the underlying terms. With language, words form natural terms with which to begin
analysis. When confronted with the varied artifacts of an entire culture, it is often less clear where to begin. In the case of George Ohr, we need not pretend that the basic units
of underlying structure that we have proposed can be defined with absolute precision. But
15 Leach’s essays have been gathered in Stephen Hugh-Jones and James Laidlaw, eds., The Essential Edmund Leach, vols I and II, (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000). Perhaps the most vivid summary of his approach is provided in his lively essay on “Animal categories and Verbal Abuse” (1964), op. cit, vol. 1, pages 322-356. Mary Douglas’s position is distilled in her book Purity and Danger: an Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (New York: Praeger, 1966). While Leach and Douglas and Levi-Strauss have at times vigorously sparred with each other, their disagreements have little bearing on the very general application of Structuralist methods employed in this dissertation. 37 what is striking is how easily, when we lay out the basic tensions that seem to underlie his art, we confront issues of value and hierarchy. Or more specifically, we discover that in each instance, Ohr used a variety of strategies to invert or confuse the normal nature of these distinctions.
The common link between his approaches is that he used the notions of “art” and
“genius” to transform things that were crazy, or repellant, or “badly made” into things that were desirable and priceless. In other words, in the world that George Ohr created, he proposed that we look at these concepts somewhat as follows:
Crazy behavior (and attire): proof that George Ohr is unique and different from other mortals, that he is a genius.
Southern: unconstrained, original, standing apart from the commerce and regimentation of the North.
Poor: a product of uncorrupted art rather than commercialism.
Abject, Grotesque: fascinating in form, unusual, unique.
Irregular: not something machine made but an original, unique work of art.
Useless: not something ordinary but a work of art; something priceless rather than something cheaply functional and mass-produced.
Thus, while Ohr’s work is often described as “abstract,” it appears that his experiment with shape and form was profoundly connected with issues of cultural and
38 personal identity, which he played out in both bodily and social terms. He referred to his pots as his “clay babies,” and he clearly thought of them as individual beings with personalities and life. At the deepest level he was interested in the notion that the working class, the common, and even the grotesque could achieve beauty through their uniqueness and individuality. At some level, in short, Ohr’s art engages in a logical process of deconstructing important and often somewhat specious binary oppositions in which his culture believed: for example, art versus craft, “real art” versus folk art, artist versus artisan, the beautiful versus the useful, art and culture versus commerce, and so forth.
Was he consciously aware of what he was doing? In practice, not unlike a speaker who follows the correct grammar of a language, Ohr’s process was probably a mix of the conscious and the unconscious. In language many speakers can use correct grammar who cannot consciously articulate the rules that they are following. Those rules that most speakers can identify, such as the proper use of singular and plural, are relatively late choices in the act of forming a sentence. The deepest level of grammar is the least accessible, and as Noam Chomsky has proposed, may well be hard-wired into the human brain. Some of Ohr’s decisions were surely based on conscious decisions; others on intuitive impulses. Nonetheless, the fact that Ohr’s decisions were not simply arbitrary, but carried symbolic value, demonstrates that his art was a more powerful and profound form of expression than has been generally recognized.
In short, Ohr’s pottery was not simply an abstract experiment with form but an intellectual construction—an affirmation of himself as an individual, based on a rich awareness of the complexities of his social identity. By deliberately challenging traditional divisions between folk art and high art; between the low class and the high
39 class, between the uneducated South and the affluent and cultured North; between the commercial and the artistic; and between the grotesque and the beautiful, he created some of the most memorable creations of his age.
40
Part I: OHR THE MAN
Chapter One The Rediscovery of George Ohr
At the time he discovered the estate of George Ohr, James Carpenter had only recently drifted into antique dealing. Remarkably, Carpenter had started off as a barber— attending barber school, cutting hair for a while in Alaska, and then returning to
Branchville, New Jersey to serve an apprenticeship under a local barber. But he soon discovered that he “didn’t care much for the barbering.” On his days off he would attend auctions, buying such objects as old firearms, clocks, swords, men’s antiques, old barbering mugs, and other “primitives.” He found that in these two days off he could make more than in five days of working as a barber. He eventually opened his own antique store and barber shop where he cut hair and dealt in antiques. This arrangement continued for about two years until Carpenter decided to quit cutting hair “for once and for all and just go into the antique business.”16
At this point, in addition to the other objects he collected, he became interested in furniture, cut glass, and stoneware pottery with cobalt decorations. He especially liked
Rookwood, but also bought “a lot of Wilder, Owen, Roseville, and an occasional piece of
Newcomb.” Carpenter recounts that fairly early in his activities as an antique dealer, he
bought an Ohr puzzle mug as part of a bundled set of pottery, but did not recognize the
name. Even when he met Ohr’s children in Biloxi, the name “still didn’t ring a bell,” and
the mug just sat on his shelf for years. At this time there was almost no market for any
16 The information and direct quotes from Carpenter in the following paragraphs were taken from his 11 September 2001 interview with Murella Herbert Powell, director of the historical society in Biloxi. 41 kind of nineteenth-century industrial, folk, or art pottery. Carpenter states, “At that time there were tons of Roseville around, but nobody wanted it. You couldn’t get three bucks for the best Roseville there is.” Instead Carpenter focused his attention on antique cars.
Carpenter explained that his interest in antique cars came from his father, who had been a chauffeur and had raced cars in the twenties. During the winter Carpenter would put ads in papers, especially in the South, announcing that he was looking for antique cars and parts. On one trip to New Orleans Carpenter inquired whether the seller knew of anyone else who would have similar material and was directed to the “Ohr boys over in Biloxi,” who had “buildings full of it. But they’re difficult.”
Carpenter soon visited the Ohrs in Biloxi, where he encountered Ojo and Leo, the only surviving Ohr boys at that point. He found that they would not do business with anyone until that person sat and drank with them. So starting at 8:30, he sat and drank with them until the entire morning had disappeared and half a bottle of bourbon had been consumed. Only then did they begin to do business. Carpenter said they had quality antique car parts and materials, and that he eventually “filled up [his] car from what I bought from them.” But they were hard to negotiate with. Ojo and Leo would never ask a price for anything, instead waiting for Carpenter to make a bid. When he did, Ojo would consult with his brother, come back shaking his head and asking for triple what Carpenter had offered.
During Carpenter’s third visit to Biloxi, Ojo approached Carpenter’s wife, who was waiting in the car, and asked her, “Would you like to see some pottery that my daddy made?” Carpenter describes the scene as they opened the garage door where Ohr’s pots were stored:
42
There had to be two or three hundred pieces sitting on a table that were unwrapped, and had been washed up a bit to be presentable. The sun hit on them and I couldn’t believe my eyes. Beautiful! The boxes were piled all the way to the ceiling. I went to pick one up and Ojo screamed at me, “nobody picks up my Daddy’s pottery.” I finally convinced him that I handled pottery and handled Tiffany Glass in the business, and that I was very careful, and that I wanted to see if they were signed. He said, “all signed.” I said . . . “This is unusual finding such a lot of it.” He said “there’s a couple of thousand of this and three thousand of that. That’s a lot of pieces here, they’re signed and they’re different.”
At this point Carpenter offered Ojo $15,000 for the entire collection and was promptly turned down. Not knowing the value of the works, Carpenter left to do some research. He came back a few months later prepared to offer $50,000 after having discovered that Ohr had been known during his lifetime by people such as Paul Cox and Edwin Atlee Barber, prominent potters and critics. Carpenter explains this second offer was refused since in the meantime the family had exhibited Ohr’s wares in Edgewater and was hoping their value would increase. Ojo was now asking for a million dollars and was shopping the wares around to other prospective buyers.
When it turned out that no one else was interested, they sold the entire collection to Carpenter, who to this day refuses to disclose the amount he paid. Carpenter brought the pieces home in a rental truck and spent the next year cleaning them. At the time
Carpenter was unsure whether or not he had made a wise decision in buying the collection. He states, “I didn’t know whether I was stuck or not. . . . Everybody would say, ‘George who?’ I never sold a pot for the first year. . . . There were no takers. . . . Big time dealers from New York stopped by. Word got around. . . . They all wanted to buy a couple of pieces.”
43
Soon after acquiring the collection, Carpenter commissioned Robert Blasberg, a former insurance officer turned pottery aficionado, to write a book about Ohr—George
Ohr and His Biloxi Art Pottery—to be discussed below. When the pots finally did begin to sell they were marked at very reasonable prices and Carpenter would often bundle the really “nice” pieces in with a few that were not of the same quality. Eventually he began to fear he was going through the collection too quickly and began to double and triple prices. However, he found he made just as much profit by selling a few pots for high prices as by selling them in bulk—a sign that people were becoming aware of the value of Ohr’s pottery.
The First Generation—The Ohr Legend Is Born
The early literature on Ohr was written from a partisan standpoint: its goal was to
boost the sale of Ohr’s work. After Carpenter purchased Ohr’s cache of pots he
commissioned Robert Blasberg to write the first monograph on the collection entitled
George Ohr and His Biloxi Art Pottery (1973). One of the greatest contributions of
Blasberg’s book was that it provided extensive illustrations of Ohr’s work. It included
photographs of huge numbers of Ohr’s pots still packed in crates, covered with dust.
However, the categories Blasberg employed to classify Ohr’s oeuvre reveal the relative
naiveté of scholarship at this time: “trick items,” “outright jokes,” “parlor ornaments,”
“acrobatic exploits,” and “cabinet pieces.” These descriptions are confusing and overlap
with one another. A single pot can often be characterized as a “trick item,” “outright
joke” and “parlor ornament”; the categories are not distinct. A pot that is a “cabinet
piece,” that is, a piece that will fit in a cabinet, can also be an “acrobatic exploit” meaning
44 that it was one of Ohr’s more tortured and contorted forms. Some of these categories have been used to project art historical arguments. For example, Garth Clark has declared that the “trick items” are early expressions of Funk and Dada. Statements of this sort, however, are perplexing without some explanation of how these “trick items” relate to
Ohr’s oeuvre as a whole, or of his artistic intentions when he made them.17
In this initial book, Blasberg strove to distinguish the ordinary from the gifted, the
kitsch from the masterpieces. His assessments are clearly a crude attempt to create
definitions and boundaries to settle a point that to this day remains one of the central questions of Ohr scholarship: to what degree should his pots be considered art.
At times, Blasberg’s narrative verges on fiction, as when he invokes a heavenly choir to explain the originality of Ohr’s work:
Sometimes angels chorused in George’s ear as he labored at the wheel. . . . Those who apprehend such cosmic strains, have been known to jig their way through life with only a token regard for considerations of dignity. Old George was one of those. We know today that this exuberant man was simply the archetype of the creative personality. Such people, the studies tell us, are intuitive and not necessarily intelligent. . . . The keynote of their type is divergent, as against convergent behavior—They are non- conformists.18
While hardly scholarly, such statements do fit neatly into the overall goal of the book: to
create a market for Ohr’s work. In this sense, Blasberg’s book is historically interesting.
Extravagant claims had been made before about painters and sculptors, but Blasberg was
surely among the first writers to maintain that angels came to the aid of a mere potter.
17 For Clark’s discussion of Ohr’s trinkets as early expressions of Funk and Dada, see Clark, “Clay Prophet: A Present Day Appraisal,” in Clark, Ellison, Hecht, Mad Potter of Biloxi. 18 Blasberg, George Ohr and His Biloxi Pottery, 13. 45
Significance of “The Mad Potter”
Blasberg’s 1973 book set the stage for three subsequent writers, Garth Clark,
Robert Ellison, and Eugene Hecht, who collaborated on the book The Mad Potter of
Biloxi (1989). This volume contains an essay by each author, each focusing on a different
aspect of Ohr’s work that highlights the author’s expertise. Thus, the essays cover history, influence, and relevance to modern art, respectively. The Mad Potter also included the most extensive assortment of full-color photographs of Ohr’s pots published to that point. These illustrations along with the informative essays make the book a seminal and valuable resource to this day.19
In his essay, “The Times and Life of G. E. Ohr,” Eugene Hecht, a physics
professor at Adelphia University and Ohr collector and scholar, presents a historical
biography of Ohr, beginning with a brief introduction of his parents and ending with
Ohr’s death. Thanks to his meticulous research, which uncovered long-buried civic
documents, rare personal correspondence, and unpublished photographs, Hecht was able
to verify much of what could previously only be assumed. The exact location of Ohr’s
first pottery studio is a good example:
North and south from Pass Christian [the main thoroughfare of the town] radiated tiny lanes, one of which was Delauney. The pottery was a few hundred feet south, on the west side of that little street, only 3 squares from the L. and N.R.R. depot.20
Hecht’s essay was followed by that of Robert Ellison. Ellison is among the top
three collectors of Ohr’s pottery, owning several hundred pieces, including some of Ohr’s
19 Blasberg’s initial monograph also contained photographs of Ohr’s pots, but they were black and white and are far outnumbered by those in Clark, Ellison, Hecht, Mad Potter of Biloxi. Of course, Mad Potter is not an exhaustive record of Ohr’s oeuvre, as his pots are said to number from 6,000 to 10,000 and are spread all over the world. 20 Ibid., 18. 46 most remarkable and brilliant works. A challenge for any Ohr scholar, this author most certainly included, is gaining access to large amounts of Ohr’s work. His oeuvre is meant to be experienced as one large collective work, with words, poems, and dates written on specific pots offering crucial information to the Ohr scholar. Ellison is fortunate to have access to such information. Consequently his writings, both his Mad Potter essay and his most recent book, George Ohr, Art Potter: The Apostle of Individuality (2006), are important sources of first-hand observation.
In his Mad Potter essay, “ ‘No Two Alike’: The Triumph of Individuality,”
Ellison used his considerable resources to trace a loose evolution of Ohr’s work, observing motifs from Ohr’s oeuvre that were similar to other late-nineteenth- and early- twentieth-century potters around the country (Figures 19, 20, and 21). Garth Clark, widely published critic and ceramic historian, provides the final essay, “Clay Prophet: A
Present Day Appraisal.” His essay, in addition to the many articles he has published on
Ohr since the early 1980s, approached Ohr’s oeuvre from an artistic standpoint. Clark’s main interest lies in identifying Ohr’s place within ceramic and art history, and in establishing him as harbinger of modern art. While Clark’s placement of Ohr within the art historical narrative is useful, his continued projection of Ohr as precursor to modern art has, in my opinion, biased his research and pushed further study along a teleological route.
A common perception of Ohr, and one that he himself promoted, emphasizes the way his pots express a masculine forcefulness. For Clark however, “Ohr’s vessels do not celebrate the male yang but are rather a deeply felt homage to the feminine ying. The forms are invariably gentle and enclosing. The mouths of his pots metamorphose into
47 soft, ruffled vulvas. The volumes become wombs.”21 Clark’s assessment of Ohr’s pots as
gentle and feminine expressions contradicts the artist’s popular macho image and adds
further dimension to Ohr scholarship.
Clark also makes note of Ohr’s awareness of and pride in the theomorphist aspect
of the potter and wheel as seen throughout history. Poets such as Robert Browning and
Omar Khayyám linked the action of making a pot from clay to God’s creation of man.
Accordingly, Clark asserts that Ohr’s famous motto, “No two pieces alike,” reflected a
“deep belief in the uniqueness of man.”22
Ohr as a Prophet
Like Blasberg, Ellison, Hecht, and Clark all succumbed to a heavily romanticized
view of Ohr’s genius as an artist. Collectively the authors agree on Ohr’s isolation, both
within Biloxi and history, and the profound importance this had on his development.
Ellison wonders, “How could he have developed such a daring concept for altering his
vessels in the relative isolation of Biloxi at that particular moment?”23 Hecht echoes
Ellison’s sentiment, referring to Ohr as the “solitary genius from Biloxi,”24 whose
“unparalleled vessel-sculpture . . . spoke a rich though arcane language that would not
become aesthetic currency for well over half a century.”25
Further, these authors stress Ohr’s ability to anticipate, perhaps even predict,
future art movements and specifically join “the discourse of abstract expressionism even
21 Ibid., 125. 22 Ibid., 123. 23 Ellison, George Ohr, Art Potter, introduction. 24 Eugene Hecht. After the Fire: George Ohr, An American Genius (Lambertville, NJ: Arts and Craft Quarterly Press, 1994), introduction. 25 Ibid., 16. 48 as it anticipates it.”26 However it is Clark’s spectacularly epic observations about Ohr’s
relationship to future art that are the most striking:
The manner in which Ohr has responded to this challenge [the need for originality of expression] has made him the most prescient prophet in Western ceramic art. His work anticipated the so-called Abstract-Expressionist ceramics movement and that of Funk. It played with the language, not yet decoded, of Dada and Surrealist object making. . . . He took vessel making to an avant-garde edge, and we took nearly half a century to catch up with him.27
Clark, like Hecht and Ellison, observes Ohr’s twisted and deformed pots and presumes a
spontaneous and intuitive process of creation, akin to Abstract Expressionism. At some
level, no doubt this parallel means something, but none of these authors seriously
attempts to explore or explain exactly where Ohr’s shapes or influences came from.
Revisionist Writing
A second generation of Ohr scholarship coexists with the original group of modern Ohr scholars (Hecht, Clark, Blasberg, and Ellison). While most scholars in this group cannot be considered Ohr experts, their methodologies, though diverse, commonly reject fabled elucidations and favor more pragmatic studies. One theme shared by many of the most recent writings about Ohr considers whether or not Ohr’s ceramic creations should be interpreted as art or craft and how they fit into the art historical narrative.
In her review of the “George Ohr: Modern Potter” show at the American Craft
Museum in 1989, critic Janet Koplos offers a surprisingly cynical take on Ohr’s work, which while far from entirely convincing, opens up some new considerations. She charges that Ohr’s eccentricity was “a justification for the show” and that his works
26 Ibid. 27 Clark, “George E. Ohr: Avant-Garde Volumes,” 19. 49
“come with a personality that seems expressly made for ‘Entertainment Tonight’ in the age of celebrity worship.” Her comments are justified by the fact that the first Ohr pot one encountered upon entering the exhibition was from the collection of Jasper Johns.
She states that attaching Ohr’s work to a recognized artist such as Johns “counts a lot in the un-self-confident world of crafts.”28
Koplos disputes elevating Ohr’s work to a sculptural, and therefore high art, level, understanding his vases to be “closed volumes . . . defined by profile . . . [rather] than by three dimensionality. They are modest enclosures that seldom reach out to interact with space, or even to powerfully declare the bit of space they contain.” By removing the signifier, “sculptural,” from Ohr’s pots, Koplos relegates the importance of his manipulations to “a matter of skill,” and takes to task Clark’s “exaggeration” of Ohr’s contribution to the avant-garde. For Koplos Ohr’s renown is not due to his pots or his personality. It is his “voracious consumption of forms and styles, his self-education . . . in ceramic history, his art concept for the work . . . and his prolific production. What has made Ohr’s reputation is not the genius of the work. It’s that his body of work came to us almost intact.”29 She somewhat disparagingly describes Ohr’s boastful words and
actions, to be discussed later, as symptoms of megalomania, which she notes “aided to
his belated success in the late twentieth century art commodities market.”30
Robert Yoskowitz, critic and fine arts professor, strives to place Ohr within his
own social context: “much of the criticism leveled at Ohr was and still is from a crafts
perspective and not seen in the light of modernist philosophy and criticism. His work
28 Janet Koplos, “A Thoroughly Modern Potter: George Ohr in Retrospect,” New Art Examiner 17, no. 5 (January 1990): 32–34. While I could not verify exactly which pot Koplos is referring to, see Johns’s painting Ventriloquist (Figure 18), in which he illustrates seven of the pots from his collection. 29 Ibid., 34 30 Ibid. 50 should be viewed within the context of his day.”31 In his 1999 article he identifies exactly
what he feels makes Ohr’s pots modern—his lack of functionality, which places his
works closer to the realm of sculpture; his separation from the purely decorative pots of
the Arts and Crafts movement; and the emotionally expressive surfaces he employed with
their nubs, fingerprints, smudges, and misfirings. To Yoskowitz, such characteristics
indicate that Ohr anticipated modern movements rather than that he was simply a careless
craftsman. Yoskowitz further suggests that the writings of Henri Bergson, particularly his
ideas of “living energy,” as well as Emerson’s transcendentalism may have stimulated
Ohr.
Critic Sidney Tillim, who also published a review of the 1989 show, was in
agreement with Koplos as he criticized the tone of the Mad Potter, “The image of Ohr
that permeates the writing on him combines the image of the artist as martyr with the now
acceptable one of the artist as huckster.” For Tillim, Ohr’s artist’s persona coupled with
his throwing and glazing skills made him the perfect crossover artist, linking the
nineteenth-century art pottery movement to the “current revisionist reaction against the
modernist emphasis on ‘high’ art while preserving and even renewing the notion of an
avant-garde.”32
Tillim accepted the idea of Ohr as isolated: “Ohr was an alien. His work is so
unlike the art pottery of his time (though he drew on traditions available to all), so
removed from prevailing notions of shape underlying the ceramic art tradition. . . . Ohr
introduced an unprecedented degree of painterly feeling into a medium in which contour
31 Robert Yoskowitz, “George Ohr: Modernist,” Ceramics: Art and Perception 36 (1999): 37. 32 Sidney Tillim, “George Ohr: Pottery and the Liquefaction of Desire,” American Craft 50 (February– March 1990): 35. 51 and shape are formal givens.”33 Tillim however rationalizes Ohr’s otherness in a way
other scholars could not. It is not that Ohr’s pots were insulated from other nineteenth-
century potters or that his forms were derived from supernatural inspirations, rather they
were original responses to prevailing notions available to all. Rejecting the artist/genius
label, Tillim sensibly pointed out that Ohr “was not ahead of his time as his partisans
claim (frankly, no one ever is); he simply gambled on posterity and, by a sheer strike of
luck, won.”34
Tillim also commented on the traditionally feminine nature of the ceramic craft
(womb as vessel), and interpreted Ohr’s pots as subversive because they literally illustrate what the pot symbolically embodies—eroticism and sexuality. He also observed that Ohr was relatively alone in his mastery of a traditionally feminine craft, which put him in competition with upper-class educated women (such as Nichols, Robineau,
Sheerer, and Frackelton) despite his lack of education and working-class status.35
The association Tillim drew between Ohr’s pots and the human form is
representative of another common theme among recent Ohr critics to link his pots to
issues of sexuality and body identity. Artist and critic Jeff Perrone has described the Mad
Potter as a “revisionist historical narrative of the second coming of George E. Ohr, the
self-described ‘mad potter of Biloxi,’ ” and a “ ‘text’ that includes the large anecdotal,
33 Ibid., 36. 34 Ibid., 35. 35 While Tillim has described pottery as a traditionally feminine craft other important scholarship has disputed the categorization of “women’s art.” Griselda Pollock and Rozsika Parker in Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology (Pantheon Books: New York, 1981) argue that women’s art is often termed as such, and consequently categorized as lesser or different, simply because it was created by women. Indeed, though there were many successful women working in pottery during Ohr’s time, there were also prominent men. Maria Longworth Nichols Storer began Rookwood Pottery but turned it over to William W. Taylor in 1889. Van Briggle pottery was created and run by Artus Van Briggle, who developed its distinctive flat glaze. Further, the major manufacturers of pottery, including Newcomb and Rookwood, had women decorating the wares while the forms themselves were thrown by men. To label pottery as a traditionally feminine craft is thus not altogether accurate. 52 oral tradition that has emerged since the works’ rediscovery. . . . That Ohr himself fueled this madness myth should make it all the more suspicious.” 36 The popularity of this
narrative, Perrone has suggested, stems from a scholarly arrogance appealing to modern
scholars’ assumptions that they can recognize artistic genius where critics contemporary
to Ohr could not.
Perrone’s analysis of Ohr has veered into a strongly postmodern deconstruction,
interpreting Ohr’s pots as feminine “madness,’ i.e. “a loss of words, of representation, of
reality . . . or a unified gender. Ohr finding himself overtaken by the pleasures of his work’s femininity, crossed over from a stable, centered masculinity into something
decentered, allover, irrational, without words, ‘mad.’ ”37 The “madness” of Ohr’s pots,
according to Perrone, was made in response to the collapse of the Arts and Crafts
movement. Perrone insisted that Ohr’s work should be seen as sculpture:
A viewer of Ohr’s thin-walled, thin-skinned, gently crushed, folded, and dented vessels cannot help but be reminded of Hesse’s fragile, tensile sets of bruised and bumpy cylinders. . . . For Hesse, repetition [in the forms of Minimalism] led to absurdity, and it may have been such absurdity that led to a Minimalism gone mad. . . . For Ohr, it was the idealism of the Arts and Crafts Movement—his Minimalism—that had gone awry.38
With these two readings of Ohr’s work—the notion of ceramics as a feminine craft and
the collapse of the Arts and Crafts movement—Perrone removed Ohr from his
isolationist narrative and placed him within another social context.
Richard Mohr’s book, Pottery, Politics, Art: George Ohr and the Brothers
Kirkpatrick (2003), is the only other book written about Ohr, and the only book written
36 Jeff Perrone, “Madness, Sex, Exhaustion,” Artforum International 28 (January 1990): 96. 37 Ibid., 99. 38 Ibid., 98. 53 by a scholar who is not part of that first modern group. Mohr also published a series of articles between 2000 and 2001 that analyzed and reprinted original letters by Ohr. Both the book and the articles psychoanalytically interpret Ohr’s works as subversive messages about society, art, and beauty.39
Mohr, social theorist and professor of philosophy, investigates two main ideas in
Pottery, Politics, Art: the reach of Ohr’s relationship to the Kirkpatrick brothers in Anna,
Illinois, and the reading of Ohr’s pots as visual representations of the more disgusting and
abject nature of the human body. The Kirkpatrick brothers have largely been
acknowledged as conservative and traditional-minded potters and their popular flask and
jug forms read as prudent messages about temperance and abstinence. Mohr reconsiders
these forms and proposes a contradictory reading—that the Kirkpatrick brothers’ pots
bore subversive messages that actually criticized and parodied conservative views on
alcohol and other “vices.”
It is commonly accepted that Ohr visited the Kirkpatrick brothers in Anna,
Illinois, in early 1882 and may have had contact with them again at the New Orleans
Cotton Centennial Exposition in 1884, which they all attended. Any influence the
Kirkpatricks, who were much more successful at the time, may have had on Ohr has been
downplayed by Ellison, Clark, and Hecht. However, Mohr stresses the value of this
39 The articles are “Mudpies for Keeps and Usefulness: George Ohr the Letters Part 3,” Journal of the American Art Pottery Association 17, no. 2 (March 2001): 12–15; “George Ohr, Begging, Badgering and Batting 500: The Letters Part I,” Journal of the American Art Pottery Association 16, no. 6 (November 2000): 16–17; “Serial Potter Arrested in Biloxi: George Ohr, the Letters Part II,” Journal of the American Art Pottery Association 17, no. 1 (January 2001): 8–11. Notably, every scholar I met with (Clark, Hecht, and Ellison) discredited Mohr’s work in the most forceful words possible. Furthermore, they did so independently, without any encouragement on my part. Mohr’s work is not valued or appreciated within the Ohr community and the Ohr–O’Keefe Museum in Biloxi refuses to have any connection with the work of Mohr, according to Clark and Hecht (via interviews by the author on 4 March 2006 and 8 April 2006 respectively). Yet an official of the museum later told me that more analytical considerations, along the lines of what Mohr has written, are necessary. 54 relationship, stating, “It was the Kirkpatricks who wrenched Ohr away from the conventional and traditional potting of Joseph Meyer, and set him to exploring the possibilities of clay as clay . . . releasing the woozy liminal shapes, the formless forms, determinately latent in that shit-like, half solid, half liquid, half living, half rotted, forever clinging substance, clay.”40
Ohr’s line of “bawdry” wares, as termed by Hecht, displays an off-color sense of
humor—creamers with feces in the bottom (Figure 9), phallic-shaped vases (Figure 10),
banks fashioned after feces (Figure 22), brothel coins with sexual messages (Figure 23)—
the impetus for which, Mohr suggests, are the Kirkpatrick brothers. Ohr did in fact
borrow a pig flask design from the Kirkpatricks, who are the earliest known potters to use
this form (Figure 24 and 25). However, Ohr took the form one step farther, requiring
drinkers to put their lips to the anus of the pig as well as the snout.
Without limiting the influence of the Kirkpatricks to Ohr’s trinkets, Mohr also
interprets Ohr’s art pots as subversive images that forced people to deal with the more
disgusting aspects of human nature. Phallic-shaped vases topped with red, inflamed labia;
volcanic, eruptive glazes that resemble sores on vessels one drinks from; twisted pots
colored in pinks and reds signifying the internal organs (Figures 10, 1, 13), were all
forms, in Mohr’s view, Ohr used to reveal the truth of nature and beauty as ugly and
deformed, as much as it was idyllic and picturesque.
Most Ohr scholars strongly reject Mohr’s theories, insisting his facts are
inaccurate and reveal more about the author himself than they do about Ohr. While some
40 Mohr, Pottery, Politics, Art, 129. In this book Mohr also suggests that the snake motif both Ohr and the Kirkpatrick brothers used reveals a deeper link between the two. Most Ohr scholars discredit this, however, because Ohr’s snakes are much more stylized and abstract, whereas the Kirkpatricks are very lifelike, so much so that even the species can at times be identified. He may have picked this motif up while visiting Illinois, but it is not as conclusive as the similarities between the pig flasks. 55 of their criticism seems just, the intensity of their resistance is surely also due to the fact that Mohr’s work strongly introduces an element of deviant psychology that is less than entirely flattering to Ohr. Though Mohr does not present any new factual information, his theory that Ohr’s pots represent the uglier and more disgusting parts of nature are original and valuable. They link Ohr not only to the pottery of the Kirkpatrick brothers, but to wider cultural and social phenomena of the latter part of the nineteenth century. As will be shown, an increasing element of society was reacting against the oppressive and politely chauvinistic etiquette of Victorian America, and exploring the grotesque and abject side of humanity.
This second generation of Ohr scholarship is diverse, and their interpretations sometimes conflict with or contradict one another. Some argue that Ohr be considered from a sculptural standpoint, while others refuse even to label his work as art. Some argue his works are purely formalist, while others see his work as the expression of emotional energy, divorced from serious formal concerns. Some remain loyal to the genius paradigm, others challenge this or insist on the relevance of Ohr’s social context.
In large part, this group of writers challenges Ohr’s mythological status, seeing it as a gimmick contrived either by Ohr or by the writers/art dealers who first promoted his work. Thus, these writers introduce a healthy note of skepticism, although aside from a psychoanalytic explanation, they do little to explain how Ohr’s work grew out of the culture of his time.
56
Chapter Two Biography and Early Literature
Childhood/Early Life
One of the major challenges to studying Ohr is the scarcity of biographical and
primary sources from which to draw information. Ohr’s three page autobiography, “Some
Facts in the History of a Unique Personality” (1901), while brief, not to mention self-
serving, provides indispensable information about his life from childhood until the year
1883. Along with its significance as documentation the peculiar literary style of this
sketch provides an intriguing glimpse into Ohr’s personality. His odd spelling and grammar, strange metaphors and puns and odd locutions make it clear that we are confronting a true “original.”
Ohr’s parents were second generation immigrants—his mother German and his father an Alsatian blacksmith. They “locked horns” in New Orleans in 1853 and settled in
Biloxi. Ohr, born in 1857, was the second of five siblings and described the group as:
3 hens, 1 rooster and a duck—I’m that duck. I don’t know how it happened, but it did, and was no fault of mine. [I] came on the second schooner, and knocked the nose out of joint of the first one, and kept it so, as the other three storks that came in town were nothing to brag about.41
According to Ohr his beginning was brazen, forceful and unapologetic. The lone
maverick “duck” had to “knock” out his own space in an otherwise normal family. His
derisive suggestion that his siblings are “nothing to brag about” implied his own
exceptionality, yet he uncharacteristically humbled himself (perhaps somewhat
fatalistically) by admitting that his strange character “was no fault of mine.” Ohr’s words
41 George Ohr, “Some Facts in the History of a Unique Personality,” Crockery and Glass Journal 54 (1901): 1. This translates into Ohr being the second oldest child, having three sisters and one brother. 57 reveal a tension within his family, though not an altogether uncommon or especially dire one, which apparently existed in part due to Ohr’s distinctive personality.
Indeed, Ohr was not just different, but a troublemaker as well:
As it is—and was—I had a big load to haul, and survived many catastrophes besides getting all the lickings of the family, as everything that was ever done wrong or happened around 3 corners, or if it did not rain, or rained too much, or the clock wouldn’t tick, or someone’s horse ran away, and 1,000 other things went democrat, I caught L [Hell] for it.42
Since no biographical statements exist from the rest of the children it is difficult to know
how accurate Ohr’s account of his childhood was. However, it does seem that Ohr
wanted to be perceived as the sibling destined to be in trouble whether in consequence of
his own actions or as scapegoat for things beyond his control.
Even in these early years Ohr perceived himself as different—a theme that
continued throughout his life and has been reinforced in posthumous scholarship. That
Ohr’s autobiography (and a large amount of existing literature) was intended for public
consumption is key to an understanding of Ohr. In order to get and hold the public’s
attention Ohr needed to create an interesting character. For this reason these writings
must be treated with a degree of temperance.
In the romantic German literary form of the Bildungsroman, loosely translated to
mean a novel of personal development or education, the hero’s early years are generally
the “wanderjahre”—“the wandering years.” Ohr’s early years conform to this pattern.
Ohr confesses that at some point in his teen years he grew tired of constantly being in
“hot aqua” and moved to New Orleans:
Well, I stormed the weather until I remember having cold bare feet about 18 times and the water was getting so almighty darned
42 Ibid. 58
hot that I concluded not to be in it all the time, and changed boarding places 80 miles away.43
In the course of his research, Hecht discovered Ohr’s name in the New Orleans City
Directory—“Ohr George E potter, r. 249 Baronne”44—for the years 1880, 1881 and
1889, thus establishing his residence in New Orleans as fact. The specific reason for his
departure to New Orleans Ohr never made clear, but it was probably a combination of a
youthful yearning for adventure, a search for a place in the world that was his own, and
perhaps escape from an overbearing father who wanted George to continue in the blacksmith family tradition. Ohr’s grandfather shod the first horse in Biloxi, Ohr’s father
(an only child) continued in the blacksmith trade, and it was expected that George would do the same. According to Ohr’s autobiography, while in New Orleans he attended
German School for a winter, apprenticed in a file cutter’s shop and a tinker’s shop, was a chief cook, and held a warehouse job at the ship’s grocer. Ohr eventually left each job for various reasons—the pay was not good enough, he did not get along with the boss, it was not for him, etc.
In 1879 or 1880 Ohr received a letter from Joseph Meyer, a successful potter in
New Orleans, and friend of the family, offering “$10 a month and a chance to swipe a trade”45 by learning to make pottery. Meyer’s family were also Alsatian immigrants who
had lived on the Back Bay in Biloxi where Meyer’s father, François Antoine, had opened a pottery. Meyer had learned the pottery trade from his father, who continued to make
utilitarian crockery in New Orleans’s Vieux Carré after the family left Biloxi. Before he
died François also started a boot and shoe store on Saint Bernard Avenue, “and for the
43 Ibid.. 44 Clark, Ellison, Hecht, Mad Potter of Biloxi, 14. 45 Ohr, “Unique Personality,” 2. 59 next two decades son Joseph alternated between pottery and dry goods depending on the exigencies of life.”46
After receiving Meyer’s invitation Ohr states he “stole a freight train at 11:65, and p.d.q went under the night and over terra firma.” Ohr was probably only looking for his next adventure (or paycheck) without suspecting that he was about to stumble into his life’s work, yet according to Ohr, when he found the potter’s wheel “I felt it all over like a wild duck in water.” Ohr’s analogy suggests that his love of clay was a mixture of pre- determined hardwiring and destiny. Destiny or not, the choice to make clay working his future was also a practical one. With this vocation he could be his own boss, control his own paycheck, and fulfill a need within the community all while doing something he enjoyed and was good at. Ohr seems to have learned the basics of clay-working from
Meyer, but did not stay long with him. His mastery of basic techniques made it possible for him to work almost anywhere as a journeyman potter. He soon left Meyer and began to travel from place to place. As he wrote in his autobiographical statement:
After knowing how to boss a little piece of clay into a gallon jug I pulled out of New Orleans and took a zigzag trip for 2 years, and got as far as Dubuque, Milwaukee, Albany, down the Hudson, and zigzag back home.
His appetite was voracious:
I sized up every potter and pottery in 16 States, and never missed a show window, illustration or literary dab on ceramics since that time, 1881.
By this time, Ohr had:
46 Clark, Ellison, Hecht, Mad Potter of Biloxi, 10. Paul Cox notes that the Joseph Meyer’s father came to Biloxi before the Civil War, which is how he was acquainted with the Ohrs. Cox notes in his article, “The Meyers had been Alsatians but the political conditions that exist even today made living intolerable in that borderland.” The Meyer family left Biloxi for New Orleans when the economics of the Civil War made it too difficult to run their pottery operation in Biloxi. 60
managed to economize, and in 2 years more, working in New Orleans, I saved up a huge wad of the green stuff which took me 3 hours to count (taking lots of time). I spent more than 3 hours wondering how I was going to have a full-equipped pottery for 2680 cents.
He was able to do so “with lime, then with grit and credit.” Being an ex-blacksmith he had the skills necessary to fabricate an iron clay mill and potter’s wheel. He felled his own trees and dug his own clay from the banks of the Tchoutacabouffa River, rafting the lumber and clay down the river eighteen miles, one way. When he returned from these trips, which sometimes took weeks, he began the cumbersome but necessary process of filtering and treating the clay. Hecht describes the process:
At the Pottery he dumped the mud into a pit and removed any organic material, pebbles, and sand. Clean clay was shoveled into a horse- powered mud mill where it was slowly ground for an hour or so making it uniform and smooth.47
In between his clay gathering trips Ohr also found time to construct his own pottery studio and produce enough to keep it afloat during his first year in business, 1883 to 1884
(Figure 26). Ohr was not discouraged, “I had to do lots of work, and hard and heavy. But
all is light and easy when the will and love of it is there.”
Though Ohr had settled in Biloxi by the early 1880s he continued to move
frequently, splitting his time between Biloxi and New Orleans where he worked with
Meyer at the New Orleans Art Pottery, and later at Newcomb College. Ohr also began
attending fairs and expositions early in his pottery career and continued to do so into the
twentieth century. Showcasing social, cultural, and technological developments of the
United States and the world, these events attracted millions of visitors and became
important to Ohr both commercially and artistically.
47 Hecht, After the Fire, 3. 61
Though busy building his pottery and working in New Orleans, by 1883 Ohr stated he had managed to create more than six hundred pieces, no two alike, suitable to take to the New Orleans Cotton Centennial Exposition. It cost Ohr a total year’s savings to get there and then some as he “got the wrong man to attend to the taking away of my ware, stand and fixings, it turned out to be nobody’s business and everybody’s pottery.”48
Curiously, 1883 is when his brief autobiography ends. It is not known when he wrote this
autobiography (it was published in 1901), though it must have been at least as late at
1896 or 1897, as he describes Meyer as “the Sophy Newcome potter,” and Meyer did not
work for Newcomb Pottery until around 1896, which will be discussed later. It is strange
that he did not update his life when he published the statement, since by 1901 there was much more to tell.
On 15 September 1886, Ohr married seventeen-year-old Josephine Gehring, a
Biloxi native. This marked the onset of an intense time for Ohr, filled with both ambitious schemes and heartbreaking loss. George’s and Josephine’s first child, Ella
Louisa, was born in 1887, but died six months later. In 1889 a second child, Asa Eugene, was born. At this point Ohr began adopting an unusual naming practice. He devised a first name that was the same as the child’s initials, just as George E. Ohr’s are his own initials. The children named in this way were his second son, Leo Ernest, born in 1890,
followed by Clo Lucinda in 1892, Lio Irwin in 1893, Oto T in 1895, Flo Lucagina in
1897, Zio born in 1900, Ojo in 1903, and Geo in 1906. Ohr supported his growing family by producing pottery, and in 1889 he constructed a new, larger workshop.49
48 Ohr, “Unique Personality,” 3. 49 Ella, the first born, died at just a few months in 1887. Asa, born in 1889, died in 1893 (apparently the idea to name his children in such a way did not occur to Ohr until after the birth of Asa). Lio, born 1893, died in 1914 doing handstands on his motorcycle. Flo, born 1897, died just shy of her second birthday in 62
We do not know at what point Ohr began to diverge from traditional shapes and produce the eccentric forms for which he is now celebrated. In a number of ways, however, 1894 seems to have marked a turning point for him. That year his first born son,
Asa, not quite five years old, died. Of George’s and Josephine’s ten children only five would survive them. The loss was compounded when on 12 October 1894 at 2:00 a.m. a fire started at the Bijou Oyster Saloon in Biloxi. The Biloxi Daily Herald reports that the fire soon reached the adjoining Masonic Opera House and from there spread to the surrounding cottages and shops. The fire consumed five structures owned by Ohr’s father, and the grocery store run by his mother. More than twenty businesses were destroyed including Ohr’s pottery, which had become the culmination of his hopes, dreams, blood, sweat, and hard-earned money.50
The devastating loss of Asa (to be compounded by the children he had yet to lose)
and the destruction of his life’s work affected Ohr deeply and seemed to strengthen a
spiritual connection he had made between his pots and his offspring. Like his pots, Ohr’s children existed because of his efforts and represented tangible proof of his actions, thoughts, and beliefs. He referred to the pots burned in the fire as his “killed babies” or
“burned babies” refusing to sell or dispose of them in any way, asking “Did you ever hear of a mother so inhuman that she would cast off her deformed child?”51 In fact, all his
killed babies held a place of honor on display in his new studio. An article of 1893
captures the correlation Ohr made between his pots and his kids:
1900. Zio, born in 1900, lived only until 1904. The children who survived Ohr were Leo (1890–1970), Clo (1892–1989), Oto (1895–1982), Ojo (1903–1991), and Geo (1906–1986). Information from Mississippi Coast Historical and Genealogical Society, vol. 38, p. 2002. 50 The article about the 1894 fire is “The Flames,” Biloxi Daily Herald, 13 October 1894, 8. 51 Della Campbell McLeod, “The Potter, Poet and Philosopher,” Memphis Commercial Appeal, 27 June 1909, front page. 63
Every now and then a piece of pottery is broken: ‘Who did that, Mr. Ohr?” “Why, can’t you guess?” “No.” Then a merry laugh rings as he lifts up the curtain, and there is a scamper of little feet. “That’s my live pottery,” he says; “but they must break something, and this bank never fails, for things are dirt cheap.”52
Spiritually, Ohr has been described as both Episcopalian and deeply religious.
Ohr’s Episcopalian affiliation is a bit surprising as his German parents were almost certainly not of this faith. Ohr’s divergence may have been a symptom of social climbing or it may have had to do with the expansion of his cultural sphere. Regardless, we know that he drew a parallel between himself and a Creator. Not only did both mold their forms in clay, but both created each work differently, imperfectly and uniquely:
According to the Good Book, we are created from clay, and as Nature had it so destined that no two of us are alike, all couldn’t be symmetrically formed, caused a variety to be wabble-jawed, hair lipped, crosseye, all colors, bow-legged, knock-kneed, extra limbs, also minus of the same, all sizes from 30 inches to 75 ditto. Everyone of us sees different, has a different voice, and don’t all like cabbage or chew tobacco! . . . I Make disfigured pottery—couldn’t and wouldn’t if I could make it any other way.53
Whether his clay babies were an ideal classical shape, covered in a disastrous glaze or listing to one side, they were all perfect and loved for these very differences. Ohr claimed never to stray from his philosophy that no two were ever the same (though some are very similar), insisting that these differences made his clay babies as much a part of him as his real children.
The devastating fire did not discourage Ohr for long, and by 1894 he had constructed a new studio (Figure 27)—a five-story Chinese pagoda oddly juxtaposed
52 “Biloxi Pottery,” Biloxi Daily Herald, 3 December 1893, [page unknown]. 53 William King, “The Palissy of Biloxi,” Illustrated Buffalo Express, 12 March 1899, 4. 64 with a type of wrap-around porch common in antebellum southern architecture. Set in a neighborhood of thoroughly conventional buildings of no particular distinction, constructed by local carpenters, it quickly became a peculiar but beloved landmark for locals and tourists alike. Ohr adorned the structure with signs proclaiming his own greatness.
But arguably, Ohr’s most exotic creation was himself (Figure 28). Physically he appeared as a backwoods Wildman complete with long beard and mustache, which he wore tucked behind his ears when throwing. His dark eyes appeared deranged, a perfect match for his eccentric behavior and sayings:
My pottery life-work is only one collection as I alone created it— and if there is a greater variety of Pottery on this Earth emenating from one creature that is and has more extreams for poor and high quality SHAPES sizes—ugly, pretty, odd, queere &c. &c. than I have—I want to see the same and Ile swim and wear out shoes to get there.54
Ohr himself predicted, “When I am gone . . . my work will be praised, honored and
cherished. It will come.”55 The dramatic story of Ohr’s “discovery” has tempted scholars
and the public alike to view him as a prophetic figure, even one endowed with mystical
powers. After all, it does seem to confirm so many of Ohr’s “prophetic” statements about
his oeuvre and the ultimate success it would enjoy.
54 George Ohr, “Biloxi Heard From,” Crockery and Glass Journal 53 (1901): page unknown. Unless otherwise noted, from this point on I have not corrected or changed Ohr’s words in any way and have even included irregular spacing and random capitalization. I believe that the visual dynamics of Ohr’s words were/are just as important as the actual meaning behind them. According to Hecht in “The Times and Life of G. E. Ohr,” in Clark, Ellison, Hecht, Mad Potter of Biloxi, 9, Ohr was born on 12 July 1857 and “a few months later he was christened George Edgar in the Episcopal Church of the Redeemer.” 55 Times-Picayune, October 1894. 65
Later Life
In 1899 Ohr sent an unsolicited sample of eleven pots to the Smithsonian
Institution in Washington, DC (Figure 29 and 30). According to Smithsonian files, Ohr
did not ask the institution to pay for his pots, and neither did Smithsonian officials offer.
Instead they kept his pots but did not accession them into the collection until 1986. It is
obvious they assigned little value to Ohr’s gift. In 1906 Ohr sent another group of pots,
again unsolicited, to the Delgado Art Museum in New Orleans (now the New Orleans
Museum of Art). Museum officials declined almost the whole lot, instead selecting only a
few pieces. Ohr must have been disappointed since his dream was to have one collector
buy his entire collection:
But I know—and know certain positively and sure—that the world of Pottery Lovers will never, never, and at no time know what I have and create untill some one gets or have what collection I have left of my lifes work in clay. To distribute what I have is like distributing a poets work—by giving hundreds of lines too hundreds of creatures—hundreds of miles apart.56
Insulted that the museum could divide his “mudbabies” into valuable or worthless pieces
of work, rather than precious creations coexisting with one another (and probably still
smarting from his experience with the Smithsonian), Ohr demanded that all the pieces be
returned. When Carpenter recovered Ohr’s pots in the mid 1960s, the sampling he had
sent to the Delgado Museum still remained in its crate. Ohr had never bothered to unpack
it. I will discuss these museum samples and present theories as to why Ohr chose to send
the particular pots he did later in the dissertation.57
56 Ibid. 57 While it stands to reason that there is a record somewhere of the pots Ohr sent to the Delgado Museum, I have failed, despite my best efforts, to uncover such. None of the scholars with whom I spoke have this information. Undoubtedly, the one person who has this information, James Carpenter, refused to be interviewed. 66
In 1908 Ohr stopped producing work. With money he received from an inheritance, Ohr bought a car dealership and went into business with his sons. He boxed up his wares, tucked them away in the attic of the dealership. Exactly why he stopped producing in 1908 is unknown, though some speculate it was weariness from rejection, the loss of his parents and other loved ones (both his parents had died and he had buried four of his ten children), or simply old age.58
Ohr did not disappear after he ended his pottery career. Just as his earlier life was filled with eccentricity, Ohr continued along that path, perhaps even more so now that he did not have pottery making to distract him. In fact his actions seem to have taken on a more inflammatory and critical edge.
In 1909 and 1910 Ohr was again in the spotlight, featured in a series of local articles stemming from legal turmoil with his family. These articles describe how the property of Ohr’s parents had been jointly willed to the surviving children upon their deaths—the father in 1904 and the mother in 1905. The terms of the will stipulated that the property was not to be sold for ten years and that George and his family would be offered a chance to buy it before it was sold off. Ohr’s siblings wanted to sell the property quickly so they attempted to have him declared insane in order to remove him from the proceedings. The jury found him sane.59
On 7 September 1909 the conflict landed the family in court. At the hearing Ohr
presented a document that he alleged had been signed by a court clerk stating that his
58 It is possible that Ohr ceased potting earlier than 1908 as there are no known pots dated after 1907. 59 Unless otherwise noted, all the following information regarding the legal turmoil and Ohr’s subsequent imprisonment is taken from “Geo. E. Ohr Released from Durance Vile,” Biloxi Daily Herald, 7 October 1910: front page; George Ohr, “Geo. E. Ohr at Out-of-Law Commission Sale,” Biloxi Daily Herald, 7 September 1909, 4; and “Ohr Fined for Striking Chancery Clerk Hewes,” Biloxi Daily Herald, 7 September 1909, 2. 67 parents’ property could not be sold for ten years. Hewes, the court clerk in the case, refused to accept it, saying the paper had nothing to do with the trial and proceeded with the sale of the property. At this point “the defendant [Ohr] struck him with his hand and seizing his [Ohr’s] wife’s hand, struck him with it.” Ohr was fined $10.60
In the same issue of the Biloxi Daily Herald, Ohr gave his impression of the
hearing, “it took me 53 years to go to jail, and lawbreakers broke the law TO DO IT”. He
follows with a P.S. written later than night, “Oh! Well! Let ‘er go Galliger, and er er.
Yes, take an eat up (lock) all dis chill lasses and bred, then call him nigger, crazy, etc.”61
This later and less rational section of the letter specifically targets his brothers and sisters
(“lasses and bred”), and calls out their efforts to have him locked up and declared insane
(“call him nigger, crazy, etc”). That he thinks the law has been trying to put him in jail for fifty-three years reveals hyperbole or a paranoid streak. However his belief that the community and his family were against him, impressions he had carried since childhood, seemed to have been quite accurate.
The situation ended when in October 1910 Ohr was jailed for not paying the $10 fine and for trespassing on the property that had formerly belonged to his parents (the siblings had succeeded in selling the property out from under him). Presumably from jail
Ohr wrote a letter to the Biloxi Daily Herald regarding the unsanitary conditions of the prison, which was published in the article “Geo. E. Ohr Released from Durance Vile”
(1910). He wrote:
60 “Ohr Fined for Striking Chancery Clerk Hewes,” 2. 61 “Geo. E. Ohr at Out-of-Law Commission Sale,” 4. Ohr’s use of the word “nigger” is the only racist remark I have encountered in all of the Ohr literature. Ohr did live in the South after the Civil War and probably picked up the racist ideology in which he was enmeshed. Regardless, Ohr would still be considered extremely liberal in comparison to other southerners of the time. Mohr also offers another explanation for the word, postulating that “nigger” in this case would be slang for “crazy,” therefore losing the malicious undertones. He compares it to the modern use of the word “gay” to describe something that is deemed dumb or ridiculous, rather than as a malevolent term for a homosexual. 68
I, Geo. E. Ohr, a law-abiding citizen, an innocent man, a victim of misconstrued ideas and culprit of misdirected energy, am now incarcerated in a filthy pen—a dirty bricked walled jail where a nauseating unsanitary dirt receptacle—a dirty and rotten excelsior torn straw mattress is strewn on a floor that never gets a scrubbing . . . I . . . had my dear sweet wife to bring me a blanket and a sheet so I would have a clean resting place on the boxes.62
That Ohr played to the sympathies of his readership and overdramatized the case
becomes obvious when one realizes he spent only a few hours—not days—in jail.
Though there exists little information about the relationship between Ohr and his siblings, it is clear that it was not a friendly one, at least when issues of property and
financial gain were concerned. His words are reminiscent of the alienation he felt in his
potting days and resultantly he again resorted to theatrics and gimmicks to appeal to the
community. The treatment Ohr received from his siblings may have been unkind but
could have remained a private family matter. His theatrics exacerbated the situation and
turned a smolder into a raging fire. Ohr deliberately manipulated the press and chose to
spotlight the incident.
In his book Louis Sullivan: His Life and Work (1986), architectural historian
Robert Twombly suggests that the period from about 1908 to 1910 seems to mark a
watershed in American culture. Twombly notes that in architecture, for example, the last
years of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth appear to have
marked a high point of American individualism in the work of figures such as Louis
Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright. Around 1910, however, this impulse faded. Sullivan’s
career collapsed while Wright went into a long hibernation that ended only in the late
1930s. Twombly asserts that reasons for this phenomenon are complex, for in the cases of
both Sullivan and Wright, personal factors played a large role in their professional
62 “Geo. E. Ohr Released from Durance Vile,” 1. 69 decline—alcoholism on Sullivan’s part and an extramarital affair on that of Wright. But they also seem to have been affected by a larger trend—the development of a culture that was increasingly corporate in mentality, and increasingly impatient with individualism.
Capitalism in the late nineteenth century was highly individualistic, built around robber baron leaders who created personal fiefdoms. By the early twentieth century a more bureaucratic mode of business was starting to emerge. Twombly concludes that business efficiency on a large scale simply could not afford to be subject to the personal vagaries of gifted but eccentric and temperamental personalities. Like Wright and Sullivan, Ohr seems to have pushed the individualistic impulse of the late nineteenth century to the point where he could no longer enjoy patronage or critical support. By 1908 both the Art
Pottery movement and the Arts and Crafts movement were in their fin-de-siècle downswing. Ohr appears to have lost the will to continue, but it is striking that he carefully boxed up thousands of his pots, clearly hopeful that at some point they would be rediscovered and he would be recognized as a major artistic innovator. As previously noted, Ohr evidently believed his work would be praised and cherished posthumously.
Had Ohr achieved fame? Ohr surely had achieved a measure of fame and success, though how much has been debated by scholars. Ohr’s obituary claims that “his fame as a fashioner of pottery spread to all parts of the United States.”63 Likewise, journalist Della
Campbell McLeod asserts that “artists from all parts of the world make pilgrimages to
this queer little spider-webbed rookery,” yet fails to identify any of these putative
visitors.64 My own research has not uncovered any major artists who visited him, with
the exception of the actor Joseph Jefferson, who encountered him somewhat by accident
63 “Pottery Wizard Dies in Biloxi,” Biloxi Daily Herald, 8 April 1918, front page. 64 McLeod, “Potter, Poet and Philosopher,” front page. 70 and stayed only briefly. Important ceramic historians such as Edwin Atlee Barber and
William Percival Jervis, who will be discussed in the next section, were aware of Ohr’s productions, although they did not always agree on their skillfulness or value. Journals and periodicals clearly thought him newsworthy, but often because of his freakish behavior and not his skill as a potter. Even the medal Ohr won at the Louisiana Purchase
Exhibition of 1904 (St. Louis World’s Fair), which should have been a great achievement, is tainted by this duality. Did they think his work was good or just so unusual that it deserved recognition? Scholars and Ohr’s hometown paper, the Biloxi
Daily Herald, could not decide if he had won a bronze or gold. Even the category in which he won, “most original pottery,” is vague at best.
According to interviews of Biloxi citizens conducted by Hecht, Ohr remained active in his later years and was often seen riding his Thor motorcycle on the beach.
Moreover, a Biloxi Daily Herald article lists Ohr’s name among the participants in various Mardi Gras parades. In the last year of his life his health began to decline, and in
1918, at the age of sixty-one, he died of throat cancer. On 8 April 1918 the front page of the Biloxi Daily Herald reported his death with the headline “Pottery Wizard Dies in
Biloxi,” and then observed: “Mr. Ohr had been in poor health for years and recently his ailment became more serious. He sought relief at New Orleans and elsewhere, but failed to find health.” Whether or not Ohr was beloved by Biloxians, or merely known as a local crank, the fact that his death was front page news indicates his importance to the town.
The choice of the word “wizard” is telling. Whether or not they entirely believed it,
Biloxians chose to celebrate Ohr as numinous and magical.65
65 Regarding Ohr’s participation in Mardi Gras parades, see “Biloxi’s First Carnival A Success Beyond Expectations,” Biloxi Daily Herald, 4 March 1908, p. 1. 71
Contemporary Reception of Ohr
The degree to which the fire and subsequent rebuilding of Ohr’s studio in 1894
affected his work is difficult to determine, but it is striking that not long after Ohr began
to receive attention in the press, though much of what was written was not very
encouraging. On the whole, his eccentric personality attracted more attention than his work. Curiously, the first major piece about Ohr was not a journalistic account but a work
of fiction, The Wonderful Wheel, written by Mary Tracey Earle and published in 1896.66
According to Who’s Who in America (1899) Earle was born in 1865 and died in
1955, and was married to W. T. Horne, the head of the division of plant pathology in the
College of Agricultural Sciences at University of California, Berkeley. Earle’s father,
Parker Earle, was the horticultural director at the New Orleans Cotton Centennial
Exposition in 1884, which Ohr attended. Two of Earle’s stepsisters would later marry
Peter and Walter Anderson, who along with their brother James would build the
Shearwater Pottery in 1928, an internationally recognized art complex in Ocean Springs.
Earle’s family owned property in Ocean Springs, Mississippi, where she often vacationed. It was here that she wrote The Wonderful Wheel and the short story “The
Man Who Worked for Collister” (1898). Ocean Springs is only about twenty minutes from Biloxi, and while living there she evidently heard stories about Ohr. In addition to
The Wonderful Wheel, she wrote two other novels, Through Old Rose Glasses (1900) and
Flag on the Hilltop (1902), published by Houghton, Mifflin & Company. She published no fewer than five stories in Harper’s Monthly between 1897 and 1915, and between
66 Incidentally, Earle was listed among the nation’s top men and women in John William Leonard and Albert Nelson Marquis, Who’s Who in America: A Biographical Dictionary of Notable Men and Women of the United States–1903–1905 (Chicago: Marquis, 1899), 432. 72
1894 and 1915, was also included in such journals as McClure’s, the Saturday Evening
Post, and Munsey’s.67
The Wonderful Wheel tells the story of a widowed potter, Giacomo Barse and his daughter Clothilde, who live as outcasts in the small Creole town of Potosi. The superstitious locals fear and reject Barse because of his “hoodoo” wheel, which has been seen to glow at night. When Barse breaks his leg and becomes bedridden he is forced to engage the community for the sake of his daughter. The local doctor and a distant cousin offer to care for Clothilde and in so doing discover that Barse’s wheel is not black magic, but merely covered with a luminous paint causing it to glow at night. When a yellow fever epidemic breaks out, during which the doctor falls sick, it is up to Barse to quarantine and nurse the rest of the community. He does so successfully, thus gaining social acceptance and a loving environment for his daughter.
Barse’s appearance is clearly based on that of Ohr. He has “strange flashing black eyes, and a black mustache so long that he draped it over his ears when he worked.”68
Earle also included other elements that link her “fictional” character to Ohr. For example,
Ohr had achieved localized fame for his assistance during a yellow fever epidemic. Also analogous is the painful rejection and isolation Clothilde and Barse experience at the hands of the unwelcoming community. So far as we know, Ohr was never described as supernatural or accused of practicing black magic, but he was perceived as an eccentric and a “crank” by both members of his community and the art world. Notably, the
67 Short stories by Earle include “Mr. Willie’s Wedding Veil” (December 1897), “Ex Libris” (June 1902), “Johnny Sands” (April 1904), “The Cenotaph” (May 1904), “The Glass Door” (February 1907), and “The Tropic Bird” (April 1915). 68 Mary Tracy Earle, The Wonderful Wheel (New York: The Century Co., 1896), 1. 73 physical and emotional characterizations Earle put forth were adopted and reiterated with virtually no changes in subsequent journalistic articles.69
In the following year, the first known nonfiction article on Ohr, “A Biloxi
Pottery” (1897), was published in Brick magazine. The unknown author treats Ohr’s
pottery as a well-known tourist destination, stating: “But of all the points of interest and
historic scenes which attract the thousands of yearly visitors to Biloxi, the best known
and most fascinating is the Biloxi Pottery and its entertaining potter.”70 But like most
articles written in Ohr’s lifetime, the author offers no critical analysis of individual
works, merely summarizing Ohr’s philosophy of “no two alike” and emphasizing his
prideful individuality. The final short paragraph of the article briefly discusses the three
pots that were reproduced with the article, but one has to wonder if the author had even
seen the aforementioned pots as she/he described the forms as “graceful” and the glazes
as “dainty.”
In 1909 McLeod reiterated the themes laid out in “A Biloxi Pottery,” again paying
more attention to Ohr’s personality than to his work. She saw him as a tourist attraction:
“A visit to the town would not be complete without a morning or afternoon spent with its most eccentric citizen.”71 She did mention the mass quantity of his pots, more than six thousand, and paid tribute to his remarkable, seemingly unsinkable ambition. But Ohr’s pottery was described as essentially a backdrop to his forceful, eccentric, perplexing personality. As she wrote:
69 In King, “Palissy of Biloxi,” 4, the author states “it would appear that he was indeed a hero during a yellow-fever scourge that decimated his native town” when speaking of his place of emphasis in The Wonderful Wheel. In the same article King also makes mention of “a vase made during a yellow-fever scourge and so marked.” Hecht has also referred to this, though I have not found any other documentation that gives the specifics of this event. 70 “Biloxi Pottery,” Brick 6, no. 5 (1897): 286. 71 McLeod, “The Potter, Poet and Philosopher,” 1. 74
Here under the Iris pitchers and long-necked flower holders moves the queer genius of the place, George Ohr. . . . One moment spewing forth philosophy and poetry that almost persuades you he is a genius, and the next drifting into some senseless twaddle that convinces you he is a freakish fool.72
Other early articles found little beauty in Ohr’s pots and focused on his eccentric personality. The following quote from an article in a New York paper from 22 December
1898, facetiously entitled “High Art at Biloxi, Miss,” stress Ohr’s gifts as a marketer and self-promoter rather than an artist, although it hints that the public was hardly lining up to acquire his wares:
Originality in the method of bringing one’s goods to the attention of buyers is striven for by every wideawake manufacturer, and at least one Western potter has achieved it. He has sent out a circular which, in these days of dainty booklets, correct and handsome typography, is little short of a crime. Gotten up in the style of a circus handbill of the vintage of 1847, and ornamented with a picture of what we thought was a broncho bu’ster in his Sunday clothes until we discovered that it was a portrait of the author, it sets for the merits of the pottery made at Biloxi, Miss., by one George E. Ohr. . . . It will be seen that Mr. Ohr, albeit a little hysterical, is, nevertheless, not only a potter, but a man of courage, and lest there be any doubt on the subject, he [Ohr] continues “and where the ‘he’ or ‘who,’ the ‘her’ or ‘they’ that will or can contradict my assertions?” In the formation of his literary style, Mr. Ohr has evidently drunk deep at many founts, but if we judge aright, at none so deeply as Browning. . . . One thing stands out clear from obscurity in the concluding sentence—the touching modesty of their creator. This attribute, combined with a hint that he is controlled by occult forces, again crops out in the following wail: “Cannot hire anybody to do my [Ohr] work and manipulate clay so that I [Ohr] or no other living, can make a reproduction of facsimile of such inspirations.” We are of the opinion that Mr. Ohr has missed his calling. Literature is the thing for him. He says that he has “a few small pieces valued to the weight of gold.” We would advise him to make a few more—large ones, if it’s all the same to him—and convert them into the auriferous metal. He could then retire from
72 Ibid., 8. 75
the carking cares of business and devote his leisure to the manufacture of more literary gems. A weary world is waiting for them.73 Critic Ethel Hutson (1905) took the trouble to specifically disparage the artistic value of
his work. As she wrote:
The eccentricity of the potter has led him to care more to make something unique than something pleasing—and his work lacks the distinction that can give soul even to ugliness, that can ennoble the grotesque: his bits of pottery are simply bizarre.74
Even reference books tended to treat Ohr and his work sarcastically. Thus, for example,
Ohr was deemed significant enough to warrant an entry in William Percival Jervis’s The
Encyclopedia of Ceramics (1902), but he did not get a very favorable review:
Mr. Ohr, with an unbounded confidence in his own genius, is laying up at Biloxi a vast store of ware in the hopes that it may be purchased entire by the nation as an example of his prowess. He has undoubted skill as a thrower, but is apt to distort his products in order to get curious shapes. Did we but accept him at his own estimate he is not only the foremost potter in America, but the whole world. He says so and he ought to know.75
In each of the preceding examples, the authors’ respective opinions are based on
Ohr’s eccentricity and total disregard for accepted styles (either ceramic or literary), and they appear personally offended by Ohr’s lack of sophistication. Discussions of his actual pottery are often afterthoughts, mentioned only as a means by which to intensify each author’s criticism of his writing or personality. Indeed, it is not always possible to tell whether his pots or his personality are the subject of many of these early articles. But
73 The original article has proven difficult to find for me as well as other Ohr scholars. The only bibliographic information available is that the article, entitled “High Art in Biloxi, Miss” was published in a New York paper on 22 December 1898. This information is given in the article “Concerning Biloxi Potteries,” China, Glass and Pottery Review (April 1899), which also includes a lengthy excerpt. 74 Ethel Hutson, “A Quaint Biloxi Pottery,” Clay Worker 44, no. 3 (September 1905): 226. 75 Jervis, Encyclopedia of Ceramics, 420. 76 though many early reviews were negative, and even cruelly taunting, Ohr at least managed to stir up publicity and attention.
As previously mentioned, Ohr sent a sample of eleven pots to the Smithsonian
Institution (Figure 29) in 1899 that were not accessioned until 1986. While this might be seen as a rebuff, apparently it was not unusual for the institution to be careless in its record-keeping, and it is striking that the pots were kept, neither returned nor discarded.
Unfortunately, no correspondence survives providing a record of the institution’s reaction to Ohr’s unusual creations, although there are some illuminating letters from Ohr preserved in the Smithsonian archives. Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of the episode is simply the nature of the work that Ohr sent to the Smithsonian, since he clearly intended this gift to serve as some sort of summation of his work as a potter. In addition, the statements he made about his work in the accompanying correspondence are both surprising and revealing.76
A good many of the pieces that Ohr sent are novelty wares: a puzzle mug, a
Lincoln log cabin, and a crumpled top hat. That Ohr should have sent such whimsical pieces to a national museum initially seems curious. Two motives can be proposed. One is that Ohr was proud to be associated with a form of pottery that had popular and rather low-class associations—in other words, that he was proud of his working-class identity.
The other is that he must have recognized this was a mode of work in which he had few
rivals, and thus one that gave him a solid claim to be represented in the museum, even if in a low-class category.
76 Information regarding the Smithsonian files on Ohr, pots that he sent to the institution, and dates of receipt and accession were received via Bonnie Campbell Lilienfeld, [email protected] “George Ohr Continued,” personal email (18 April 2008). 77
In addition, Ohr included five vases and three bowls that were very different in character (Figure 29). The first vase was glazed in an earthy color similar to the puzzle mug. While Ohr included some dimpling on the body, the vase was not subjected to any extreme gestures or motifs. The second vase is tall, slender, and classical in design until one notices the twisting at the top of the neck and the speckled, multicolored glazes that put the pot closer to one of Ohr’s more extreme wares. The third vase is also tall but features a deep twist in the body and is coated in a blood-red glaze. While the vessel does not convey the sense that it is out of control, the deep twist and color make it one of
Ohr’s more enthralling works. The fourth vase is covered with a metallic glaze, has a dimpled body and two intertwined necks. The glaze is not vibrant or grotesque, but by its very simplicity it draws attention to Ohr’s manipulations of the form. The fifth vase is also glazed in blood red, but on this pot Ohr tore the rim and pinched the neck and body, making the form appear damaged, battered, and asymmetrical.
The first bowl is blood red and included strong undulations along the rim with a pinched and dimpled body. The shape is fluid and loose, but the mottled red color makes the work resemble a bleeding, mangled limb or something similarly grotesque. The second bowl is also metallic, but the rim has been ruffled to create a thin, sharp edge that looks dangerous to the touch. The third bowl is perhaps the most extravagant of the collection. It features a round foot but a diamond-shaped mouth. The rim is pulled thin and allowed to flop over the base, while a tear in the side makes the bowl look tattered and dilapidated.
Through simple observation it is clear that the works, taken as a group, exhibit a broad range of Ohr’s techniques, from fairly simple, straightforward shapes to more
78 unusual ones. It is unclear whether Ohr hoped that they would be displayed as a group or was simply sending a scattershot sampling of his wares in the hope that something would strike a curator’s fancy and go on display.
More than a year later, in 1900, Ohr sent an umbrella stand (Figure 30), also now part of the Smithsonian’s collection. Written on it is the following:
Biloxi, Miss. Dec. 18, 1900. To the Smithsonian Wash. As kind words and deed never die, such words and deed are fire, water and water acid. And time proves when recorded on mother earth or clay. This is an empty jar just like the world solid in itself yet full on the surface. Deed and thoughts are but the instigation and shadows fade and disappear when the sun goes down. Mary had a little lamb Pot Ohr E George has had a little potter now where is the boy that stood on the burning deck. This pot is here and I am the potter who was. G.E. Ohr
As is often the case with Ohr’s statements, his meaning is occasionally hard to grasp, but
his message may be roughly interpreted and paraphrased. Ohr opens by declaring that
kind words and deeds are never forgotten and for this reason are similar to fire, water,
and acid, i.e. things that are elemental and are difficult to destroy. He then goes on to note
that kind words and deeds are even more indestructible when burned into clay, which
could also be understood as a variation on the vanitas theme of “life is short, art is long.”
At this point the statement shifts direction and a note of bitterness slips in. He declares
that the world, like this jar, is seemingly full, but is actually empty. Thoughts and actions
will just disappear unless they leave some tangible trace, just as the sun disappears into
shadow. At the end of the statement, clear meanings dissipate into wordplay. Rather than
signing himself “George Ohr” he becomes “Pot Ohr,” that is, his name dissolves into his
work as a potter. “The boy stood on the burning deck” alludes to a sentimental poem of
the time about a boy who perishes on a burning boat. At some level this seems to refer to
the child George Ohr who has passed away; it may also refer to the fire that destroyed his
79
studio. He ends by expressing the desire that the pots will serve as a memorial to his life
when he himself has passed away.77 The common denominator of all these statements is
their emphasis on the transient and the lasting. Ohr clearly hoped that his gift would earn
him a lasting place in the national museum and would carry on his memory beyond his
death.
Positive Reviews
Fortunately, not all critics were dismissive of Ohr’s wares. L. M. Bensel, writer
for Art Interchange, wrote a surprisingly judicious and analytical review of Ohr’s work
without allowing eccentricities to interfere with his observations. Bensel noted Ohr’s
“experiments in metallic glazes” and his “penchant for a dull, soft green” as well as “the
darker blues and in dragon’s blood” in “many of his finer pieces.” He carefully described
the clay Ohr used, observing that it was dug “from the banks of the Tchouticabouffe
River, and from the banks of the singing Pascagoula,” and commenting that it “is adapted to fine work” and allowed Ohr to produce “some of the softest and richest effects imaginable.” He recognized that Ohr did not embellish his pottery because “the fanciful shapes which he gives to many of [his pots] form sufficient decorative quality.” Bensel also provided the most accurate catalog of Ohr’s forms in any literature up to that point:
“With pitchers he is prone to bowl shapes, bent in trefoil pattern, as well as with cups and saucers. There are no ‘trimmings’ to Ohr’s work.” Though he felt that “the man is evidently an uncultivated genius, whose work runs to eccentricity rather than to
77 Ohr was, at this time, not dead. Indeed he lived for another eighteen years. What is more, he did not stop potting until around 1907. However, these last words perhaps reflect the discouragement that he was beginning to feel. 80 individuality,” Bensel concluded that Ohr’s work has “an art and a grace of its own that must be recognized.”78
Edwin Atlee Barber described Ohr’s pottery as “one of the most interesting in the
United States.”79 Barber observed that “[t]he extreme thinness of the pieces and the great
variety of forms are their special characteristics. While in a plastic state they are twisted,
crushed, folded, dented and crinkled into grotesque and occasionally artistic shapes,” but
for Barber “the principal beauty of the ware consists in the richness of the glazes, which are wonderfully varied, the reds, greens and metallic luster effects being particularly good.” Ohr would surely have disagreed with this, as he placed more emphasis on his forms. Barber however captured the essence of Ohr’s philosophy:
Being made for the most part entirely by hand, no two pieces are precisely alike. They range in size from the tiny vase or puzzle mug to pieces as tall as man. Mr. Ohr has been potting for nearly twenty years, and all of his methods and processes are entirely original.
Since Barber was a noted authority on pottery and his book considered to be the seminal pottery reference manual, such a statement surely gave Ohr’s career a significant boost.
Interestingly, it was not until the 1902 edition of the book that Ohr was included, despite two previous editions in 1893 and 1901. This fact further suggests that by 1902 Ohr was beginning to make a name for himself.
However, the most enthusiastic account of Ohr’s work in his lifetime was written by William King, a writer for the Illustrated Buffalo Express. The business manager of the Catholic Union and Times, King was not a curator or art professional, although he
78 L. M. Bensel, “Biloxi Pottery,” Art Interchange 46 (January 1901): 8–9. That Bensel’s review was so generous is especially significant because Art Interchange was an expensive magazine aimed at the cultural elite. 79 Barber, Pottery and Porcelain of the United States. 81 was an enthusiastic amateur collector of ceramics. According to an article published by the Buffalo Express in 1898, King began his collection in 1890 with a small plate by a woman he knew who did pottery painting. By 1899 he had assembled more than 350 objects, including Asian, French, English, German, and Austrian works. His main focus, however, was on what he considered American pottery, which embraced a wide range of ceramic production. This included works from the Zuni, Pueblo, Chiriqui, and Moqui cultures, as well as Rookwood, Chelsea, Dedham, Lonhuda, Utopian, Louwelsea,
Trenton Belleek, Chesapeake, Mariposa, Dickens, Onondaga, and others. King was not a rich man and secured most of his collection through bargain hunting at auctions and in old curiosity shops. Nonetheless, the Buffalo Express thought his ceramic collection impressive enough to grant him four pages. King liked to dream that Buffalo might someday have a museum that would include a solid pottery collection if only “some day a
Buffalonian [would] startle us with a donation of a half million or more.”80 He also urged
china painters and ceramic students in Buffalo to get together and form a ceramic society
“either as an independent body or as an adjunct to the Buffalo Society of Artists or the
Art Students’ League.”81 Further research at the Buffalo Historical Society has revealed
that King was a member of the Committee on Fine Arts of the Pan-American Exposition,
held in Buffalo in 1901, and was recognized as a local expert. In April 1900 King was the
Chairman of the Pottery and Glass exhibit at the annual exhibition of the Buffalo Society
of Artists, which included works by George Ohr.
King’s first article on Ohr, “The Palissy of Biloxi,” appeared in 1899 in the
Buffalo Express. Interestingly, it was published directly after an article entitled “Directors
80 “Some Art Pottery in Buffalo,” Buffalo Express, 25 December 1898, 123. 81 Ibid., 124. 82 of the Pan-American Exposition Company,” which provided pictures and biographies of each of these twenty-three men. King later became a kind of ceramic spokesman for the
Pan-American expo, writing an article for the Crockery and Glass Journal entitled
“Ceramic Art at the Pan-American Exposition” in 1901. It is not clear how King became aware of Ohr’s work, and he does not seem to have owned any examples. He may well have learned of Ohr from Edwin Atlee Barber or William Percival Jervis, both of whom were friends and both of whom had included Ohr in their comprehensive listings of
American potters.
In “The Palissy of Biloxi” King retraced much of what had been reported in previous articles. He offered a history and development of Ohr’s pottery, including the
1894 fire that leveled everything Ohr had achieved. King, like the others, devoted much attention to the signs hanging around Ohr’s newly built pagoda studio (Figures 31 and
32), which he most likely saw in photographs from other publications as there is no record of King having visited Ohr’s studio. Some examples include:
UNEQUALED! UNRIVALED! UNDISPUTED! GREATEST ART POTTER IN THE WORLD!
George E. Ohr, Delieator [Delineator] in Art Pottery. Magnum Opos, nulli secundus, optimus cogito, ergo sum82
A sign over the door read:
Erected in 1888, burned out and rebuilt in 1894 by the Unequaled Variety Potter, Crank, etc.
King then went on to provide an informative description of Ohr’s wares, describing the glazes as “fairly riotous in rich coloring. There are reds and greens, blues, browns and
82 The use of the word “delineator” is probably in reference to artists prints, which listed the delineator’s name along with the artist’s. 83 yellows—in fact every conceivable color is to be found . . . His metallic glazes are veritable ceramic triumphs,” but King also realized that “the shapes themselves are what will strike the ‘rank outsider’ with greatest force.” King declared that “it may be inferred from all that is said above, that the Biloxi pottery has little or no claim to real artistic value, but, indeed, the inference would be an error,” and in the end concluded that “Mr.
Ohr is indeed a genius, an odd one, I grant, but well worthy of more space than I have given him. He would be a most attractive adjunct to our Pan-American Exposition.”83
Most fairs, especially the Pan-American, which sought to celebrate the talent and sophistication of the United States, would have shied away from Ohr because of his eccentricities. King was probably hoping that his sponsorship of Ohr would encourage people to take Ohr’s work seriously.
Fairs and Expositions
Most artists achieve a reputation through art galleries and museums. Ohr,
however, never showed his work in an art gallery and his attempts to place his work in
museum collections did little to advance his career. Instead, his major venues aside from
his shop in Biloxi were fairs and exhibitions. The major fairs in which he exhibited are as
follows:
1884. World’s Industrial and Cotton Centennial Exposition, New Orleans 1893. World’s Columbian Exposition, Chicago. 1895. Cotton States and International Exposition, Atlanta 1900. National Arts Club, New York 1900. Exposition Universelle, Paris 1901. Pan-American Exposition, Buffalo 1901. Providence Art Club of Rhode Island 1904. Louisiana Purchase Exposition, St. Louis.
83 Though King gives a positive review of Ohr and provides some biographical information, he also plagiarized Bensel’s article in certain sections. 84
Ohr does not seem to have attended the two art club events. But he attended the various world’s fairs, with the exception of the exposition in Paris, and apparently marketed his work very energetically at them.
Social Influences—Diversity
World’s fairs had tremendous cultural influence across all classes of society in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. As historian Robert Rydell notes, between
1876 and 1916, nearly one hundred million people visited the international expositions held at Philadelphia, New Orleans, Chicago, Atlanta, Nashville, Omaha, Buffalo, St.
Louis, Portland, Seattle, San Francisco, and San Diego. Each fair was formulated around an event that celebrated American bravery, scientific vision, natural resources, or economic achievement. For instance, the World’s Industrial and Cotton Centennial
Exposition of 1884–85 in New Orleans was held to celebrate the centennial anniversary of the cotton industry; the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago honored the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s discovery of the New World; the Pan-American
Exposition of 1901 in Buffalo observed the arrival of low-cost electric power from
Niagara Falls in November 1896; and the Louisiana Purchase Exposition of 1904 in St.
Louis commemorated the centennial of the 1803 land purchase.84
As Rydell notes, 1876 to 1916 was a period of considerable social disruption.
Industrialization, class warfare, social-reform movements, speculative finance and its
resulting depressions, and consciousness of worldwide diversity all contributed to an
84 Robert W. Rydell, All the World’s a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1876–1916 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 2. 85 unsettling state of affairs. International expositions, however, placed all these developments within an optimistic framework. Rydell postulates:
To alleviate the intense and widespread anxiety that pervaded the United States, the directors of the expositions offered millions of fairgoers an opportunity to reaffirm their collective national identity in an updated synthesis of progress and white supremacy that suffused the blueprints of future perfection offered by the fairs.85
Rydell also observes that one of the major functions of these expositions was to exhibit the latest scientific, artistic, and cultural innovations. As a corollary to this, they served
an important commercial role as a forum in which to showcase new products. Finally,
they served as a meeting ground for the diverse cultures of the world, as a means of
promoting both world trade and colonialism. As a consequence, the fairs in the United
States often had “educational” exhibits aimed at introducing Americans to the cultures of
Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Such exhibits were intended to promote cultural
exchange, although they often also served to reinforce cultural stereotypes and colonialist attitudes.
Rydell goes on to claim that generally, the exhibits portrayed Asian or African cultures as “primitive” and traced an evolutionary progression of cultures that culminated with American white supremacy. The New Orleans exhibition in 1884–85, for example, which Ohr attended, featured a fifty-foot giant globe that rose above the other exhibits. Its transparent crystal sides were etched with outlines of continents, while displays on the interior, created by ethnologists at the Smithsonian, featured the handiwork of “heathen lands” such as “the exquisite handiwork of the semi-barbarian of the distant Orient.”
85 Rydell, All the World’s a Fair, 4. 86
According to one account, the globe “was a perfect textbook of the habits, modes of life, social and political, of the countries over the seas.”
Rydell also notes that, along with favoring Anglo-Saxons over other races or peoples, world’s fairs tended to favor more industrialized regions, and for this reason tended to favor the North over the South. Between 1881 and 1918 there were seven fairs held in six southern states (Atlanta in 1881 and 1895, Louisville in 1883 and 1887, New
Orleans in 1884–85, Nashville in 1897, Charleston in 1901–2, St. Louis in 1904), compared to eleven fairs in nine northern states (New York in 1853–54 and 1918,
Philadelphia in 1876, Boston in 1883–84, Chicago in 1893, San Francisco in 1894 and
1915, Buffalo in 1901, Portland in 1905, Seattle in 1909, and San Diego in 1915–16).
This discrepancy, however, becomes even more striking when one notes that most of the exhibits at these fairs came from the North or from Europe, rather than from the south.
This discrepancy was particularly noticeable in the arts, since most southern folk arts were considered crude and old-fashioned and therefore unworthy of inclusion. At the
Atlanta Cotton States and International Exposition of 1894, for example, four-fifths of the art displays came from New York and Philadelphia, and practically all the remaining exhibits from cities outside the cotton states. The breakdown of art exhibits is as follows:
426 exhibits in the Department of Fine Arts came from New York, 178 from
Pennsylvania, 28 from France, 27 from Holland, and 15 from Italy, and a solitary exhibit from a southern state, Georgia.86
To counteract this subservient status, as early as the 1880s certain southern business leaders sought to promote the notion of a “New South” dedicated to progress
86 Walter G. Cooper, The Cotton States and International Exposition and South (Atlanta: Illustrator, 1896), 77. 87 and patriotism. Historian John Findling likens the fervor of the New South movement, which swept the southern business community in the last decades of the nineteenth century, urging that “the old sectional quarrels be put aside and that henceforth the region should devote itself to commerce and industry—in a word, progress,” to the “Born Again
Christian movement of our day.”87
The World’s Industrial and Cotton Centennial Exposition of 1884–85 in New
Orleans, which Ohr attended, was formulated on the heels of this energizing new concept
of the south and was organized by men whom Findling describes as “New South zealots.”
These men include F. C. Morehead, Vicksburg editor and president of the National
Cotton Planter’s association; Edmund Richardson, largest cotton planter in the United
States; and Major E. A. Burke (Bourbon-Redeemer Democrat), treasurer of the state of
Louisiana and editor of the New Orleans Times-Democrat.
The New South agenda emphasized the importance of the south’s natural
resources and importance to trade, citing their abundant plantation land and numerous
ports. Aware that the “Negro Question” often placed the south in a negative light, these
fairs often incorporated exhibits designed to illustrate the important role that African
Americans played in the southern economy. Rydell notes, “Where the directors of the
Philadelphia and Chicago expositions had been ambivalent toward black exhibits, if not
adamantly opposed, the directors of the southern fairs established Negro departments to
illustrate the compatibility of blacks and whites in the South.”88 Indeed, it was at
Atlanta’s 1895 Cotton States and International Exposition that Booker T. Washington
87 John E. Findling, Historical Dictionary of World’s Fairs and Expositions, 1851–1988 (New York: Greenwood Press, 1990), 86. 88 Rydell, All the World’s a Fair, 74. 88 delivered his famous Atlanta Compromise speech, which encouraged black and white cooperation by easing racial discrimination.89
Through these fairs, Ohr was exposed to a wide range of artistic trends. The
Centennial Exposition of 1876 in Philadelphia is often cited as the first instance in which
Americans saw the full range of French and Asian styles of pottery, as well as new directions in painting, such as Impressionism or Symbolism. The 1893 world’s fair in
Chicago, which Ohr visited and where he displayed his work, was notable for a particularly large group of artistic exhibits, ranging from the academic work of figures such as William-Adolphe Bouguereau, Jean-Louis Meissonier, Édouard Detaille, and
Jean-Léon Gérôme, to more innovative figures such as James McNeill Whistler, John
Singer Sargent, Thomas Eakins, Childe Hassam, William Merritt Chase, Winslow
Homer, George Inness, Elihu Vedder, Mary Cassatt, and Augustus Saint-Gaudens. It is certainly striking that Ohr rebuilt his studio not long after visiting the Chicago fair, and
that his work seems to have become considerably more radical around that time.
The Midway
Notably, while his work was sometimes included in exhibits in the main display
section of these fairs, Ohr focused even more intently on the section of the fairs devoted
to souvenirs and popular entertainment: the Midway. In Chicago, he did not exhibit in the
main exposition buildings but on the Midway, and this seems to have been his usual
practice at other fairs as well. Most likely Ohr exhibited on the Midway by choice, seeing
it as the best place to sell his work. In at least a few instances he exhibited both on the
Midway and at another sector of the fair. At the Cotton States and International
89 Findling, Dictionary of World’s Fairs, 139–40. 89
Exposition in Atlanta, Ohr had both a booth on the Midway and a display in the
Machinery Building, the former geared toward entertaining the public and selling his wares, the latter intended to garner serious critical appreciation of his artistry and technique.
The Midway was a standard feature of every major exposition: an area set aside to provide visitors with carnival food, souvenirs, and knickknacks, musical performances, exotic dancers, ethnic villages, and other forms of popular entertainment. Richard
Mandell describes the atmosphere:
Typically at a large exhibition there are surging crowds, hawkers, flapping banners, and garish colours everywhere. In addition to the gaiety and the spendthrift atmosphere, the observer can sense about him a pervading rivalry as new products strive for his approbations, and businessmen, sleek representatives of great corporations, or hucksters of vulgar entertainment, vie for his cash.90
To a large degree the Midway was a business venture, a place for visitors to spend
their money. According to Rydell, the 1900 Universelle Exposition in Paris, for example,
earned more than $700,000 just in the Midway section alone. But the Midway was also
intended to be educational, although in a less rigorous fashion than the main display area
of the fair. Rydell reports that at the Chicago fair, the Midway was placed under the
jurisdiction of the Department of Ethnology and Archaeology to lend it a degree of authority. Similarly, the Midway of the Buffalo Pan-American exposition featured a number of attractions that mixed ethnology and education with entertainment, including the Esquimaux Village, Trip to the Moon, Thompson Aerio-Cycle, the Old Plantation, a
90 Richard D. Mandell, Paris 1900: The Great World’s Fair (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1967), preface. 90
Dreamland maze of mirrors, Indian Congress, the Beautiful Orient, House Upside Down, and Roltaire’s Palace of Illusions.91
Ohr did not simply show his work on the Midway: he used his booth to stage a
show. Ohr adorned his studio with large boastful signs and he did this also at fairs. From
far off visitors could make out a chaotic exhibit cluttered with large signs, which upon
their approach, yielded messages bragging about Ohr’s exquisite skills, inimitable
creations, and challenges to prove him otherwise. Ohr’s exhibit at the Cotton States and
International Exposition in Atlanta, for example (Figures 33 and 34), featured larger-
than-life signage bearing such messages as:
Biloxi Mississippi “Greatest” Art Potter On Earth “You Prove the Contrary” GEO. E. Ohr
And:
Biloxi Mississippi Art and Novelty Pottery. Geo. E. Ohr has challenged any Potter on Earth in Variety Work. Wonderfull Puzzling Trick cup No Two Souvenirs on Earth Alike
Once in front of the booth visitors were treated to a performance. Mustache tucked behind his ears, beard tied in a bow on top of his head, dark eyes flashing, Ohr would throw a lump of clay on the wheel and dazzle the audience with a myriad of forms,
“[f]irst a flower pot, then a jar, next a jug with a cob stopper made of clay; form after
91 Rydell, All the World’s a Fair, 74. Souvenir Booklet of One Hundred Views of the Pan-American Exposition (Buffalo, NY: Robert Allen Reid, 1901). 91 form was brought out in rapid succession until finally it assumed the graceful outlines of a Greek urn.”92
Ohr was most likely an idiosyncratic person even before his first exposition.
However, he clearly amplified the qualities of his personality for the purposes of
entertainment and attention. He knew that he had to make his work stand out from that of
other potters. In other words, the competition of selling at a world’s fair taught him to
exploit the things that made him and his work different from everyone else’s.
It is interesting to consider that perhaps Ohr’s pottery forms—both his fair wares
as well as his art pottery—may have originally developed as a method of entertainment
born from the carnival-like atmosphere of fairs. His ability to transform a single piece of
clay into shapes of varying sizes with different openings testifies to his profound
throwing skills. Indeed, he was tapping into the same amazement and disbelief that
magicians and tight-rope walkers depended on. His art pots display a similar type of
daredevil thrill—thrown paper thin, twisted, crumpled, gravity defying, and alive.
While he took scores of his art pots for display, Ohr had another line of pottery
creations that targeted the fair-going audience. The forms were often whimsical and
vulgar—even obscene. They included piggy banks shaped like vaginas (Figure 35),
brothel coins (Figure 23), creamer pots with feces at the bottom (Figure 9), puzzle mugs
(Figure 36), ink wells shaped like artist’s palette and Lincoln log cabins (Figure 37).
While Ohr’s art pottery was quite expensive, these knickknacks were affordable: puzzle
mugs, for example, cost about a dollar. Further, they appealed to people who had no
interest in his more ambitious artistic creations. Unfortunately, we have no records of
92 “Biloxi Pottery,” Brick, 287. This describes an encounter at Ohr’s studio, but there is no reason to think Ohr did not exact the same impression at fairs and expositions. 92 what Ohr sold, or to whom. But since thousands of his more artistically ambitious creations remained in his possession at his death, we can assume that he did not sell such pieces very often. Most of the major art pottery by Ohr can be traced back to the family trove that Carpenter acquired. By contrast, his much cheaper trinket wares appear to have sold readily, and while many were probably broken or thrown away, they still frequently turn up at auctions and in local antique stores. The fact that they are so common suggests that Ohr made them in vast quantities.93
Amid the hustle and bustle, haggling, lights, and noise sat George Ohr between
signs proclaiming his superiority and performing amazing feats on his wheel. In addition
to placing himself directly within the flow of money he also would have liked the idea of
presenting himself as another oddity. Rather than being part of the fine arts building, he
was a sideshow gimmick, outside the ethnographic program and outside the accepted
norm. Ohr was keenly aware that his success depended on his difference from other
potters.
Visual Display
Through world’s fairs and visits to large cities such as Chicago, Ohr also became
conscious of the importance of visual display. The pagoda studio he built after the
devastating fire of 1894 (Figure 27) was designed with obvious intent to astonish. An
observer commented on its amazing blend of architectural styles:
Architecturally, it is chaotic, having some of the characteristics of every well-known type of building except that which it might
93 Ohr’s brothel tokens are a good example of this. More often than not there is a set of five available on ebay at a price much less than his one-of-a-kind wares. That this author was able to find and afford this collection of coins is apt evidence to their availability and affordability. Other trinkets such as coin banks, inkwell, and mugs also make common appearances on ebay. 93
most readily be expected to have—the low pillared, balconied, Colonial house in which the South abounds. The ground floor suggests a log cabin, the upper ones a cross between a Chinese pagoda and a Russian country house, the whole the dream palace of a freakish brain. Needless to say, Mr. Ohr built it himself. And he’s proud of it.94
To make certain the building would not be missed Ohr painted “Biloxi Art Pottery” across the front. Also included in Ohr’s new studio design was a row of windows surrounding the ground level of the structure, perhaps informed by the latest trend of creating consumer desire through window display and design of merchandise.
William Leach, author of Land of Desire (1994), notes that prior to 1880 department stores did not exist and consumers relied on smaller more specialized stores for their needs. However, by the 1890s cities were filled with large multifloored, multiwindowed buildings, such as John Wannamaker’s stores in New York and
Philadelphia. That Wannamaker’s philosophies on advertising were fairly widespread, and thus accessible to Ohr, is demonstrated by an ad, “Wannamaker on Advertising,” that
Wannamaker placed in the Biloxi Daily Herald in 1888, which this author discovered while researching in Biloxi.
Leach observes that central to this increase in the use and appearance of glass and display windows “was the desire to show goods off day and night through all possible means” and to intermingle “the application of color, glass, and light to create an extensive public environment of desire.”95 One is reminded of the intricate and impressive window
displays at Christmas time that have so infiltrated the American psyche they are now a
long-standing tradition. Though not intended to sell anything specific, these impressive
windows create a fantasy world of snowflakes, goodwill, and abundant treasures,
94 King, “Palissy of Biloxi,” 4. Description is printed in this article and given by an unidentified individual. 95 Leach, Land of Desire, 40. 94 appealing to the consumer’s deep desires; they create (and deign to sell) an image of contentment, success, leisure, and the American dream, not just the ties, shaving gel, and red wagons displayed within.
In the late nineteenth century two prominent journals were dedicated to the study and guidance of window display and interior merchandise design: The Dry Goods
Economist and Frank Baum’s The Show Window. Baum would achieve greater fame for his later effort, The Wizard of Oz. Furthermore, Ohr’s favored Crockery and Glass
Journal, described as being “designed as much or more for the retailer as for the manufacturer,”96 would have most certainly discussed strategies for the visual display of
merchandise. The culmination of Baum’s expertise was his book The Art of Decorating
Dry Goods Windows and Interiors (1900). The unique function of store windows, Baum declared, is not to light up the interior, but rather to sell goods. A good display therefore—one that was unusual and distinctive—was one that could capture the consumer’s attention.97
Baum cautioned that merely crowding a window with articles was not nearly as effective as a “simple artistic arrangement of a few attractive goods.” A “simple arrangement” could entail color theory, drapery, constructed backgrounds, mechanically operated displays, and dazzling light effects. He even recommended using the “Framed
Form” to simulate a life-size picture. The ultimate goal was, of course, to embellish and enhance commodities. Though the illustrations accompanying his theories actually appeared overly busy with too many components, his principle of design was still
96 Frank Luther Mott, A History of American Magazines (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1967), 3:27–28. 97 Frank Baum, The Art of Decorating Dry Goods Windows and Interiors (Chicago: Show Window Publishing Company, 1900). 95 apparent—the individual objects are subordinated to an overall harmonious design. Baum insisted, “there must be positive knowledge as to what constitutes an attractive exhibit, and what will arouse in the observer cupidity and longing to possess the goods you offer for sale.”
Though Ohr’s studio did not have show windows, the ground level was encircled by glass windows and large doorways that ultimately served the same purpose. Ohr provided an easily accessible view into the interior of his studio, through which one could see the use of many of Baum’s suggested techniques.
At first glance the room may have appeared chaotic—pots hung from the ceiling, lined the walls, and were even stacked on the floor (Figure 31). When compared with an image from his earlier studio (Figure 26), however, his design theory becomes obvious.
Gone are the pots stacked upon one another, lining the roof, or supported by flimsy shelves. Ohr’s new design boasted the sheer variety and quantity of pots. Each occupied its own space, organized by size and/or type. There was no sense of imbalance or fragility in the arrangement; each piece was securely and solidly positioned.
It would have been easy to allow chaos to overcome his display, but this was not the case. A harmony was created by the insertion of larger pots at various locations thus breaking up the repetition of his customary four- to twelve-inch pots. Existing photographs of his studio are in black and white so his practice of color theory is hard to discern. However, knowing the array of unique glazes that constitute his oeuvre, it is not hard to imagine a room alive with vibrant colors. Baum’s suggestion of using a frame to create a “life-size” picture was not ignored either. However, instead of using a gilded frame, Ohr employed two horizontally elongated signs—one at the ceiling and one at the
96 floor. As a potential customer entered the room he was overcome by a sea of pots
“framed” by declarations of their greatness and uniqueness.
Though Ohr applied emerging visual design guidelines, made especially apparent when compared with his earlier studio, he also added distinguishing elements that again set his intentions apart from the large department store windows of northern cities.
Department store windows were meant to create a desire in potential consumers and also to advertise the glamour, beauty, and selection of their products. Certainly, the placement and design of Ohr’s windows and doorways embraced this principle. Yet it was of the utmost significance that the view through Ohr’s studio windows was not a model of a studio in a show window, or a mass-produced object set on display. It was, in fact, the actual studio, the many one-of-a-kind objects, and, with Ohr’s presence, the actual process of creation. None of the department store windows could offer what Ohr’s pagoda gave people—the witness of authorship and the promise that these objects actually delivered the preciousness that department stores could only fabricate.98
In truth, Ohr’s display was only part of his advertisement. It was not complete until the mad potter himself sat among the crazy forms. An observer records the impression:
Entering the house that Ohr built, you find, bending over his wheel or patting into shape—more probably out of it—his latest creation, the potter himself. His eyes hold you first—wonderful eyes, big, bright, brown, wild like those of a startled animal. And then your gaze gets tangled in the meshes of his mustache and so lost for awhile. For it is impossible to tear your fascinated eyes away until they have followed all the twists and turn of that
98 The word “author” is used in the preceding paragraph to describe an individual who alone is responsible for an original work. The notion that this concept of the author is a relatively recent term, and is bound up in ideas of authenticity attribution, and ultimately copyright is discussed by Martha Woodmansee in The Author, Art, and the Market: Rereading the History of Aesthetic (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994). 97
hirsute ornament and discovered its ends as they curl for the third time about his ears.99
The interior of the pottery studio “tells a tale of tireless work, a happy workman, few
sales, unappreciative townspeople and infrequent visitors.”100 Indeed, like department
store windows, Ohr was selling more than an object; he was selling an image—an image that was contrived, but one that offered a viable alternative to the mass production so
rampant in the Gilded Age.
Architecture
The idea of the “other” was also manifest in the architectural agenda of fairs. The
Chicago world’s fair of 1893 is a case in point. The main pavilions of the fair, while
designed by disparate architects, were all in the classical style, following guidelines laid
down by the master planner, Daniel Burnham. Indeed, what was most striking about the
effect was its insistence on visual unity. Within the main fairground, only one building
departed from a classical template, Louis Sullivan’s Transportation Building, and even
that followed the general color scheme and system of proportions observed in the other
buildings, although Sullivan enlivened the color scheme by adding some other colors,
chiefly delicate reds, oranges, and yellows. As many writers have noted, this scheme
carried an imperial message. The whiteness seemed to symbolize both cleanliness and
white supremacy, and the disciplined program, as Stanley Appelbaum notes in The
Chicago’s World’s Fair of 1893: A Photographic Record, suited “the temper of the
99 King, “Palissy of Biloxi,” 4. Description from an unidentified observer. 100 Ibid. 98 country, which was actively turning from the conquest of its own territory to imperial conquests overseas.”101
As one moved away from the central area, however, building styles grew more eccentric and exotic. Appelbaum notes that like other nineteenth-century expositions, the
fair featured “many separate, freely imaginative pavilions, pagodas and kiosks supplied by the individual exhibitors, whether foreign nations, states of the Union, private firms or other organizations.”102 Surely the most unusual building at the fair was the Japanese Ho-
o-den (Phoenix Temple) (Figure 38), which featured traditional Japanese architectural
design with sloping roofs and pagodalike construction. According to Japanese historian
Judith Snodgrass the Ho-o-den’s placement on the Wooded Island assured that the building was literally and figuratively marginalized in keeping with the exposition’s
Western dominance.103
Snodgrass points out that, while marginalized, the building had enormous architectural and cultural influence, inspiring architects such as Frank Lloyd Wright, and
even encouraging an interest in Buddhism. It is striking that after Ohr’s studio in Biloxi
burned down in 1894, just a year after he had attended the Chicago fair, he constructed
his five-story pagodalike structure (Figure 27), reminiscent of the exotic architectural
forms he witnessed in Chicago, and adorned its exterior with signs similar to those that he
had hung around his exhibition booths. The apparent reference to the Japanese pavilion is
101 Stanley Appelbaum, The Chicago World’s Fair of 1893: A Photographic Record (New York: Dover, 1980), 13. 102 Ibid., 28. 103 Judith Snodgrass, Presenting Japanese Buddhism to the West: Orientalism, Occidentalism, and the Columbian Exposition (Chapel Hill: North Carolina Press, 2003). 99 intriguing. Clearly Ohr consciously chose to picture himself as an exotic, an outsider, and a figure who stood outside normative American cultural traditions.104
104 Ibid., 2. 100
Chapter Three Ohr, Advertising, and the Artistic Persona
As even a brief summary of his ventures into advertising makes clear, Ohr was very skillful at self-advertisement. In essence, he recognized that it was important to stand out as different from anyone else, both in his artistic persona and through the distinctiveness of his work, even if that meant being regarded as annoying, crazy, or tasteless. For any publicity was good publicity and better than being unmentioned. As has already been noted, many of the first journalistic mentions of Ohr focused more on his strange personality than on his work. What is more, even early on, several writers noted that his methods of self-promotion were not truly crazy or unconsidered but reflected a deliberate and effective strategy of gaining attention. In 1905, for example, Ethel Hudson, a southern critic, graduate of Newcomb College, and assistant to Ellsworth Woodward, wrote:
It is said that the most unfailingly effective way to attract the attention of the public is to slap it in the face. . . . James McNeill Whistler was the cleverest of such self-advertisers. . . . The notorious “Fra Elbertus” of East Aurora has practiced similar advertising methods. . . . Mr. George E. Ohr, of Biloxi, has adopted similar methods of self-advertisement; and though he can not be said to display the genius of a Whistler, neither can he be accused of exhibiting the humbuggery of a Hubbard.105
In this significant passage Hudson links Ohr to Whistler and Hubbard, founder of
Roycroft. Both men were significant figures to the developing consumer culture,.
Whistler helped create a distinctive persona for the artistic “genius,” and Hubbard showed that art and craft could become profitable through skillful use of advertising
105 Hutson, “Quaint Biloxi Pottery,” 265. 101 techniques. The full implications of Hudson’s statement are explored below, but as a preface, it is helpful to know something about new developments in advertising in the second half of the nineteenth century that had fundamentally transformed business practices. In fact, Ohr’s style of self-promotion was unusual, since it ingeniously blended two different traditions—commercial advertising, which boosted the virtues of a product, and the popular notion that creative geniuses were inherently eccentric, even crazy, and thus, somewhat paradoxically, that craziness provided proof of artistic merit.
Advertising has always played a role in business, but the notion that it was a business in its own right on which business success was dependent was something that came to the fore in Ohr’s lifetime, in large part because new mass media made it possible to advertise in ways that had not been possible before. The historian Joel Shrock observes that during the first half of the nineteenth century, when America was still largely agrarian, reading matter was relatively scarce. Yet, with the development of such distribution systems as railroads, postal subscription, and mail order catalogs in the second half of the nineteenth century, all Americans were provided the opportunity to attain published material. Consequently, the amount of printed material increased exponentially. According to Shrock, published books grew by 300 percent between 1880 and 1900; newspapers experienced a 700 percent increase in circulation during this same period. The number of magazines grew from 3,300 in 1885 to more than 5,500 in 1900, by which time magazine circulation had reached sixty-five million, providing three magazines for every four people in the country.106
Gilded Age Americans bought books and printed resources from a number of
places, including bookstores, libraries, subscriptions, door-to-door salesmen, newsboys,
106 Shrock, The Gilded Age, 60, 151. 102 and, in rural areas, mail order catalogs. Indeed, as we learn from Shrock, the diversity of printed material available in catalogs was both astounding and eclectic. For instance, the
Montgomery Ward catalog included a selection of atlases, dictionaries, encyclopedias,
Louisa May Alcott’s works, Emerson’s Essays, Mark Twain’s complete writings, Dante’s
Inferno, and the works of the ancient Jewish historian Josephus, among other things.107
With this availability and quantity of reading materials, it was not long until
different client bases with diverse reading and consumption interests developed.
Magazines jumped at the chance to fill these individual niches. And in 1885 Congress
lowered postage rates to one cent per pound for second-class mail, which, as Shrock
explains, catapulted magazine sales and further developed the low-cost mass-market
magazines. More genteel magazines such as Harper’s, Scribner’s, and Atlantic Monthly
sold for twenty-five to thirty-five cents a copy, and were aimed at the moneyed and well-
educated classes. However, when magazines such as Ladies Home Journal, Munsey’s,
Cosmopolitan, and McClure’s came onto the scene in the 1890s asking for only ten cents
and less for a copy and still retaining a sense of excellence and good illustration, editors
of upper-class magazines “locked up their ivory towers and came down into the market
place.”108
Due in large part to the upsurge of published material, advertising in the Gilded
Age not only became more prominent, but also began to emerge as an important
determinant of social trends and ideologies. The Gilded Age was a time of desire and
consumerism. The Industrial Revolution had created a middle class with money to spend,
as well as the concept of leisure time. People were looking for ways to spend their
107 Ibid., 156–57. 108 Mott, History of American Magazines, 2. 103 money, whether on household items, fashion, vacations, or art. This period saw the rise of corporations, department stores, mass transit, and mass communications. And it was the responsibility of each of these groups to create a desire for their wares, whatever they may be.
Artists were not exempt from these changes in how business was conducted.
Their livelihood depended on a desire for their product. As art historian Sara Burns has suggested, this desire was encouraged by creating an artist persona—a personality and character that identified artists as illustrious members of society while also setting them apart from that society as “creative geniuses.”109
James McNeill Whistler
The key figure in developing the modern persona of the eccentric artist-genius in
the United States was James McNeill Whistler, who lived from 1834 to 1903,
overlapping Ohr’s life by forty-seven years. During the mid 1880s to mid 1890s, when
Ohr was developing professionally, Whistler had already established himself as an artist
with a distinct persona.
According to Burns, “the career of Whistler marked the point where artist and
image became interdependent, where the commodified self became a vital marketing
tool. . . . Not every artist thirsted after publicity, and exploited it, as insistently as he did,
but his actions must be seen as forming an exemplary pattern of great significance for
artists in the twentieth century.”110 Ohr would have felt the significance of Whistler’s
commodified artist image long before Hudson’s remark of 1905, quoted above,
109 Burns, Inventing the Modern Artist. 110 Ibid., 245. 104 associated the two. Perhaps he even identified with him on a personal level. Both men had created works that were unappreciated, insulted, and rejected on a public and critical level. And both artists felt as though their work was momentous to the world of art. The various tactics Whistler employed to gain attention for his works are analogous to similar actions by Ohr.
While a remarkable painter whose Nocturnes and Arrangements startled the audience of their time, Whistler’s fame derived equally from his eccentric clothing and appearance and his very public spats with critics—including a widely publicized lawsuit against John Ruskin, whom he sued for libel after Ruskin accused him of “throwing a pot of paint” in the public’s face. Indeed, Whistler knowingly shaped and manipulated his image “using the newspaper and the periodical establishment to popularize and immortalize himself and his work.”111
Burns observes that Whistler quite deliberately used his physical appearance to
attract attention. His cane, white tuft, monocle, and long dark coat became his trademarks. Indeed, some articles at times focused solely on his appearance while
completely neglecting his art. Such an assessment is apparent in the article “Whistler,
Painter and Comedian,” from McClure’s Magazine (1896): “he wears a very long black
overcoat . . . and a French top hat with the brim standing straight out. In his hand he
carries a kind of wand of bamboo about four feet long and very thin. His gloves and boots are very carefully selected, and of irreproachable fit.” All that is missing to complete this description is mention of his infamous monocle and white tuft of hair at the front of his
head. However, a mere glance at any portrait, caricature, or cartoon of Whistler will
reinforce the importance of these attributes (Figure 39).
111 Ibid., 223. 105
One of Whistler’s most important techniques of self-promotion was to create public disputes in print with critics who had written negatively or thoughtlessly about his work, Burns notes. A good example of this is Whistler’s correspondence of 1867 with P.
G. Hammerton, who had criticized Whistler’s Symphony in White No. III. Hammerton observed that despite Whistler’s descriptive title, this painting, which features a girl in a white dress, actually contained colors other than white—such as her blue ribbon, red fan, and reddish hair. He also noted that her complexion was not a pure white, but more flesh colored. Whistler then replied:
How pleasing that such profound prattle should inevitably find its place in print! “Not precisely a symphony in white . . .for there is a yellowish dress . . . brown hair, etc. . . . another with reddish hair . . . and of course there is the flesh colour of the complexion.” Bon Dieu! Did this wise person expect white hair and chalked faces? And does he then, in his astounding consequence, believe that a symphony in F contains no other note, but shall be a continued repetition of F, F, F? . . . Fool!112
In essence, Whistler made disputes about his work a form of entertainment.
Indeed, while he time and again berated and abused the press for its supposed
stupidity and artistic ignorance, this did not stop him from collecting and keeping
a scrapbook of every remark made about him or his work throughout his entire
career. His book The Gentle Art of Making Enemies opened with a long series of
negative reviews that he faithfully reprinted. He clearly understood that the content of the article was not nearly as important as the fact that he was still considered newsworthy.
Like Whistler, Ohr used both his strange appearance and disputes with critics as a way of gaining attention. Just as Whistler’s white tuft and cane were his visual
112 Whistler, The Gentle Art of Making Enemies, 45. 106 trademarks so was Ohr’s long handlebar mustache (Figure 40). When pictured, his mustache was always apparent, and he often used it as a sight gag. Critics also emphasized Ohr’s appearance:
He is a man of interesting conversation, with restless, flashing eyes. . . . We also begged a photograph of the potter himself, though we like him best in his potter’s garb, at which time his flowing mustaches are wound up and about his ears with two or three turns.113
And:
To see him bending over his wheel, his long mustache plaited and tucked behind his ears, his sleeve rolled up to his shoulder, patting the white clay into shape to the tune of some familiar lullaby, carries out still further his comparison about the child of his fingers.114
Facial hair was certainly not a rarity in the Victorian period, as most photographs from
this time feature men with grand and exaggerated mustaches. However, by the early
twentieth century facial hair to that degree was out of style. Ohr clearly maintained and
exaggerated his to stand apart from the crowd. To be sure (as will be discussed more
thoroughly later), Whistler and Ohr developed quite different personas. Whistler
consistently portrayed himself as a sophisticated dandy, while Ohr played the role of a
half-educated buffoon. But though the two differed in their roles and attendant costume,
the strategy was similar: to develop and control their own public personas.
Like Whistler, Ohr delighted in stirring up controversy in the press. Indeed, his
mode of writing was so distinctive that William King, the author of the first sympathetic
discussion of Ohr’s work (“The Palissy of Biloxi,” discussed previously), devoted his
second article on Ohr to reprinting a strange letter that Ohr had written to Major Algar M.
113 “Biloxi Pottery,” Brick, 287. 114 McLeod, “ Potter, Poet and Philosopher,” 1. 107
Wheeler, superintendent of the Department of Manufactures at the Buffalo Pan-American
Exposition. Major Wheeler was appointed to the position on 28 May 1900, only a few months before this article was published. Wheeler was a well-known Buffalo citizen who had had a distinguished record of service in the Civil War, served as assistant postmaster of Buffalo, was president of the Exhibitors’ Club at the Atlanta, Nashville, and Omaha
Expositions, and, during his tenure at the Pan-American, served as president of the
National Association of Exhibitors.115
In November 1900 the Buffalo Enquirer announced that Wheeler had decided to
devote display space both to “fine art” and “industrial products.”116 Art industrial
products he defined as “all work of an artistic character not included in fine arts.” While
today Wheeler’s two categories seem somewhat peculiar, essentially he was interested in
expanding the idea of creativity to include things such as pottery that were often left out
of art expositions, which generally included only painting and sculpture. His decision
thus opened the door for Ohr to gain a major display of his work, and Ohr’s letter was
clearly written with the goal of obtaining such as display:
I have ben to the Falls, and all over this U.S. A. of mine (and yours) and can write you a letter four miles long, one inch thick with 99 pounds pressure to the square inch, all pure unshrinking wool, without any crackage, breakage, all tonnage prepaid and no white feathers, and will try to make this short, stiff, business like and style to suit the occasion, as I am not in Fluer de lis [sic] fix to purchase sanding room for a clay baby (Pat) or myself, I’ll proceed to talk (or write) $$$ acts . . . if I was the President of the Pan-American I would go to Paris or any country—one better—on an original art potter and make him (me) an exception, on a display of rarities that do exist and in a reality. Americans want every little and big object, article, machine, racers, etc., the greatest, and want it solid, pure,
115 “Major Wheeler: An Experienced Man,” Buffalo Commercial Advertiser, 28 May 1900, 3. 116“Industrial Arts of the Americas a Separate Exhibit,” Buffalo Enquirer, 10 November 1900, 2. 108
original and genuine America, and I can hold my end up till the cows come home on my specialty.117
As with Ohr’s other statements, it takes close reading to construe his meaning. Ohr begins colorfully attesting to his diverse experiences and knowledge, which extend across the entire country. Rather than go into detail about all his experiences, however, Ohr decides to get to the point (“short, stiff business like and style to suit the occasion”). He notes that he did not have money to pay for a spot at the Pan-American Exposition and is not a “Fluer de lis,” that is, some fancy French potter. Nonetheless, Ohr challenges Major
Wheeler to find any potter in the world who is more original than he (“go to Paris or any country . . . on an original art pottery and make him (me) an exception, on a display or rarities that do exist and in reality”). Indeed, Ohr insists Wheeler would be smart to grant him a free spot, since he is exactly the sort of American artist such fairs were created to showcase, especially the Pan-American in Buffalo. When they made purchases, he insists, Americans “want it solid, pure, original and genuine America,” and thus, when placed in competition with the Europeans “I can hold my end up till the cows come home.”
Though Ohr’s response was not as caustic as Whistler’s, it was equally memorable because of his bizarre misspellings and peculiar wordplay. So strange, in fact, that he was able to get it published in a widely circulated magazine simply to provide amusement to readers, an accomplishment Whistler might have envied.
In addition to making use of magazines and journals, Ohr also printed up promotional statements on his own. In a letter to a friend dated 16 May 1898, Ohr
117 George Ohr, in William King, “Ceramic Art at the Pan-American Exposition,” Crockery and Glass Journal 53 (1901): 17. It is not known who Pat is, and indeed Pat may be a random name Ohr assigned to one of his pots. 109 mentioned that he had just printed one thousand circulars about himself and his work, and was including this statement with every object he sold:
How you like my rather warm circular? I got a cheap job making a 1000 souvenirs for a Chicago [sic] coal dealer and will put one of these THINS—with every flower pot—etc. that I sent—it will shake some of the Rookward lovers on art. I am not making salt just now—BUT Im making a lot of fuss as U’C. If you get in town, show this to that Rooward dealer and ask him to invest $500 on a sample = he wont hit you =.118
Essentially, Ohr confesses that he is not making much money (“salt”) right then, but is
excited by the fact that he has just published a circular that will stir up a “fuss” since he is
taking on the advertising claims of the “Rookward” (that is, Rookwood) company, and
apparently has demonstrated that they are phony and that their pottery is inferior to his.
Sadly, only one example of this flier survives and it is in the possession of Eugene Hecht,
who did, however, publish it in its entirety in 1992.119
One of the most interesting aspects of this process of advertising and self-
promotion is that it forced Ohr to clearly define the most distinctive qualities of his work
and then to push further in that direction. In this case, he was clearly boasting of the fact
that his pots were truly handmade—“no two alike”—as opposed to Rookwood, which
claimed to be making “art” but was really manufacturing a commodity by mass-
production methods. Developing such an advertising circular, defining the special
qualities of his work, clearly also provided a spur to Ohr’s artistic creativity, since it
encouraged him to develop a product that even more strikingly exhibited the uniqueness of his approach to pottery—that is, to create works that were more and more unusual and
eccentric.
118 Hecht, After the Fire, 18. 119 Eugene Hecht, “The Long-Lost 1903 Handbill of G.E. Ohr,” Arts and Crafts Quarterly (1992): 14–17. 110
The Emergence of Mass Media: Ohr and Elbert Hubbard
While Whistler seemed to have pioneered the strategy of behaving eccentrically
to market his art, Ohr was probably more directly influenced by a model closer to home,
Elbert Hubbard. It is clear that Ohr was interested by Hubbard’s success, for he once placed an advertisement in Hubbard’s magazine Philistine, which will be discussed
below. It appears that Hubbard may have taken an interest in him as well: one of the
obituaries for Ohr mentioned that Hubbard had “learned of his [Ohr’s] genius” and
“became interested in the man and his work.”
Born in 1856 (he died on the Lusitania in 1915), Hubbard was the founder of the
Roycroft community and, according to historian Freeman Champney in his biography of
Hubbard, a pioneer of modern advertising. Until the age of thirty-six, Hubbard worked as a salesman for the Larkin soap company, initiating such techniques as gift premiums for
regular purchases. As Champney notes, Hubbard became much more than a soap
salesman. In 1895 he sold his share of the soap company to create an Arts and Crafts
community in Aurora, New York, based on the ideas of William Morris. The name
Roycroft, which he chose for this community, pays homage to the accomplishments of
Samuel and Thomas Roycroft, seventeenth-century English bookbinders. Initially he
focused on publishing, after the model of William Morris’s Kelmscott Press. Hubbard’s
first and most successful publication was a monthly journal, the Philistine, which ran for
twenty years until his death, but he also produced a great range of other magazines and
serial publications, including the Fra and Little Journeys, which were also profitable. The
community branched out to produce other products including pottery, rugs, baskets,
111 furniture, stained glass, and candy, all of which were marketed under the Roycroft name.120
The pages of the Philistine were filled with Hubbard’s prose and poetry. Most of
these writings provided guidelines for living, and carried titles reminiscent of sermons,
such as “Heart to Heart Talks with Philistines by the Pastor of his Flock.” Hubbard
referred to himself as a “Pastor” as well as “Fra” although he was never ordained or
recognized by any church or official religious organization. He used these designations to
reflect the new religion of the Gilded Age, centered on life in nineteenth-century
America, rather than on an omnipresent God. Indeed, he must have struck a cord with the
public as Hubbard’s readership grew dramatically from a circulation of 2,500 in 1895 to
20,000 by the third year and 52,000 by 1900. In comparison, a contemporary elitist
journal, the Chap-Book, had a circulation that never rose above 16,500.121
Hubbard (like Ohr) held many views that were extremely liberal for the time. He
fought for greater marital freedom, liberal divorce laws, and socialism. Ohr’s further
interest in Hubbard is documented through the fact that he advertised in the December
1901 issue of the Philistine, (Figure 41):
REV. GEORGE E. OHR begs to introduce himself to the Philistines as Potter to the Push also Originator of the Bug-House Renaissance in Life, Letters and Art. M. Ohr, like Setebos, makes things out of Mud—and never duplicates. Correspondence solicited. Address, BILOXI, MISS. P.S. Mr. Ohr whishes to explain that the prefix Rev. to his name does not signify that he is a preacher. It only means that he is worthy of Reverence, because he does his work as well as he can, and Minds his own Business.122
120 Freeman Champney, Art and Glory: The Story of Elbert Hubbard (New York: Crown, 1968), 58. 121 Champney, Art and Glory, 58. 122 Philistine 14, no. 1 (December 1901): facing p. 1. 112
Ohr begins by referring to himself as “Rev. George E. Ohr” and describing himself as
Reverend of his own business. He is clearly making fun of Elbert Hubbard, who frequently described himself as a preacher, despite his lack of formal ordination. Perhaps he was also a bit fascinated by and resentful of Hubbard’s success as a proselytizer. Like
Hubbard, Ohr’s claim to be a preacher has no official status, but relies simply on the fact that “He does his work as well as he can, and Minds his own Business.” He goes on to claim divine powers by comparing himself with Setebos—the god in Shakespeare’s
Tempest who created the moon and the sun. At the same time, Ohr stresses his outlandishness. The Renaissance he boasts of representing comes from the “Bug-house,” or insane asylum, and there is nothing fancy about his working process, he simply
“Makes things out of mud.” By using the phrase “never duplicates,” Ohr evidently establishes his claim to be superior to rival potteries, such as Rookwood or Van Briggle, and even Roycroft, which also used mass-production techniques to produce identical or near-identical objects.
Though inspired by William Morris’s ideals, Hubbard’s processes, like many Arts and Crafts endeavors, increasingly adopted mass-production factory techniques that effectively reduced the individual’s mark on a finished product, something Morris would not have advocated. No doubt Ohr was taking something of a dig at Hubbard when he states that his own pots were “never duplicated.” Likewise, while Hubbard was often inspired by idealism, in practice his approach often limited individual freedom, particularly when it was shaped by tight economic constraints. For instance, Hubbard’s employees were not only expected to work in the Roycroft shop, but to live in the
Roycroft community and partake of community activities. No doubt Hubbard hoped to
113 create a utopian existence. However, many workers complained of excessively long work hours, mandatory involvement in company recreations, and inadequate wages.
Advertising was the field in which Hubbard truly excelled. For Hubbard, advertising was not simply an appendage to business but something that permeated every aspect of business activity. He strongly believed that one should advertise every day and that it was always the right time for promotion. As he wrote:
The author [Hubbard] advertises men, times, places, deeds, events and things. His appeal is to the universal human soul. If he does not know the heart-throbs of men and women, their hopes, joys, ambitions, tastes, needs and desires, his work will interest no one but himself and his admiring friends. Advertising is fast becoming a fine art.123
Hubbard’s methods of advertising were often ingenious. For instance, a typical issue of
the Philistine contained approximately seventy-two pages—about forty of which were
advertisements. Hubbard designed his advertisements to take advantage of his loyal
readership, who hung on his every word. Many of his ads seemingly began as stories, and
the reader only discovered their commercial intentions several pages later. For example,
the November 1906 issue of the Philistine featured a lengthy advertisement for Macy’s,
beginning with the sentence “George Washington did his shopping by mail.” Hubbard
then went on to discuss the shift from London to New York as the center of the fashion
world, launching into a discourse on the importance of trusting the merchandiser, the
evils of buying on credit, and the need for women to be financially independent. Finally,
four pages later, when Hubbard began to extol the virtues of Macy’s, the reader
discovered he had been tricked into spending much time and concentration on an
advertisement, not an article about George Washington. Indeed the ad Ohr placed in
123 Elbert Hubbard, The Notebook of Elbert Hubbard: A Companion Volume to Elbert Hubbard’s Scrap Book (New York: Wm. H. Wise, 1927), 66. 114
Hubbard’s Philistine was an effort to capitalize on Hubbard’s notoriety and advertising savvy.
Like Whistler, Hubbard was aware that an “artistic look” could be helpful in promoting his ventures. Champney observes that as Hubbard’s success grew, his appearance began to change. He began to wear a cape overcoat, large Buster Brown cravat, flannel shirts, baggy pants, and heavy shoes. He also allowed his curly hair to grow (Figure 42). In essence, he combined the bohemian look of Oscar Wilde and the rugged craftsman look of William Morris. A former co-worker observed that “as his public career grew—with its dependence on self-advertising—his appearance became a sort of trademark.”124 Very likely Hubbard’s skillful use of a distinctive look as a
marketing tool was one of Ohr’s inspirations for making use of this device himself.
Hubbard frequently featured his photograph in his journals and publications, and
he arranged to be photographed with important people—for example, playing golf with
John D. Rockefeller, dancing with Eva Tanguay and talking to Thomas Edison. Very
likely it was Hubbard who inspired Ohr to have a large group of striking photographs
taken of him. Several of these were reproduced in early articles about his work, including
a very proper quarter length portrait prominently featuring Ohr’s long mustache and a
bow tie (Figure 43), a less formal portrait in which he wears scruffier clothes and crosses
his arms to accentuate his muscles/masculinity (Figure 44), Ohr inside his studio
surrounded by thousands of his wares (Figure 31), and finally a very small Ohr proudly standing in front of his towering pagodalike studio (Figure 27).
Ohr used one photograph in particular repeatedly throughout his career (Figure
28). In this image his hair has been arranged into three parts—two sides ticking straight
124 Champney, Art and Glory, 61. 115 out from his head and the front pointed down over his forehead in the shape of a triangle.
His twisted, waxed moustache extends at least five or six inches beyond his checks while his beard curls beneath his chin. To exaggerate the sense of strangeness he assumed bizarre expressions—with his mouth stretched in an “O” of mock surprise or fear and his eyes frantic and wide. Such photographs make him look mentally unbalanced and surely reinforced the notion that Ohr was a “Mad Potter.” But of course it is clear that such photographs were consciously staged.
Ohr and Barnum
Ethel Hutson’s previously quoted statement in which she links Ohr to Whistler
and Hubbard also provides another significant cultural cue to which Ohr was likely responding—that of “humbuggery.” In placing Ohr between “the genius of a Whistler” and “the humbuggery of Hubbard,” she implied both that he had a touch of both and that there was a link between all three. In their extravagant showmanship, she implied, all three had affinities with the most extravagant showman of the nineteenth century, P. T.
Barnum, the figure who turned humbuggery into an art form.
P. T. Barnum, the founder of the Barnum and Bailey Circus, perfected the art of turning extravagant, ridiculous, untruthful claims into a form of entertainment. He popularized the “humbug”—the game of pulling one over on the public. His first such stunt involved an elderly black woman, Joice Heth, whom he claimed was 160 years old and had once been the slave of George Washington. When interest in Heth appeared to be waning, Barnum wrote an anonymous letter to the local newspaper suggesting that she was not really an aged woman but instead an automaton. Not only did this attract new
116 visitors, but brought back repeat viewers who wanted to figure out how they had been duped. According to historian Neil Harris:
it was during Joice Heth’s tour that Barnum first realized that an exhibitor did not have to guarantee truthfulness; all he had to do was possess probability and invite doubt. The public would be more excited by controversy than by conclusiveness. The only requirement was to keep the issue alive and in print.125
Rather than seeking to conceal his deceptions, in his 1869 autobiography, Struggles and
Triumphs, Barnum boasted of his ability to fool the public through ingenious ruses.
While Barnum’s rise to fame occurred before Ohr was born, he was still a vital
presence when Ohr was beginning his career. Harris notes that Barnum published almost
annual editions of his autobiography, and in 1883 produced a third version, which he
revised annually until 1889. By the late 1880s Barnum was boasting that more than a
million copies of his autobiography had been sold, making it one of the top three or four
best-known autobiographies in nineteenth-century America. Significantly, in the book
Barnum never probes the inner depths of his psyche. Instead, he presents himself as a
stereotype of the New England Yankee: clever, keen, eager to strike a bargain. As Harris
observes, “In this context the autobiography is not simply the chronicle of a life, but a
text on the social functions of illusion and the role of the deceiver in an egalitarian
society.”126
Like Barnum’s circus, Ohr’s pottery demonstrations were not intended to be
educational. They were a form of entertainment—and also a form of freak show in which
he created a bizarre assortment of forms that provoked feelings of curiosity, disbelief,
disgust, amusement, and excitement in his audience. Like Barnum, Ohr also exploited a
125 Neil Harris, Humbug: The Art of P.T. Barnum (Boston: Little, Brown, 1973), 23. 126 Harris, Humbug, 231. 117 regional stereotype, although it was that of the “dumb southerner” or southern eccentric rather than the clever, deceitful New England Yankee.
Interestingly, while Ohr’s persona was ostensibly southern, his boastful self- advertising belonged to a northern tradition rather than a southern one. It is often assumed that the innovations of the Gilded Age were experienced by the nation as a whole, but in fact, the northern states were the predominant beneficiaries of new methods of production, consumption, and advertising. Therefore, these new advertising strategies, demanded by newfound prosperity, were very largely northern constructions. Indeed, after Reconstruction and in the wake of so much economic failure, residents of the South
“rationalized their commercial failures by taking refuge in the notion that they were too refined and civilized to compete successfully against the vulgar money grubbers of the
North.”127 Their pride rested on the fact that they did not resort to northern advertising
“tricks” or gimmicks in order to dupe their customers.
For example, as Neil Harris has noted, Barnum’s hoaxes were never popular in
the South, for they presupposed a climate of interest in science, new technology, and new
discoveries. Paradoxically, this made northerners more susceptible to explanations
couched in impressive jargon. To put the matter in Harris’s words, it made them “easy
targets for pseudoscientific explanations, for detailed descriptions of fictional machinery,
for any fantasy that was couched in the bland neutrality of a technological vocabulary. . .
. The coming of steam, of railroads, of telegraphs indicated the futility of declaring
anything impossible or incredible.”128 In this atmosphere of continual forward progress, it
was often difficult to distinguish truth from falsehood, and falsehood became a form of
127 Frederick S. Starr, Southern Comfort: The Garden District of New Orleans, 1800-1900 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), 249. 128 Harris, Humbug, 72–73. 118 entertainment. Ohr’s use of “humbuggery” was aimed toward his northern visitors who liked to be fooled.
119
Chapter Four Ohr as a Southern Character
Ohr’s eccentric persona certainly set him apart from other potters. It also seems to have been adopted to appeal to a particular group of clients, who were amused by stereotypes of the “ignorant” South. The South, having recently struggled through a failed
Civil War, was still dealing with the effects of inequitable and flawed Reconstruction efforts. The South was not a cosmopolitan place but one that both embraced and perpetuated old-fashioned, simple, at times primitive customs that seemed quaint to visitors from other parts of the country.
In fact, Ohr focused his salesmanship not toward his southern neighbors, but to the middle- and upper-class northern tourists who had the time and money to winter on the warm and pleasant Gulf Coast where Biloxi is located. The tourist trade in Biloxi was experiencing an upsurge thanks to the recently developed train system which made a stop there. While the rest of the South was in the wake of Reconstruction recovery, Ohr’s coastal town was perfectly situated to receive the tourists who had both money and leisure time. On occasion Ohr signed his pots with just the word “Biloxi” (Figure 45), thus rendering his southernness and his signature interchangeable aspects of his identity.
Other times he would incise the location from where he dug the clay on the bottom of the pot in question. A pot from this author’s collection is marked “Mud from the channel of
Biloxi water” (Figure 46) while others bear similar inscriptions describing their origins.
By and large, Ohr used local clay dug from the Tchoutacabouffa to throw his pots, so wares that veered from this habit were experimental in nature, testing the viability of
120 local clays. Through the employment of local clays Ohr celebrated the South’s natural assets, symbolically emancipating the South from northern materials and further enforcing Ohr’s southern identity.129
There was surely a conscious artfulness to Ohr’s activities, since Biloxi had an
economy quite different from the rest of Mississippi and was a major destination for
northern tourists. Aside from oyster and seafood canning, tourism was the main trade for
Biloxi and the Gulf Coast. The main impetus for this development was the completion of
the Louisville and Nashville Railroad (L&N) in the early 1880s, just shortly before Ohr
established his pottery. The L&N connects New Orleans to Mobile, Alabama, providing
easy access to all of the coastal towns in between including Bay St. Louis, Pass Christian,
Biloxi, Ocean Springs and Pascagoula, among others.
The Gulf and Ship Island Railroad was another main line existing in the Gulf
Coast Region, completed in 1900. It catered mostly to the piney woods of southeastern
Mississippi and extended from Gulfport to Jackson. Its primary use was not for tourism,
but it was another factor which strongly impacted economic development of the Gulf
Coast. By 1907 it had made the coastal town of Gulfport the leading exporter of yellow
pine.
The L&N not only allowed the Gulf Coast region to become a major exporter of
foodstuffs by facilitating easy travel between these towns and to the major ports of New
Orleans and Mobile, but also provided a second season for coastal towns by enabling those from northern and midwestern states to winter in warmer regions, “As more and
129 It is not possible to affix any specific chronology to pots marked in this manner as dates do not consistently accompany these marks and they appear on wares exhibiting “early” and “late” motifs. 121 more of these ‘snowbirds’ flocked to the ‘American Riviera,’ the hotels remained open all year.”130
A whimsical booklet written in 1894 entitled “Along the Gulf: An Entertaining
Story” is narrated by a rider on the L&N who is on holiday with a party of ladies and
gentlemen. He praises the shores that edge the state of Mississippi saying:
here . . .during the summer months, congregate the cream of Southern Society . . .the flower of Southern manhood and the blossoms of Southern womanhood: while in the Winter months, people from all over the country come to these places, seeking in the balmy climate of this section, the health which the rigors of a northern winter deny them.
Each chapter in the booklet is a review of one of the L&N’s coastal stops, with the greatest amount of space devoted to Biloxi. The northern tourists of this party celebrate
Biloxi as “a thriving, energetic little business city,” praising its seafood industries, its involvement in developing the economy both in Biloxi and nationwide through the efforts of the Iroquois Commercial Club and Business Men’s League, its beautiful bathing beaches, electric street lamps and the local paper The Biloxi Herald. Significantly they devote a section to George Ohr, “the artistic potter whose quaint and indescribable shapes in clay have made him famous all over the United States,” pronouncing his studio as “one of the show places of the town” and recommending that “visitors to Biloxi make it a point to visit it during their stay.”
The tourist trade was so prominent in Biloxi that one 1890 article from the Biloxi
Herald reported that for two weeks in February “Biloxi hotels have been tared to their utmost capacity to provide accommodations for the great number of Northern visitors . .
130 Charles Sullivan and Murella Hebert Powell, The Mississippi Gulf Coast: Portrait of a People (Sun Valley, CA: American Historical Press, 1999), 107. According to “Biloxi as a Winter Resort,” Biloxi Herald, 13 October 1888, the L&N railroad ran four daily trains through Biloxi to eastern and western cities and a coast train morning and evening to New Orleans, eighty miles away. 122
.on several occasions guests have been turned away.”131 This article serves to reinforce the importance of tourism in Biloxi, but more significantly qualifies its visitors as
Northern. Indeed, the tourist surge experienced along the Gulf Coast consisted predominantly of Northern visitors.
Citizens of Biloxi were certainly not oblivious to the importance of these northern visitors. In fact, each issue of the Biloxi Herald contained a standard section
listing the “visitors of the North” and at which hotels they were staying. They even
published a letter from a Northern veteran who was expressing his views on whether or
not a Federal Soldiers Home should be established in Biloxi. It was of no consequence
that he was not a resident of Biloxi. His Northern status was enough to qualify him.132
Despite this symbiotic relationship, there existed a tension between Biloxians and their “very Northern” visitors which resulted from the South’s resentment of their reliance on the northern dollar. Their indignation was amplified by the fact that northern visitors made it a practice to remind their southern hosts exactly who was facilitating their economic success, and that the North was still considered the more progressive and educated region of the country.
In his introduction to Facts About the Gulf Coast, a tourist oriented booklet from
1905, W. A. Cox praises the warm and sunny attributes of this ideal coastal community.
An essay in the booklet entitled “A Northerner’s Opinion” by Ethelyn Colcord from Le
Mars, Iowa, begins with a backhanded compliment:
We Northerners . . .seem to have acquired a mistaken idea of our sister states. Those who have not taken the trouble to investigate the matter are led to consider the Southerner an indolent, lazy, unenergetic, unenterprising body, lacking all ambition. This, of
131 “Northern Visitors,” Biloxi Herald, 15 February 1890, 4. 132 “Northern Veteran’s Views” Biloxi Herald, 25 February 1888, 5. 123
course has been so in the past, and is at present true to a certain extent.
She then praises the wonderful advancements the Gulf Coast has made, exemplified by their lumber output, power house, street car line, two large banks and attractive wide streets, among other things. Lest she appear too proud of the South she then tempers this praise with the statement, “it cannot be truthfully said that this change is due wholly to
‘Northern enterprise,’ although, it must be admitted, that the Northerner is in some degree the instrument of it.”133
The presence of, dependence on, and tensions between the Northern visitors and
the native Biloxians made a significant impression on Ohr. Not only did Ohr’s livelihood
depend on their continued presence, but he was impacted by the progressive Northern
attitudes regarding consumer desire and advertising. Ohr’s dependence on his northern
client base made him sensitive to northern attitudes toward southern arts. Artists of the
South were not held to the same standards as artist from the North who were seen as
more sophisticated and cosmopolitan. Southern artists were seen as nothing more than
quaint craftsmen or folk artists whose work could never match the refinement or
erudition of the North. These mind-sets put into stark contrast how the southern “artist”
was received by Northern visitors, i.e. as nothing more than a quaint craftsman whose
work was not to be considered by the same standards as artists of the North. Indeed, if the
North, which dictated all of the country’s trends and progress, was considered the model,
then the Post–Civil War South had become the aberrant of the mean, the Other.
The idea of the southern eccentric, I would suggest, is an offshoot of this concept
of South as the Other. While the origins of the southern eccentric are not well defined,
133 “A Northerner’s Opinion,” Facts About the Gulf Coast: Gulfport, Biloxi, Pass Christian (Gulfport: W. A. Cox & E. F. Martin, 1905). 124 there has long been a specifically southern type capable of existing only within the southern states. Many well-known southern writers such as Mark Twain, William
Faulkner, and Eudora Welty focus on highly eccentric characters who also have distinctly southern speech patterns and social characteristics. These characters differ greatly from one author the next but they commonly exhibit a disregard for social norms whether out of ignorance or lack of concern. The characters are typically portrayed as regionally isolated as the embodiment of a particular place and lack the cosmopolitan qualities that are often associated with people from the industrial northeast.134
George Ohr’s strange behavior, though it played on the notion of southern
eccentricity, was not simply the product of cultural isolation. Rather it was in large part a
response to the modern advertising and consumer culture that were entering his
consciousness via expositions, New Orleans culture, and the scores of northern visitors in
Biloxi and his studio. I argue that in an attempt to project a more memorable image, he
adopted this eccentric persona that played to the characterizations northerners imposed on
southerners. Just as one buys a Caribbean souvenir more for its representation of a
specific time and place than for artistic qualities, Ohr was selling Biloxi’s local flavor in
the form of pottery. Ohr’s flamboyant, even clichéd southern self-presentation mirrored
134 For more information on the self-conscious formation and manipulation by southerners of the eccentric and backwards image, see Marion Barnwell, ed., A Place Called Mississippi: Collected Narratives (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1997); Richard Gray and Owen Robinson, eds., The Literature and Culture of the American South (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004); Noel Polk, Outside the Southern Myth (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1997); and Howard Zinn, The Southern Mystique (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1964). The outrageous antics of Ellen Bernstein’s circle of friends in The Divine Secrets of the Ya Ya Sisterhood are nothing out of the ordinary in southern society, or so they would have you believe. Even kidnapping her soon-to-be married daughter is par for the course. John Berendt’s book Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (1994), which was based on real life events from the 1980s, stressed the voodoo qualities of the midnight hour. Kevin Spacey played the eccentric homosexual millionaire art dealer Jim Williams in the later film of the same name and perfectly captured the peculiar decadence of New Orleans. 125 the distinct myths projected on the culture of the South by those who controlled the nation’s economy—the North.
Though the residents of Biloxi also constituted a portion of Ohr’s clientele, his relationship with this group could be described as more honest. It is difficult to project an exaggerated image of a region to someone who already lives there. Biloxians tended to have a more practical relationship with Ohr—their needs were more along the lines of flower pots and chimney pipes, not dysfunctional oddly shaped works of art.
Furthermore, southerners developed a culture that would not tolerate the same kind of advertising gimmicks so prevalent in the North. After Reconstruction and in the wake of so much economic failure, residents of the South “rationalized their commercial failures by taking refuge in the notion that they were too refined and civilized to compete successfully against the vulgar money grubbers of the North.”135
The North’s perspective on the South was (and some would argue remains)
oversimplified and caricatured, casting the entire South as culturally homogeneous. Even
though Biloxi did not fit the profile of the typical southern town, Ohr’s image, as
projected both by the media and in person, portrayed just the kind of southerner the North
had come to expect—the dumb-yet-good-natured illiterate popularized through characters
such as Sut Lovingood and Huckleberry Finn that will be discussed later.
Southern Humor
An awareness of a uniquely southern brand of humor can be traced back to Henry
Watterson’s book Oddities in Southern Life and Character (1882). James Caron and M.
Thomas Inge note that this anthology is not simply a collection of humorous stories but
135 Starr, Southern Comfort, 249. 126 employs comic material to “represent a culture.”136 What is more, Watterson saw this
distinctive southern brand of humor as a source of regional pride.
Caron and Inge point out that Watterson drew on a number of well-known
antebellum southern writers and characters, including Augustus Baldwin Longstreet’s
Georgia Scenes (c. 1840), William Tappan Thompson’s Major Jones’s Courtship (1845),
Johnson Jones Hooper’s Some Adventures of Simon Suggs (1845), Thomas Bangs
Thorpe’s Mysteries of the Backwoods (1846), John S. Robb’s Streaks of Squatter Life
(1847), Joseph M. Field’s The Drama in Pokerville (1847), Henry Clay Lewis’s Odd
Leaves from the Life of a Louisiana “Swamp Doctor” (1850), Joseph G. Baldwin’s The
Flush Times of Alabama and Mississippi (1853), and Hardin E. Taliaferro’s Fisher’s
River Scenes (1859). By collecting such a large group of southern writers and characters
Watterson suggested that such humor was not simply the product of a talented individual
but was characteristic of the region.
In the nineteenth century one of the most popular authors of southern humor was
George Washington Harris, creator of the popular character Sut Lovingood, featured in
Sut Lovingood’s Yarns (1867). Sut is the archetype of the early East Tennessee
mountaineer:
‘I’se hearn in the mountins a fust rate fourth proof smash ove thunder cum onespected, an’ shake the yeath, bringin along a string ove litenin es long es a quarter track, an’ es bright es a weldin heat, a-racin down a big pine tree, tarin hit intu broom- splits, an’ toof pickers, an’ raisin a cloud ove dus’, an’ bark, an’ a army ove lim’s wif a smell sorter like the devil wer about, an’ the long darnin needil leaves fallin roun wif a tif-tif—quiet sorter soun, an’ then a-quiverin on the yeath es littil snakes die; an’ I
136 James E. Caron and M. Thomas Inge. Sut Lovingood’s Nat’ral Born Yarnspinner: Essays on George Washington Harris (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1996), 7–8. 127
felt quar in my in’ards, sorter ha’f cumfurt, wif a littil glad an’ rite smart ove sorry mis’d wif hit.137
Sut’s backward and loutish language comically and vividly contrasts with more formal
manners of speech associated with the privileged and educated. Walter Blair notes that
this crude vernacular, therefore, was emblematic of a dislike of untrustworthy Yankees,
“sheriffs, most preachers, learned men who use big words or flowery language, tavern
keepers who serve bad food, and reformers.”138 Sut represented the non-elite class of
America and those men who physically cultivated and settled the land, not the men who
threw money at it from their safe and comfortable mansions. What’s more, Blair
concludes that Sut’s descriptions of his home in the Smoky Mountains were warped and
exaggerated to emphasize the comedy and not the reality of his squalor. Indeed, his
humor made his life appear very jolly.
An interesting revelation about the way Sut’s language was bent and deformed is
put forth by Carol Boykin in her essay “Sut’s Speech: the Dialect of a ‘Nat’ral Borned’
Mountaineer” (1965); she observes that Harris’s warping of Sut’s language was not an
attempt to phonetically capture the East Tennessee dialect for greater authenticity. In fact,
she notes that at times Harris misspelled Sut’s words for no good reason, i.e., the
phonetic pronunciation had not been changed or directed. For example, the words “wun,”
“cum,” and “trubbil,” are spelled differently, but the pronunciation has not changed—
one, come, and trouble still sound the same. Additionally the reduction of syllables, such
as “want” for “wasn’t,” “natral” for “natural,” “speck” for “expect,” or “pendence” for
137 Caron and Inge, Sut Lovingood, 82. Interestingly, Joe Jefferson, who visited Ohr’s studio, was known for playing homely American characters. Rip Van Winkle (1859) was probably his best known. Jefferson’s visit to Biloxi, and perhaps even to Ohr’s studio in particular, was certainly part leisure, but also a means to pick up humorous mannerisms. 138 Walter Blair, “George Washington Harris,” in ibid., 88. 128
“dependence,” highlighted Sut’s sloppy diction, but did nothing to indicate his regional dialect. Boykin suggests that Harris’s intentions for the misspellings were to “deliberately overstate the ignorance and illiteracy of his characters,” and to “clutter the page.”139
If this distortion of speech and deliberate misspelling served to represent a
“dumb” southern type who identified the southern region and the southerner’s popular position against the northern Yankee/fast talker/elitist, then the words of Ohr can be read in a similar fashion:
Now then, my Dear, Good Readers, and all the rest of yease . . . let me radiate & while U R reading, don’t think between D lines, ‘Smart Aleck, damphool potter,’ etc. A duck doesn’t knead his brains 2 float as he is built 2 hold water, B in it & stay dry & I don’t need any 2 mash mud or push a pencil, Because I’m built that way.140
Boykin’s observations about Sut’s speech also hold true for Ohr. As seen in this passage, he uses “damphool” for “damn fool” and “knead” for “need,” even though neither
misspelling actually changes the pronunciation of the word. In fact he spells “need”
correctly later in the same sentence. Further the only function served by his consistent use
of numbers and letters for words, as in 2 B for “to be,” U R for “you are,” and “D” for
“the,” is to confuse and dramatize the paragraph visually, not to aid in pronunciation.
Ohr’s inimitable phrases, such as “mash mud” (make pottery) or “push a pencil” (write)
are not reflective of his regional dialect, only of his own distinctive way of writing or
talking. Of course, at times Ohr’s phonetic spelling may have been due to actual
ignorance, but he clearly exaggerates this quality to dramatize his southern persona.
139 Carol Boykin, “Sut’s Speech: The Dialect of a ‘Nat’ral Borned’ Mountaineer,” in The Lovingood Papers, ed. Ben Harris McClary (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1965), 38, 40. 140 George Ohr, “Letter & Answer No. 2,” 1903. Journal unknown. From loose pages found at the Biloxi Public Library. 129
That Ohr and Sut represented two different geographical regions is of little importance since the southern types set forth in southern cartoons were not overly topographically specific:
Longstreet’s Georgia is intended to represent the sparsely settled, raw, and morally unenlightened counties west of Augusta and Savannah; Baldwin’s Alabama and Mississippi are geographically interchangeable; and Cob’s Mississippi could be any of those states below the Ohio and north of Louisiana.141
It is important to realize that the knowledge of these southern types was not
limited to the South. Indeed, the northern perspective is often what gave them their
edge—those who lived in the South would certainly have been aware of the
outrageousness of the representations. The North, surely conscious that such descriptions
were overstated, used these exaggerations to rationalize its superiority especially in an
antebellum and Reconstruction climate. Many of the authors and characters I have listed
above, such as Longstreet, Baldwin, Harris, Hooper, Robb, and Field, were first printed
in the New York journal, Spirit of the Times, which became their principal medium of
publication. The success of this magazine prompted others to follow suit and many of
these authors were found in such papers as the New Orleans Picayune, the St. Louis
Reveille, and the Cincinnati News. Further, most of these same writers had northern
publishers – Harper published Longstreet and Appleton published Baldwin, for example.
This was of course indicative of the fact that northern cities had the corner on book
publishing, but it also revealed their dominant readership.142
141 Thomas Inge and Edward J. Piacentino, eds. The Humor of the Old South (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2001), 4. 142 Hennig Cohen and William B. Dillingham, eds. Humor of the Old Southwest (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994), introduction, xvii. 130
Southern humor also looked to the wildly overexaggerated behaviors, words, and tall tales of frontiersmen. An example from Mike Fink reads:
I can hit like fourth-proof lightnin’ an’ every lick I make in the woods lets in an acre o’ sunshine. I can out-run, out-jump, out- shoot, out-brat, out-drink, an’ out-fight, rough-an’-tumble, no holts barred, ary man on both sides the river from Pittsburgh to New Orleans an’ back ag’in to St. Louiee. Come on you flatters, you bargers, you milk-white mechanics, an’ see how tough I am to chaw! I ain’t had a fight for two days an’ I’m spilein’ for exercise. Cock-a-doodle-doo! 143
The famous passage from Twain’s Life on the Mississippi in which we first
encounter the soon-to-be famous character Huckleberry Finn, also features southern
boasting of this sort:
Whoo-oop! I’m the old original iron-jawed, brass-mounted, copper-bellied corpse-maker from the wilds of Arkansaw!—Look at me! I’m the man they call Sudden Death and General Desolation! Sired by a hurricane, dam’d by an earthquake, half- brother to the cholera, nearly related to the small-pox on the mother’s side! Look at me! I take nineteen alligators and a bar’l of whiskey for breakfast when I’m in robust health, and a bushel of rattlesnakes and a dead body when I’m ailing! I split the everlasting rocks with my glance, and I squench the thunder when I speak! Whoo-oop!144
In the preceding passage a young Huck has swum up to the side of a raft and is eavesdropping on two rowdy frontiersmen exchanging warnings and gearing up for a fight. Perhaps this man is hoping his far-fetched exaggerations and mind-boggling bravado will be enough to discourage a first punch.
Similarly, much of Ohr’s eccentricity was illustrated in his comical overexaggeration and challenges. The sign hanging from his studio (see p. 64 for the text)
143 Cohen and Dillingham, Old Southwest, introduction, xvi. 144 Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996; original ed., 1875), 44– 45. 131 is one example, as is the previously mentioned flier of sayings that Ohr distributed, some of which include:
My challenge to the whole world of wealth and potters, too make facsimile of my twist or crinkled SHAPES or for creating new designs on potter’s wheel still holds good. Please shut me up.
And:
American born, free and patriotic, blowing my own bugle, and will tackle the greatest of all great potters in the world, creating shapes on ceramic wheel.145
While the exaggerations of Mike Fink and Twain’s riverboat men were meant to emphasize their strength and toughness, Ohr’s words boast of the individuality of his pottery and his great skill on the pottery wheel.
The characters and southern humorists whom Ohr’s vernacular recollects originated prior to 1860, for the Civil War radically changed the southern way of life and
erased many of the conventions necessary for this kind of humor. However, the writing
“was a bridge that linked the past and the present, oral tradition and the written word, and a regional culture with the national culture. . . . The times changed and so did the mode of comedy, but Old Southwestern humor did not entirely disappear.”146 Again, Mark Twain is an apt example. Though his career flourished after the war and he was a contemporary of Ohr, his humor often exhibited the illiteracy and overexaggeration used by pre–Civil
War humorists.
Without belaboring the point, I would like to briefly return to Mary Tracy Earle’s
The Wonderful Wheel. As already noted, the main character bears a striking resemblance to Ohr, confirming that Ohr’s persona was sufficiently interesting and eccentric to serve
145 “Concerning Biloxi Potteries,” 47. The author says this quote came from Ohr’s handbill. 146 Cohen and Dillingham, Old Southwest, xxxix–xl. 132 as the inspiration for the main character in a fictional novel. In other words Ohr’s persona perfectly fit the expectations of northern customers and readers.
Southern Characters in Northern Periodicals
The magazines with which Ohr was involved suggest that he deliberately courted
a northern audience. As one might expect, Ohr was featured in regional southern
periodicals such as the Biloxi Daily Herald, the Commercial Appeal, and Southern
Quarterly, but he reached far beyond these geographic boundaries. Brick, which
published the first known article on Ohr, was based in Chicago, and the Clay Worker,
which printed the Hutson article “Quaint Biloxi Pottery,” was based in Indianapolis.
King’s important first article, “Palissy of Biloxi” (1899) was published in the Buffalo
Express. The Crockery and Glass Journal, in which Ohr publicly and idiosyncratically
aired his grievances with William King and A. M. Wheeler, discussed in Chapter Three,
was a New York trade paper. Ohr even managed to infiltrate elitist New York art
magazines such as Harper’s Monthly and Art Interchange, albeit rarely. Harper’s only
included a photograph of the pottery and a short caption that read “The Pottery of Biloxi”
in its May 1895 issue, while Art Interchange provided a very respectful review of Ohr’s
work by L. M. Bensel in 1901.147
As previously discussed, King’s “The Palissy of Biloxi” printed in the Buffalo
Express (1899), was one of the most comprehensive articles on Ohr. One angle of this article that I have not yet touched on is the specific appeal the Buffalo Express must have
held for Ohr because of its proximity to New York, the largest city in the United States
147 Information regarding where these above three magazines were published obtained in Mott. A History of American Magazines, vols. 3 and 4. 133 and a major cultural center. As has been discussed, the Buffalo Express article highlighted in Ohr’s eccentricity, prominently featuring his characteristic misspellings, strange punctuation, awkward and illogical sentence arrangements, photographs of himself, and interior and exterior shots of his new pagoda studio. His Biloxi origins, prominently featured in the title, coupled with the crazy words and images encouraged northern readers to view Ohr as a typical southern eccentric.
Consequently, King’s attention to Ohr garnered the potter a lot of magazine space, initiating the publication of a series of articles written by Ohr (Ohr’s letter to Major
Wheeler in “Ceramic Art at the Pan-American Exposition,” “Biloxi Heard From” in
Crockery and Glass Journal (1901), and “Some Facts in the History of a Unique
Personality” in Crockery and Glass Journal (1901)). This series allowed Ohr to market his southern eccentric persona to areas outside the South. Indeed, King seems to set up an
Abbott and Costello routine. King presented the voice of the nation, graciously allowing the eccentric from the South to speak his mind while poking fun at his words and getting a good laugh for the country. Ohr was a willing participant in this entertainment.
134
Chapter Five Socialism and Individualism
Socialism
Ohr’s pots ostentatiously declare that they are handmade, even crude. Their rough
clay, strange glazes, and irregular shapes align Ohr’s creations with the work of humble
artisans in the folk tradition rather than the factory mode of northern industrialists. These
artistic qualities seem to have had a deeper social significance for Ohr, for we know that
he was a political radical, a socialist, an advocate of the rights of “the common man.”
Our knowledge that Ohr was a socialist, or at least sympathized with socialist ideals, rests on just three tantalizing bits of evidence. First, we know that he was close to
Biloxi’s Socialist party leader Sumner Rose, since approximately three years after Ohr’s death, in a letter to the Biloxi Herald, Rose stated that he “happened to know him [Ohr] intimately.” Second, the picture published with Ohr’s 1901 autobiography shows a banner hanging on his studio that reads “Welcome Miss S.P.A”—Mississippi Socialist
Party of America (Figure 47). And third, Ohr incised on one of his pots:
“Presented to j.t. vanrensslear los angeles calif by the appeal to reason giard Kansas for meritorious service in the cause of socialism.”148
As usual, Ohr’s spelling is peculiar, but the name should probably be spelled “J. T. Van
Rensselaer” and he was associated with The Appeal to Reason, the most widely circulated
Socialist party journal of this period, which was published in Girard, Kansas.
148 The photograph is published in Ohr, “Unique Personality,” 1. At this point I can not provide a photograph of the inscribed pot. The owner has refused to allow any reproductions of the pot and has ignored my requests that he simply confirm its existence. Because other scholars and Ohr-O’Keefe Museum officials have seen this pot and because there is other evidence of Ohr’s socialist sympathies, I do not think this lack of visual evidence should cast any doubt on my argument. 135
The socialist movement can be traced back to the writings and activities of the
German political economists Karl Marx and his associate Friedrich Engels in the mid nineteenth century. The original goal of socialism was the installation of a classless society through a proletarian revolution. Under this egalitarian system the land, factories, mills and all other means of production and services would be “owned and controlled by all the people and democratically administered through a Socialist Industrial Union
Government.”149 Marx’s writings provided elaborate explanations of how to achieve this
goal by eliminating social classes and by eliminating money.
In practice, however, many ardent socialists were unable to grasp Marx’s turgid
arguments, and not surprisingly, therefore, socialism in the U.S. was seldom a pure
Marxist socialism. In fact, Julius Wayland’s Socialist party journal The Coming Nation,
which was largely responsible for popularizing socialist ideas in the United Sates, failed to print anything by Marx and Engels out of fear that the material was too difficult for most American readers, and would turn people off to the cause. Instead, Wayland published such works as Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (first published in 1888),
Victor Hugo’s Address to the Rich and Poor, and essays by John Ruskin and Thomas
Carlyle that were more accessible to ordinary readers. As historian Timothy Messer-
Kruse has noted, socialism in the United States was often an odd mixture of different intellectual strands:
Henry George’s “single tax” campaigners, Edward Bellamy’s “nationalist” clubs, Christian socialists, cooperative unions, and many elements of the Populist movement each combined in its
149 Socialism: Questions Most Frequently Asked and Their Answers (Brooklyn: New York Labor News, 1972), 11. 136
own unique way a hostility to industrialism, a limited vision of state socialism, and a devotion to political liberty.150
Within this varied collection of beliefs, there were many almost opposite positions, and as a result American socialists found it difficult to remain unified. Rightward leaning socialists wanted to maintain a class system but with better cooperation and mutual respect. An improved relationship between the classes would be achieved through a gradual step-by-step process rather than a single revolution as called for by Marx and
Engels. Radical, left wing American socialists wanted a classless co-operative commonwealth that would be accomplished through a violent working-class revolution.
Some socialists wanted to eliminate religion in favor of science, while the Christian
Socialist movement believed that socialism was in keeping with “the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man, in the spirit and according to the teachings of Jesus
Christ.”151
Dolores Hayden, author of several books on the history of American landscapes, explores the actual physical design of architecture and community planning in seven utopian communes in the United States. All the reformers “believed that social change could best be stimulated through the organization and construction of a single ideal community, a model which could be duplicated throughout the country,” despite the fact that they all advocated diverse programs, programs ranging from “absolutism to anarchy,
150 Though Marx is often associated with communism, a political system, he was more closely related to socialism, an economic system. Indeed, communism was envisioned by Marx and Engels as the very last stage in their socialist revolution. Regarding Wayland’s publications, see Howard H. Quint, The Forging of American Socialism: Origins of the Modern Movement (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1953), 185. Carlyle was a Scottish Calvinist who wrote essays that appealed to Victorians struggling with scientific and political changes that threatened the traditional social order. Quote from Timothy Messer- Kruse, 1848–1876 The Yankee International: Marxism and the American Reform Tradition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 252. 151 Morris Hillquit, A History of Socialism in the United States (New York: Dover, 1971), 319–21. 137 spiritualism to atheism, speculative land development to collective industry.”152 During
the last years of the nineteenth century, some forty utopian socialist novels depicted
descriptive pictures of the ideal life that could be reached if only America could attain a
cooperative society. The two most influential socialist novels were Edward Bellamy’s
Looking Backward (1888) and William Morris’s retort News From Nowhere (1890).
Bellamy’s Looking Backward, which had a particularly American resonance, tells the
story of Julian West, a typical nineteenth-century middle-class gentleman who falls under
hypnosis in the year 1887 and awakes in the year 2000 to find the world much changed.
All manufacturing has been consolidated under the government and all citizens work
within this universal industrial service between the ages of twenty-one and forty-five.
Within this industrial service each citizen has a distinct purpose determined by his wishes
and aptitudes. No job is looked down upon and all are valued equally because all are
necessary to society. In Bellamy’s view, money was what allowed the rich to prey upon
the poor and caused the unjust and horrible conditions of the lower class during the latter
part of the nineteenth century. Bellamy’s system was therefore moneyless, providing
equal wealth to all just for being citizens.
By 1900 there were four thousand Bellamy Clubs in the United States and
hundreds in Holland, Denmark, and Sweden. Politically, Bellamy’s utopian socialist
ideals united his Nationalist party supporters with the Populist party and amassed
numbers large enough to scare the Democrats and Republicans who dominated party
politics in the United States.153
152 Dolores Hayden, Seven American Utopias: The Architecture of Communitarian Socialism, 1790–1975 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1976), 9. 153 Information regarding proliferation of Bellamy Clubs in Frederick Highland. Looking Backward: A Critical Commentary (NY: American R.D.M., 1965), 31. In 1891 Bellamy founded the magazine the New 138
The other major socialist novel of the period, News From Nowhere (1890), was written by William Morris, a figure who surely would have interested Ohr because of his energetic activities promoting the Arts and Crafts movement. Morris’s book was written in direct response to Looking Backward. The main character, socialist worker William
Guest, falls asleep and dreams of a utopian society. However, unlike Julian West, who ultimately remained in the futurist society, Guest awakens and realizes that his utopia is only a dream that will never be achieved during his lifetime, regardless of his efforts.
Herein lie the key differences between Morris’s and Bellamy’s utopia.
Historian Alexander McDonald explains that Morris’s utopia is much more pragmatic. His citizens are individuals who speak different languages and reflect the very realistic dissent, grumbling and obstinate refusal that would accompany such a massive shift in hegemony. Whereas Bellamy pictures the transition to socialism as something as easy as falling asleep and waking up in a different time, Morris’s perception of the process is decidedly more pessimistic. Equality was attainable, but not without intense effort along the lines of the revolution Marx foresaw.154
Socialism in Mississippi
Mississippi was and is predominantly a one-party state, voting non-Democratic
only twice out of the thirty-two presidential campaigns between 1836 and 1960, and
choosing a non-Democratic governor in only four elections out of forty-four, according to
Nation, which became the official paper of the Nationalist party. The Nationalist party, which joined with the Populists, embraced most socialist tenets except for the name. It gave the Populist cause a heavy socialist coloring. 154 Alexander McDonald, “Bellamy, Morris, and the Great Victorian Debate,” in Socialism and the Literary Artistry of William Morris, eds. Florence S. Boos and Carole G. Silver (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1990), 86–87. 139 historian Stephen Cresswell. However, during the years following Reconstruction,
Mississippi witnessed an upsurge of locally grown political movements formed in response to growing dissatisfaction with government failure to reconstruct the South after the Civil War. These opposition movements, including the Republican, Greenback,
Populist, Gold Democrat, and Prohibition parties, as well as a variety of independent political groups, had some degree of success but by 1885 were mostly finished. Cresswell reports that by 1889 Farmer’s Alliance leaders were in the process of forming another political party—the Populist party. Along with other deep-south states such as South
Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama, Mississippi gave very few votes to socialist presidential candidates. Indeed each state gave three percent of the vote or less to socialist candidate
Eugene Debs in his attempts for the presidency.155
Biloxi, however, had a notably different social and political character than the rest
of the state. While “King Cotton” dominated most of Mississippi, Biloxi and the Gulf
Coast relied almost exclusively on the seafood industry and tourism, the latter of which
was discussed in Chapter Four. “This industry [oyster and shrimp canning and shipping]
is by far the biggest industry of the coast,” asserted prominent citizen W. A. Cox in his
1905 essay “Biloxi Old and New.” The five large oyster and shrimp canning factories in
the city ran eight months out of the year and were staffed mostly by hundreds of
“Bohemians . . . brought here from Baltimore, the chief northern oyster center.” The men
lived in Biloxi from September to May helping the factories produce 2,500 barrels of
oysters a day for canning purposes. In addition to the canning of oysters and other
155 Stephen Cresswell, Multiparty Politics in Mississippi, 1877–1902 (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1995), introduction p. 3; and Stephen Cresswell, “Grassroots Radicalism in the Magnolia State: Mississippi’s Socialist Movement at the Local Level, 1910–1919,” Labor History 33, no. 1 (Winter 1992): 82. 140 shellfish “there are several other large establishments that open the oyster, not to can them, but to ship north raw.” One of the largest shippers in Biloxi was Mr. U. Desporte, who shipped seventy thousand raw oysters every day. The other raw oyster dealers shipped about that number in a day together. Cox declared that “the supply never grows less though the demand steadily increases. It makes our part of the country a cash country.”156
Citizens of Biloxi and the Gulf Coast were aware of their differing culture and ideology, especially in light of the events surrounding them in the rest of the state.
Personal accounts from citizens of Harrison County (the county in which Biloxi is
located) who experienced Reconstruction in the late-nineteenth-century South are kept on
file at the Mississippi Archives in Jackson. They provide further testimony to the
arguments put forth in this section. For example, one such statement reads:
Our County of Harrison had no large cotton plantations, and no large slave owners, hence there was not the sharp feeling among our people because of class and caste. Harrison County had been settled largely by men and women from other lands, Germany, France, Denmark, Sweden, England, Italy, Sicily, Slavonia, Poland, Scotland, and they were not so imbued with the feeling of class distinctions as were their countries, and too, Harrison County was thinly settled, and the settlements had been built by men who had come from far countries to get away from Caste, war, taxation, too much government, and especially from too much meddling with the individual. They had come here to be free, to be let alone, to be given a chance to make a living.157
While it was never a politically dominant movement, socialism seems to have been stronger around Biloxi than in any other area of Mississippi. According to
156 All quotes from W. A. Cox, “Biloxi Old and New,” Facts About the Gulf Coast: Gulfport, Biloxi and Pass Christian (Gulfport: W. A. Cox & E. F. Martin, 1906), 72. 157 Quotes from Mrs. Stella Buckles and Mrs. H. D. DeSaussure in WPA County History for Harrison, series 447, assignment no. 7, 6 May 1936. 141
Cresswell, socialism was most popular in the sixth (southeast—including Harrison
County) and fifth (east central) districts of Mississippi. He suggests several reasons why socialism was most successful in these districts. Most farms in these areas were traditional small family farms operated by the owner. Sixty to sixty-six percent of the population was white, lessening racial tensions caused by the Democratic party’s insistence that the white race would be in danger without Democratic control. And finally their economies were not farm based but varied, including transportation, manufacture, commerce, and tourism. As stated previously, the southeast and east central districts of
Mississippi, which were located on the coast and maintained important train depots, were anomalies because unlike most places in the South they did not have to base their economy on agriculture.
Even though the Socialists, and any oppositional party, fell short of blocking
Democratic dominance, Cresswell states:
[d]uring the years from 1904 to 1922, the Socialists in Mississippi were the most important opposition party in the state. . . . The Socialists ran candidates at all levels, published newspapers, had prospering local chapters, and even won a couple of offices—rare for non-Democrats in the deep south.158
Socialists from Biloxi in the year 1912 had slightly higher property values than Biloxi
Democrats. Most owned their own homes and most were married with three or more children. Of the 141 leaders of Mississippi socialism, Cresswell was able to locate forty- nine in the 1910 census. Their professions were as follows:
Twenty-two were farmers Twenty were skilled craftsmen or industrial laborers Eleven owned small businesses Four were professionals (physician, two lawyers, optometrist) Four were salesmen or store employees
158 Cresswell, “Grassroots Radicalism,” 85, 98. 142
Two were fishermen on the Gulf Coast
Typically Socialist party leaders in Mississippi were born in Mississippi or elsewhere in the South, according to Cresswell. Most, almost half, were fifty or older. Greatly outnumbering small merchants and professionals were those who worked with their hands, such as farmers and skilled craftsmen. Their personal wealth surpassed that of typical citizens within the community.159
As Cresswell observes, these men were not at the bottom of the economic system,
meaning their interest in socialism was not fueled by despair and poverty. Rather, they
viewed socialism as a means through which they could protect what they had earned.
“Like the earlier Populists, they sought protection from monopolies, unjust advantages of
the very rich, and unfair practices by the railroads.”160
If we take Creswell’s profile as a standard, Ohr’s social station was similar to that of many Mississippi socialists. Ohr owned his own property, was married, had ten children, was born and raised in Biloxi, worked as a craftsman, and was in his mid fifties by the time socialism was experiencing its heyday in Mississippi. He was not a wealthy man, but when the fire of 1894 destroyed his business he had the funds to rebuild within the year, whereas many businesses were not able to do so. Furthermore, it seems his support of the socialist movement was also an attempt to protect his trademark pottery and business from large corporations and unfair business practices. His protests against
Rookwood, Teco, and Van Briggle, discussed below, suggest that he was threatened by the way large businesses could advertise more widely and set their prices lower than
159 Ibid., 88. 160 Ibid. 143 could the individual craftsman. Ohr was also, through his mother, of German descent, as were the majority of American followers of socialism.
Sumner Rose
In some fashion, George Ohr surely belonged to this small group of socialists or socialist sympathizers since his good friend Sumner Rose was at the center of Mississippi socialism: he was the publisher of the first Socialist party paper in Mississippi, The
Grander Age. Originally a Populist paper, it became Socialist in 1896 when Rose refused to support the Democratic candidate and endorsed the Socialist presidential candidate instead. Publication of The Grander Age ceased for a time, but in 1903 it was resurrected in Biloxi, where it was printed weekly for a subscription cost of fifty cents a year.161
Rose used the paper to strengthen the Socialist Party of America in Mississippi and across the south, but according to Cresswell, “[t]he paper had its greatest impact . . . in its city of publication. Biloxi, a center of fishing, seafood canning, and tourism, soon was home to a strong and growing Socialist local.”162
As with most other American Socialist publications, the paper devoted little
attention to economic theories. Indeed, the maxims that Rose printed in the The Grander
Age are closer to a homespun humanist philosophy than to a political platform. As he
wrote:
“To be a Socialist is to espouse the cause of humanity,”
“Instead of ‘making money’ under Socialism, we will produce a living, and a splendid one it will be,”
161 Ibid., 90. 162 Ibid.. 144
“Thoughts are living things—frequently they influence, frequently they propagate.”
“Socialism is the doctrine of love, and those who teach it, should avoid teaching hate.”163
Ohr’s own signs and one-liners bear resemblance to these sayings in format as well as
content, suggesting that he may have been inspired by Rose’s example:
“No Preacher, no Doctor, no Lawyer can carry your cross.”164
“Shapes come to the Potter as verses come to the poet.”
“Clay follows the fingers and the fingers follow the mind.”165
Very likely it was the humanitarian side of socialism, rather than its economic arguments,
that most appealed to Ohr.
In addition to editing The Grander Age, Rose was heavily involved in Socialist activities and politics. Cresswell reports that in 1911 Rose was elected alderman for
Biloxi’s first ward with nearly sixty percent of the vote. He also won the Socialist nomination for mayor of Biloxi in 1912, but did not win the election (Biloxi was no stranger to supporting local Socialist candidates; Socialist mayoral candidate Jens Neilsen got twenty percent of the vote in 1910). Socialist gatherings were often held at Rose’s
place of work. This author has discovered that local advertisements listed him as the manager of the Gulf Coast Musical Headquarters, “located at 210 E. Howard Ave, near
City Hall,” and this is the same address given for local Socialist meetings. At this time,
Mississippi was developing inventive new forms of popular music, and one cannot help
163 The Grander Age, October 1903, p. 2. 164 From signs on a Mardi Gras float, reproduced in Robert Blasberg, The Unknown Ohr: A Sequel to the 1973 Monograph (Milford, PA: Peaceable Press, 1986), 59. 165 This saying and the previous are from Ohr’s handbill. 145 wondering whether Ohr was engaged in any way with the musical side of Rose’s activities, along with his socialism.166
In the early to mid 1890s Rose began a cooperative colony along the Gulf Coast
called Co-Opolis Clay. It consisted mainly of Populists and supporters of farmers’ and
workers’ cooperatives, primarily from the northern states. The group “built homes, a
store, a print shop, and planned to farm, raise fruit and engage in light manufacturing.”167
While Ohr did not join the colony, he endorsed their product. The Biloxi Daily
Herald article “Geo. E. Ohr on Co-opolis Clay” stated that Ohr had been experimenting
with clay from Co-opolis where the Biloxi Brick company would locate its plant. He
speaks favorably of the organization, encouraging locals to use the clay for almost any
project from pottery to roofing tiling or “anything in that line, except china.” Ohr continues, “The brick made from this clay be of superior quality.”168
J. A. Wayland
If Rose’s Grander Age aspired to organize the Magnolia state, Wayland’s socialist
journal Appeal to Reason was a nationwide endeavor, the most influential and widely read socialist publication of the period in America. Historian Ira Kipnis explains that
Wayland’s first career as a real estate agent came to an abrupt end upon his first
introduction to socialist tenets. He immediately closed his business in order to devote all
of his time to spreading the socialist message to friends and neighbors. Having faith in
166 Information regarding Neilsen’s percent of the vote from Cresswell, “Grassroots Radicalism,” 92–93. Rose’s name and the Howard Avenue address were part of an ad for the Gulf Coast Musical Headquarters from the Biloxi Daily Herald, 13 March 1908, 4. This same address was also given for local socialist meetings in Biloxi Daily Herald, 26 February 1908, 1. 167 Cresswell, Multiparty Politics, 166. 168 Biloxi Daily Herald, 27 November 1902, 6. 146 socialist teachings, Wayland believed America would soon be experiencing another economic crisis, so he sold all his property and assets, insisting on payment in the form of gold and government bonds. After the panic of 1893 he found himself with $80,000 that he used to begin his first paper, the Coming Nation.169
In 1897 Wayland left the Coming Nation and moved to Girard, Kansas, where he
established Appeal to Reason. Appeal to Reason, the socialist party journal founded in
1897, was where “American Socialism found its most indigenous voice.”170 Using
simple, straightforward language, Appeal to Reason was accessible to almost anyone who
read it. With a subscription rate of twenty-five cents a year and circulation of between
300,000 and 500,000, Kipnis notes that this journal became the most prolific and
successful means by which the socialist message was spread throughout the United
States.
As part of the inscription on a pot mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, Ohr
writes Girard (“giard”) Kansas, the home of the Appeal, as well as J. T. Vanrensslear of
Los Angeles. Just who Vanrensslear was is uncertain. A large part of the Appeal’s success, however, was due to volunteer workers who folded, bundled, and distributed the magazine, which could be the “meritorious service” to which the pot refers. Los Angeles in particular had an especially large Appeal following.
Though key to spreading socialist ideals throughout the country, the Appeal also
received much criticism from other socialists and socialist papers. Kipnis believes that
some of this hostility sprang from their lesser success, but Wayland’s Appeal “was also
criticized for its lack of publicity of the Socialist Party, its ‘ultra capitalist business
169 Ira Kipnis, The American Socialist Movement, 1897–1912 (New York: Greenwood Press, 1968), 45. 170 Irving Howe, Socialism in America (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985), 4. 147 methods,’ its use of the party to build the Appeal instead of vice versa, its reformist approach to socialism, and its employment of salesmen who brought the socialist movement into disrepute.”171 Indeed, in 1906, the Appeal had an income of $10,000 a month thanks to its copious advertising. Perhaps most influential was Wayland’s determination to “singlehandedly . . . ‘Yankeefy’ the American Socialist movement ”172
Fairhope, Alabama
Approximately seventy miles from Biloxi is the cooperative colony of Fairhope,
Alabama. Cathy Donelson, Fairhope historian, explains that Fairhope was founded in
1894 by twenty-eight visionaries and freethinkers from Iowa who pooled their resources
to create a utopian community based on Henry George’s single-tax ideals. In his book
Progress and Poverty (1879), George insisted that everything supplied by nature, most
importantly land, belonged to all humanity equally. In his single-tax colony no one owns
the land, but instead pays rent that goes to the community rather than the owner. Further,
all assets within that land are also the property of the community. In exchange, no other
taxes or regulations are levied and there is no change in land rental prices.
According to Donelson, Fairhope became the oldest, largest, and most successful
single-tax colony in the world, attracting progressives, Populists, Socialists, Quakers,
artists, and intellectuals. The founders of Fairhope wished to establish a model
community free from all private monopolies, providing residents with equal opportunity
and reward for individual efforts. The twenty-eight founding members incorporated and
171 Kipnis, American Socialist Movement, 250n says the Appeal hired as a subscription salesman a “socialist” who combined his soap-box orations on socialism with the announcement “Jesus Christ now addresses you through this instrumentality.” 172 Ibid., 249, 44. 148 called themselves the “Fairhope Industrial Association.” This corporation used rent paid by the lessees to pay all governmental taxes, thus forming a single tax that encouraged residents to use the land productively and retain its value for the community.173
Upon her visit to Fairhope this author spoke to several local historians and found
that despite a strong oral tradition linking Ohr to Fairhope, no evidence exists at this time
that would confirm the association. The proximity of Fairhope to Biloxi and the presence
of local potter Frank Brown and his Fairhope Pottery Company, however, suggests that
Ohr was at least aware of if not personally involved with the cooperative. In addition,
Ohr made at least one pot out of clay from Mobile, Alabama, which is just across the bay
from Fairhope.174
William Morris and the Arts and Crafts Movement
Significantly, the Arts and Crafts movement was closely allied with socialism: the
leading spokesman for the movement, William Morris, proselytized energetically for
both. Drawing inspiration from the writing of John Ruskin, Morris argued that society
had been debased by the machine and the Industrial Revolution and that social justice
could only be achieved when all men could take pleasure in the work of their hands.
Morris also believed work was the only undertaking that instilled within man a true sense
173 Cathy Donelson, Images of America: Fairhope (Charleston, SC: Arcadia, 2005), 8. Though Fairhope was based on a utopian ideal of equality, was home to Socialist groups, and even praised Socialist organizations across the country in its local newspaper, the Fairhope Courier, the community still took pains to distance itself from socialism. For example, the Fairhope Courier, 18 August 1894, 1, mentioned that “The Coming Nation Colony is now located at Tennessee City, near Nashville, Tenn,” and then comprised of “in the neighborhood of twenty families. Among them we note the name of one of our correspondents, Mr. T. Eliot Tait of Barberton, Ohio, which lends us to remark as we have done before, that we sincerely trust none will apply for membership in Fairhope, especially at this time, who do not fully understand the fundamental differences between our plans and those of our friends at the Coming Nation and other similar colonies.” 174 Organizations and local historians with whom I visited while in Fairhope include Donnie Barrett at the Baldwin County Historical Society, Bonnie Gum, author of Made of Alabama Clay, and local historians Sonny Brewer and Martin Lanoux. 149 of purpose: “[a] man at work, making something which he feels will exist because he is working at it and will it, is exercising the energies of his mind and soul as well as his body. . . . Not only his own thoughts, but the thoughts of past ages guide his hand, and as part of the human race, he creates.”175
The message of Morris and Ruskin was carried to the United States through crafts exhibits, salesrooms, and catalogues and printed materials such as arts and crafts, socialist, and labor magazines. The last years of the nineteenth century and the opening years of the twentieth saw the largest following of the Arts and Crafts movement in the
United States. Thousands of organized groups formed a craft network across the country between 1896 and 1915.176
Elbert Hubbard, whose creativity in advertising has already been discussed, was
Morris’s most vocal advocate in the United States. Hubbard constantly reiterated
Morris’s theme of the importance of virtuous work. Thus, for example, he wrote:
To be healthy and sane and well and happy, you must do real work with your hands as well as with your head. The cure for grief is motion. The recipe for strength is action. Love for love’s sake creates a current so hot that it blows out the fuse. But love that finds form in music, sculpture, painting poetry and work is divine and beneficent [emphasis added].177
Significantly, Hubbard also sometimes wrote about the dilemma of placing a financial value on something with a spiritual aspect. In fact, one of his anecdotes may refer to Ohr.
Hubbard described asking an artist to fix a price on his work, beginning by inquiring
what the cost of the material and production had been. The potter responded, “Do not ask
175 John Bruce Glasier, William Morris and the Early Days of the Socialist Movement (Bristol, Eng.: Thoemmes Press, 1994), 147–48. 176 Eileen Boris, Art and Labor: Ruskin, Morris and the Craftsman Ideal in America (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986), 20, 32. 177 Champney, Art and Glory, 189. 150 me anything about the cost of material. I make a beautiful vase, that is enough.” Hubbard then inquired as to the amount of time it might take, receiving the petulant response,
“Time! How can you ask me the time it takes to make a beautiful thing? You certainly do not understand art. An artist knows nothing about time nor expense. He creates. That is enough.” Hubbard then mockingly observed that this same artist had a work of art that, in an unguarded moment, he offered to part with if I would “pay a price which seemed to me beyond that of rubies.”178
Ohr himself addressed the issue of the financial value of hand work in a
remarkable letter of 1915 in which he condemned mass production for destroying
creative individuality:
G.E. Ohr Will and can Make any of the high Priced Payers—of Rookwood Teco—Vanbriggle or Capitalized companies Servents Work—“show their HAND—As to where is the Potter—that can” “Father the Art Produced—The outcome would “BE” that Five—or Fifteen Did the “JOB on Pot While in Sculptertng— Carving—of Paintings it dont Take a Doz’ to Accomplish Art Pottery—(Originality does not Emenate from A Company of regiment ((Cromos and Photos Are “PICTURES”—But sutch dont command Fabulous Prices As “Real—head-heart-hand-and Soul” “ART.”179
This statement is significant for several reasons. First it establishes Ohr’s attentiveness to the competition between himself and other popular potteries such as Rookwood, Teco,
and Van Briggle. Second, Ohr simultaneously condemns their methods of mass
production while distinguishing his own approach of making each pot entirely with his
own hands. The value of art pottery, he implies, is not in the high prices or the number of
people who do the carving and “sculptertng,” but in the degree of originality that cannot
178 Hubbard, Notebook of Elbert Hubbard, 154–56. 179 Richard Mohr, “Mudpies for Keeps and Usefulness,” 16. From Ohr’s letter to C. L. Alexander on 31 March 1915, reproduced in this article. 151 be manufactured. He also points out that this system, which relies on “high priced payers” of “capitalized companies,” perpetuates the servitude of artists on the labor line.
Not only is their work commercialized, but they cannot see their own hand or prove that they fathered the object. Finally, his use of the phrase “real head, heart, hand and soul art,” especially when used in conjunction with remarks on mass production, bears a remarkable resemblance to Ruskin’s words regarding the spirituality inherent in the production of art, “ ‘Fine Art’ is that in which the hand, the head, and the heart of man go together.”180 That Ohr referred to his pots as “mudbabies” denotes their function as
living, breathing extensions of himself.
Such a view of work as a sacred form of expression had links with an indigenous
tradition of American thought, that of the New England transcendentalists. In his lecture
“The Transcendentalist,” for example, Emerson insisted that work should be endowed
with dignity and spiritual purpose, in terms strikingly similar to the writings of William
Morris:
Much of our reading, much of our labor, seems mere waiting; it was not that we were born for. Any other could do it as well or better. So little skill enters into these works, so little do they mix with the divine life, that it really signifies little what we do, whether we turn a grindstone, or ride, or run, or make fortunes, or govern the state.181
In his well-known essay “Self Reliance” (1841) Emerson further reinforced his belief in
individual purpose in labor:
There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better or for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe if full of good, no kernel of nourishing
180 John Ruskin, The Two Paths (New York: J. Wiley, 1859). 181 Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Complete Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vols. 1 and 2 (New York: Wm. H. Wise, 1929), 109. 152
corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried.182
Henry David Thoreau was another popular figure who decried the loss of
spirituality in a modern world. His book Walden (1854) detailed the two years he spent
living on Emerson’s land around Walden Pond in Massachusetts. His purpose in removing himself from society was to gain a more objective understanding of it.
Addressing many issues such as economy, reading, solitude, and higher laws, Thoreau
concluded that consumerism and modern life had allowed humanity to neglect reality and
perhaps people their true selves. Thoughts from the conclusion of his book seem to
resonate the most with readers, “Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is
more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star,” and “If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears the beat of a different drummer.”
Unlike much of the philosophy written during this time, the works of Emerson and Thoreau were widely read and reached a larger audience of people. The philosophies of these two men encompassed the individual as part of a whole, emphasizing a need to critically question modern society, spirituality, and ultimately one’s purpose and place within it. Emerson attempted to answer these questions, stating that “all persons were one with nature, and that nature was one with God. This spiritual unity and kindredness gave significance and dignity to the ordinary individual.”183
I would like to propose that Ohr’s peculiar and inconsistent selling habits
reflected his socialist ideals. Ohr would ask exorbitant prices for his wares, refuse to sell
to those willing to pay, and then turn around and offer the piece for next to nothing to
182 Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emerson’s Essays (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1955), 30. 183 Wayne Craven, American Art History and Culture (Boston: McGraw Hill, 2003), 221. 153 someone he deemed “worthy.” This seems to be counter to Ruskin’s and Morris’s ideals, which urge art to be accessible to all. However, barring the realization of a truly egalitarian society, this may have been Ohr’s way of equalizing the classes. He would deny the rich something and grant it to someone more deserving, awarding it democratically and based on merit instead of to the highest bidder.
154
Chapter Six The Beauty of the Grotesque
The evidence discussed in the previous chapter suggests that the rough appearance of Ohr’s pots carried a political or at least a social message—an insistence on the significance of the lower class, of the common worker, of ordinary people who were not wealthy or privileged. Clearly, he strongly identified with the outcasts that society dismissed. Interestingly, however, Ohr intuitively combined this implicit sense of social compassion with another major theme of nineteenth-century thought, the notion that ugliness can be beautiful if seen in the right light. Critics and collectors contemporary to
Ohr often referred to his pottery as deformed, twisted, and ugly:
His work, indeed, suffers from his efforts to make it original at any cost of beauty and aesthetic charm . . . it is the lack of good proportion, of grace and of dignity, that makes it fail to produce on the spectator the effect a work of art should produce. At once I am reminded of those grotesque and rugged poems of Robert Browning’s, which even his most ardent admirers can not defend.184
Such “lack of good proportion” could be seen in social terms as an identification with
social misfits, who are in some way congenitally deformed. But Mohr has proposed that
Ohr’s pots confront still more fundamental issues—the realities of the body:
[Ohr’s] rending and splattering . . . suggest a deeper signification in these works and in Ohr generally. The theme is that of abjection. . . . Abjection’s blurring of interior and exterior specifically explains reactions of disgust to body excretions— matter expelled from the body’s inside: blood, pus, sweat, excrement, urine, vomit, menstrual fluid, plus the smells, sounds, images and other psychic reminders of these excretions.185
184 Hutson, “Quaint Biloxi Pottery,” 225. 185 Mohr, Pottery, Politics, Art, 152. 155
The genital forms Ohr often employed were simply the gateways between the inner and outer realms of the body. Mohr observed that Ohr’s pots did not match up to “received templates of urn and baluster,”186 but, to paraphrase a quote from Chapter One, adhered
more closely to clay’s “shit-like,” half living and half rotted qualities, which produced
“liminal” and “formless” forms.187
Interestingly, both Emerson and Thoreau were concerned with the challenge of
finding beauty in seeming ugliness. Thus, Emerson wrote that man should embrace “the
dignity of the life which throbs around him, in chemistry, and tree, and animal, and in the
involuntary functions of his own body.” Similarly, Thoreau argued that man should learn
“to eat, drink, cohabit, void excrement and urine” in a spiritual way. Further, Thoreau
used the process of creation itself to show that body and soul were interchangeable, as
they originated from the same place. While at Walden he observed winter giving way to
spring, buds becoming flowers, grubs metamorphosing into butterflies, decayed animals
becoming fertile soil. The hawk, symbolic of the soaring spirit, was also a vulture, killing
in order to survive. Life was death and death was life, the earth became spirit and spirit
returned to the earth. Thoreau insisted this realization “should at once cheer and disgust
us.”188
There exists a large body of literature dealing with the abject and grotesque. An
important figure in this field is Julia Kristeva, French philosopher, literary critic, and
psychoanalyst, who in Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection describes abjection as
the process of letting go of something we would like to keep because we understand it to
186 Ibid., 146. 187 Ibid., 129. 188 Joel Porte, Consciousness and Culture: Emerson and Thoreau Reviewed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 9. 156 be a part of ourselves—blood, pus, excrement, etc. However, when we are confronted with these things we encounter something that was once a part of us and are horrified because it no longer is. Kristeva asserts:
A wound with blood and pus, or the sickly, acrid smell of sweat, of decay, does not signify death. In the presence of signified death—a flat encephalograph, for instance—I would understand, react, or accept. No, as in true theater, without makeup or masks, refuse and corpses show me what I permanently thrust aside in order to live. These body fluids, this defilement, this shit are what life withstands, hardly and with difficulty, on the part of death.189
In this way, the abject is not a reminder of death but of the grotesque processes of the
body that are necessary for life.
Kirsteva also uses abject to describe marginalized groups such as prostitutes,
convicts, and disabled persons. In this way, the abject related to Ohr’s work in that his
forms and glazes suggest the grotesqueness of the body’s processes, but also because Ohr
the man and his pottery were marginalized and cast-off.
J. K. Huysmans
Even if Ohr did not read works by Emerson and Thoreau, their concern with
finding beauty and spirituality in the ugly realities of daily life permeated nineteenth-
century American culture, and Ohr was surely affected by their view. But the bizarre,
often grotesque, at times obscene, aspect of Ohr’s work seems to go beyond American
transcendentalism. It connects with a separate strain of nineteenth-century culture, a
fascination with the decadent and the misshapen, as exemplified in the writings of French
novelist J. K. Huysmans and his English counterpart Oscar Wilde, and in some of the
189 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 3. 157 extreme expressions of the Aesthetic movement. If Emerson and Thoreau strove for a closer connection between the physical and the spiritual, Huysmans and Wilde represented a more brutal and irrational interpretation of nature and human existence.
Both writers challenged conventional morality and traditional ideals of beauty. Whether directly, or through intermediate sources, Ohr was surely influenced by these ideas. In the art of clay, his pots reflect the same spiritual crisis addressed by these writers.
Huysmans’s best known book, Against the Grain (1884), was discussed at length in Wilde’s famous novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891). Wilde also praised it when he was brought on trial for homosexuality. Against the Grain focuses on the wealthy Duc
Jean des Esseintes, only surviving member of a once-powerful family that has succumbed to inbreeding and degeneracy. In the book Des Esseintes becomes sick of the hypocrisy of Parisian life and retreats to the country. Here he adopts his own lifestyle, sleeping during the day and remaining awake all night. In his self-imposed solitude he becomes lost in his books (Mallarmé, Baudelaire, Edmond de Goncourt), his art (Moreau and
Redon are his favorites), and his own thoughts, which not surprisingly focus on the ugly, brutal, and phony aspects of the modern world. By thinking too much and incessantly scrutinizing spirituality and purpose, he brings a sickness upon himself that is part physical and part psychological. Ironically, in the end Des Esseintes is only able to save his life by returning to the culture of pretense that he fled.
While Huysmans’s pessimism stems from the folly of humanity—in particular he laments the hypocrisy of the church, the decay of spirituality through capitalism and commerce, and the corrosion of humanity brought on by a trend toward individualism—
158 his meditations revolve around the predictability of human nature and the tendency toward destruction:
Des Esseintes dreamed of . . . the picture of a London, fog-bound, colossal, enormous, smelling of hot iron and soot. . . . All this activity he could see in full swing on the riverbanks and in gigantic warehouses bathed by the foul, black entanglements of beams piercing the wan clouds of the lowering firmament, while trains raced by, some tearing full steam across the sky, others rolling along in the sewers, shrieking out horrid screams, vomiting floods of smoke through the gaping mouths of wells, while along every avenue and every street, buried in an eternal twilight and disfigured by the monstrous, gaudy infamies of advertising, streams of vehicles rolled by between marching columns of men, all silent, all intent on business, eyes bent straight ahead, elbows pressed to the sides.190
Clearly Huysmans views humanity’s modern accomplishments as nothing more than one stage in a cycle doomed to repeat itself continually. Humanity is not God’s divine creation, just another organism that cycles through nature’s processes. What is more, the language he uses to describe nature reveals a grotesque and abject response to it:
The men brought other and fresh varieties [of Caladiums], in this case presenting the appearance of a fictitious skin marked by an imitation network of veins. Most of them, as if disfigured by syphilis or leprosy, displayed livid patches of flesh, reddened by measles, roughened by eruptions; others showed the bright pink of a half-closed wound or the red brown of the crusts that form over a scar; others were as if scorched with cauteries blistered with burns; others again offered hairy surfaces eaten into holes by ulcers and excavated by chancres. . . . Thus assembled all together, these strange blossoms struck Des Esseintes as more monstrous yet than when he had first seen them ranged side by side with others, like patients in a hospital ward, down the long conservatories.191
In linking the colors and shapes of the flowers to images of disfigurement and sickness
rather than beauty and idealism, Huysmans unites the two realities of nature, one being
190 J. K. Huysmans, Against the Grain (A Rebours), with introduction by Havelock Ellis (New York: Dover, 1969; original ed., 1884), 121. 191 Huysmans, Against the Grain, 85–86. 159 no less truthful than the other. He identifies the oft denied dualism inherent in society and nature.
Oscar Wilde
While Huysmans was largely responsible for introducing a fascination with decadence, Oscar Wilde brought this approach to the attention of a broad public. Through both his own activities and parodies and responses to his work, Wilde became familiar to
Americans at all social levels, from millionaires and aesthetes to Colorado miners, who packed in to hear his pronouncements and epigrams when he came to lecture in
Leadville. Southerners were not exempt, for Wilde spoke in New Orleans during his widely publicized lecture tour of the United States in 1882. Notably, not only Wilde’s art, but his persona and mode of dress challenged Victorian standards. Like other artists of the time (Whistler, for example) he embraced a persona with many feminine qualities— he wore his hair long and dressed in extravagant clothing with feminine features such as ruffles and silky fabrics.
While Victorians generally shrank from using the word “homosexual,” they clearly recognized from the first that Wilde was interested in a world that was sexually perverse. The critic Mark Hennessey has noted that Wilde’s play Salome “opens a window onto a sinister and forbidding world.” Not surprisingly, “initial reviews were decidedly mixed.”192
Hennessey, and other authors, recount that these issues burst into public scandal
in 1895 when Wilde unwisely brought a libel suit against John Shalto Douglas, the ninth
192 Mark Hennessy, Oscar Wilde: Complete and Unabridged (New York: Barnes and Noble, 2006), introduction. 160
Marquess of Queensberry and father of Lord Alfred Douglas, the beautiful young man with whom Wilde was infatuated at the time. During the London trial the defense brought out numerous witnesses who testified to Wilde’s homosexual escapades. Feeling the tide turn against him, Wilde dropped the suit only to be charged with gross indecency. He was convicted and sentenced to two years hard labor. After his 1897 release he lived a penniless and hermitlike existence until his death in 1900.
Hennessey speculates that, to many, Wilde’s incarceration represented a triumph of virtue. But Wilde’s imprisonment and subsequent death also made him a martyr. Prior to his arrest, gay culture had no public identity and homosexuality did not exist in popular discourse. Afterward, it entered the public consciousness. In his book Oscar Wilde’s Last
Stand (1998) Philip Hoare describes the infamous Billing’s trial, which also centered around a libel suit, this one brought against the right-wing Noel Pemberton Billing by the famous Salome actress Maud Allen. As Hoare demonstrates, the suit was essentially a continuation of the issues raised during Wilde’s trial even though it took place eighteen years after his death. This time what was on trial was the Cult of Oscar Wilde.
Wilde not only challenged sexual mores but introduced a new sensibility that defied normal notions of beauty and propriety. In his Picture of Dorian Gray, for example, he celebrates Dorian’s youthful beauty but seems to be equally fascinated, and in some sense enchanted, by the decay that becomes visible in his portrait. Dorian’s many immoral and selfish acts over a period of the years register on the face of the portrait, while Dorian never ages:
Hour by hour and week by week, the thing upon the canvas was growing old. It might escape the hideousness of sin, but the hideousness of age was in store for it. The cheeks would become hollow or flaccid. Yellow crow’s feet would creep round the
161
fading eyes and make them horrible. The hair would lose its brightness, the mouth would gape or droop, would be foolish or gross, as the mouths of old men are. There would be the wrinkled throat, the cold, blue-veined hands, the twisted body, that he remembered in the grandfather who had been so stern to him in his boyhood. The picture had to be concealed. There was no help for it.193
Wilde uses shockingly grotesque and brutal language to describe the aging process. One does not merely grow old. Instead, people “fail,” their senses “rot,” they become
“hideous” and “haunted.” Growing old is clearly a natural process of life, however Wilde
refuses to come to terms with this part of nature peacefully. Even his grandfather is
described as being “twisted,” “wrinkled,” and “blue-veined.” He resists idealizing the
inevitable, or idyllically yielding to an unstoppable process. Instead he embraces the abject truth of nature, taking the position that humanity is not exempt from decay, death,
or failure. Our carcasses are not above rotting in the woods like the body of a dead deer.
In a remarkable passage of the novel, Wilde celebrates not only physical decay, but moral and mental deformity as well. As he cynically declares:
I am telling you the truth. There is a fatality about all physical and intellectual distinction, the sort of fatality that seems to dog through history the faltering steps of kings. It is better not to be different from one’s fellows. The ugly and the stupid have the best of it in this world. . . . If they know nothing of victory, they are at least spared the knowledge of defeat. They live as we all should live, undisturbed, indifferent, and without disquiet. They neither bring ruin upon others, nor ever receive it, from alien hands. Your rank and wealth, Harry; my brains, such as they are—my art, whatever it may be worth; Dorian Gray’s good looks—we shall all suffer for what the gods have given us, suffer terribly.194
To Wilde, the beautiful, wealthy, and intelligent of a society are actually the disfigured
ones because they are so unlike the norm. Thus, paradoxically, Wilde actually envies the
193 The Best Known Works of Oscar Wilde (New York: Blue Ribbon Books, 1927), 188–89. 194 Ibid., 109. 162 majority of the population who are poor, stupid, and ugly because society’s expectations of them are much lower. Like Huysmans, he sees people as decaying, reveling in their own ignorance and celebrating the very accomplishments that cause their collective decomposition. Only a select few (the wealthy, smart, and beautiful) can see the real truth and for this they suffer.
In a general way, there are many parallels between Ohr and Wilde—the fascination with the grotesque and malformed or the delight in playing a self-consciously exaggerated artistic role. To be sure, Ohr, with his bristling mustache and clay-covered hands, was aggressively masculine rather than “feminized.” But the notion of playing up sexual roles to the point of parody was something Ohr shared with Wilde. He just pushed the approach in a slightly different direction.
Omar Khayyám
While Ohr’s work has suggestive parallels with that of Wilde, he never explicitly
paid tribute to Wilde. But Ohr’s immense affinity to Khayyám is illustrated by the signs
that adorned his pottery, declaring himself “BILOXIES OHRMER KHAYAM” (Figure
48).
Omar Khayyám was a Persian mathematician and astronomer of the late eleventh
and early twelfth centuries. His mid-nineteenth-century fame, however, was due to the
appearance of a collection of his quatrains, The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, translated
and published in 1859 by the English poet Edward Fitzgerald. Three more editions
followed in 1868, 1872, and 1879, respectively, and Khayyám began to develop a
following with many of the qualities of a cult. By the late nineteenth century, numerous
163 illustrated editions had begun to appear, including a famous one by the American visionary painter Elihu Vedder with illustrations that interestingly foreshadow both
Symbolism and Art Nouveau.
In 101 stanzas the Rubáiyát describes the certainty of death and explores man’s struggle to find his purpose in life. Christopher Decker notes that Fitzgerald’s verses seem to have only loosely followed the original Persian source. In practice, Fitzgerald had produced a new statement of his own: an iconoclastic rejection of traditional religion, traditional morality, traditional notions of rectitude and duty. While he would have been censored for making such assertion on his own, these statements became acceptable, or at least marginally so, because Fitzgerald’s publication was allegedly a “translation” of an ancient source.195
Indeed, even when presented in the guise of a translation, the book was widely
attacked as decadent and blasphemous. Decker gives the example of William McIntoch
who published a spoof of the Rubáiyát’s alleged nihilism in The Philistine that went as
follows:
Wake! for the bearded goat devours the door! And now the family pig forbears to snore, And from his trough sets up the Persian’s cry— “Eat! drink! To-morrow we shall be no more!”
And is this all? Shall skies no longer shine, Or stars lure on to themes that seem divine? Ah, Maker of the Tents! Is this thy hope— To feed and grovel and to die like swine?196
195 Christopher Decker, Edward FitzGerald’s Rubáyát of Omar Khayyám: A Critical Edition (Charlottesville; University Press of Virginia, 1997). 196 Philistine 1, no. 4 (September 1895): 125–26. Opposite Crane’s “A Lantern Song” and contains eight stanzas. 164
McIntoch clearly felt that Khayyám’s Rubáiyát was immoral and represented the denial of all religious and spiritual ideals.
Notably, the verses of the Rubáiyát repeatedly refer to a potter and his pots, using the potter as a as a metaphor for God (the maker) and the pots as a symbol of human existence. Ohr was surely fascinated by this fact. For example, stanzas eighty-two through ninety describe a conversation among pots overheard by the author while standing in the potter’s house:
As under cover of departing Day Slunk hunger-stricken Ramazán197 away, Once more within the Potter’s house alone I stood, surrounded by the Shapes of Clay.
Shapes of all Sorts and Sizes, great and small, That stood along the floor and by the wall; And some loquacious Vessels were; and some Listen’d perhaps, but never talk’d at all.
It is as if the author is describing Ohr’s studio exactly—pots of all shapes and sizes stacked on shelves, on the floor along the wall, hung from walls and along doorframes.
The poem continues:
Said one among them—“Surely not in vain My substance of the common Earth was ta’en And to this Figure moulded, to be broke, Or trampled back to shapeless Earth again.”
Then said a Second—“Ne’er a peevish Boy “Would break the Bowl from which he drank in joy: “And He that with his hand the Vessel made “Will surely not in after Wrath destroy.”
After a momentary silence spake Some Vessel of a more ungainly Make:
197 The word “Ramazán” refers to Ramadan, the fourth pillar of Islam, which requires worshippers to fast between sunrise and sunset. This and all subsequent verses are taken from Decker, Rubáyát of Omar Khayyám, 107–8. 165
“They sneer at me for leaning all awry; “What! Did the Hand then of the Potter shake?”
Whereat some one of the loquacious Lot— I think a Súfi pipkin—waxing hot— “All this of Pot and Potter—Tell me then, “Who is the Potter, pray, and who the Pot?”
“Why,” said another, “Some there are who tell “Of one who threatens he will toss to Hell “The luckless Pots he marr’d in making—Pish! “He’s a Good Fellow, and ‘t will all be well.”
“Well,” murmur’d one, “Let whoso make or buy, “My Clay with long Oblivion is gone dry: “But fill me with the old familiar Juice, “Methinks I might recover by and by.”
So while the Vessels one by one were speaking, The little Moon look’d in that all were seeking: And then they jogg’d each other, “Brother! Brother! “Now for the Porter’s shoulder-knot a-creaking!”
The imagery Khayyám’s language evokes is not as visually repulsive as that of
Huysmans or Wilde, but it is just as decadent in its uncertainty of God’s presence and human purpose. Ohr’s feelings toward his “mudbabies” were strongly reminiscent of
Khayyám’s celebration of diversity of forms. Pots that had been burned or those that were ungainly, lopsided, and dysfunctional were never discarded by Ohr; instead, they occupied a place of honor in his studio.
Perhaps this was Ohr’s way of answering the questions Khayyám proposes— would God create someone only to throw that person away in a life with no purpose? And further, what of the pots/people that are “ungainly” and “leaning all awry”? Are they nothing more than mistakes? For Ohr broken and grotesque pots were just as capable of beauty. In this way Ohr’s pots reflected humanity itself, which consists of the “well- made” as well as the “broken.” People or pots that appeared useless still had an inherent
166 destiny or function. One’s purpose can be recovered/discovered by simply filling the pot with water—that is, letting it perform the action it were created for. As with people, simply doing what they can is enough to confirm the importance of their existence because what they are able to do is what they are destined to do. This was Ohr’s way of answering the plaguing nineteenth-century concern about the pointlessness of life.
Khayyám also addresses another issue that was important to Ohr—the parallel between the potter and God. Ohr saw himself as a Creator, akin to God because both created out of nothing but mere mud. In his tender treatment of his “mudbabies” Ohr addressed the niggling voice, symbolized by Khayyám’s Sufi pipkin that inquires, “who is God?” God is a “good fellow” and kind, manifest in both the creator and the created.
Ohr’s purpose was granted by God and he, in turn, grants further purpose to his mud creations.
As a related but peripheral issue, it is interesting to note the similar visual formats employed by Ohr and Khayyám. The following is a typical example of the kind of language Ohr used:
Soposen a pretty ‘a beautiful’—a raving handsome and sweet darling steen years of lovlyness—were 2 tell U—right at Y-R mustach—that u was the sweetest man on Earth and was going 2 love U 4 Y-R life—heart & soul; wouldent you shout very loud, and nervously, the word—WHAT.198
A sample of Khayyám’s writing follows:
And if the Wine you drink, the Lip you press, End in what All begins and ends in—Yes; Think then you are TO-Day what yesterday You were—TO-MORROW you shall not be less.199
198 Hecht, After the Fire, 28. 199 Decker, Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, 102. 167
Both Ohr and Khayyám have distorted punctuation, random and sporadic use of capitalization, and illogically ordered sentences. Undoubtedly, Khayyám’s balanced quatrains were far more organized that Ohr’s text, yet both writers relied on a visually dramatic composition to further enhance their words. Whether or not Ohr was deliberately emulating Khayyám is an ultimately unverifiable but interesting thought, strengthened by the importance Ohr placed upon Khayyám’s words.
If the writings of Emerson and Thoreau embraced individuality and optimistically suggested a more general, but more pervasive presence of God, the Rubáiyát proposed a spirituality that was separate from the popularly accepted, organized religions of the day.
Indeed, it seemed to highlight the question that must have nagged at everyone’s subconscious: What if the human race had no special divine purpose? What if humans were just another form of animal with no God or heaven or hell to guide their conscience or reward their faithfulness?
These thoughts reflect a different and darker response to the spiritual crisis during the Gilded Age. Indeed, while much of the population held fast to the idea of a controlled and ideal beauty, another portion was attracted to a darker, brutal, and more realistic conception of nature.
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Part II: OHR AS A POTTER
Chapter Seven American Pottery in the Nineteenth Century: Its Three Traditions
Ohr began his career as a common laborer, shifting from one trade to the next, and he began his career as a potter as a simple artisan, turning out simple forms. After a time, however, Ohr’s ambitions shifted: he began to think of himself as an artist and to insist that his works be viewed as manifestations of creative genius. This shift is documented in the advertisements with which Ohr promoted his career. Throughout the
1880s and early 1890s Ohr placed ads in the local Biloxi Daily Herald that advertised flowerpots, stove flues, water jugs, and the like for sale, such as the ad below:
POTTERY! GEO. E. OHR, Manufacturer of Flower Pots, Drain Tiles. Stove Flues, Water Jugs, Vases and Artistic Ware200
Ohr makes it clear that he considered his wares primarily functional, manufactured for
practical purposes for the citizens of Biloxi. In fact, he seems to have been willing to
perform almost any job for which he would be paid. One 1889 ad, placed seven years
after Ohr learned to pot, advertised him as a sign painter. During these years Ohr clearly
thought of himself as a craftsman. Whether working in clay or with paint he was someone
who could create usable things for his community. In 1892, however, Ohr had a
photograph taken of himself with a group of large pottery vessels beside a sign reading
“Art Potter” (Figure 49). No longer did he wish to be known as the local craftsman who
could paint a sign or provide a chimney flue. He wanted to be known as an artist.
200 Biloxi Daily Herald, 29 August 1885. 169
Notably, the vases standing beside him, while well crafted, are not particularly original.
For the most part they follow standard high Victorian fashion. However, some ruffling around the lip of the vase in the middle, and the fanciful scrolled handles on some of the other shapes, provide a hint of the direction Ohr was soon to take.
To understand Ohr’s amazing artistic development it is helpful to know something of the background of nineteenth-century pottery and the traditions from which he emerged. By the late nineteenth century industrialization had touched almost every aspect of life and pottery production was no exception. Mass-produced pottery was predominant in the North where industry was king. Rather than originality or craftsmanship, the goal of industrialized potteries was to create huge quantities of ceramic ware and therefore huge profits. As a result, these potteries relied heavily on premixed powdered clays and glazes. Often potters were organized in assembly line fashion, churning out repeated forms to be decorated at a later stage. In lieu of hand- thrown clay, molds were also used. Wares were fired in large electric or gas kilns whose temperatures and firing patterns were standardized to fit their formatted glazes. Pottery of this sort could barely be called art or craft, but was instead purely utilitarian.
Ohio was a major manufacturer of clay products during this time. Two prominent potteries exemplify the amount of pottery large companies had to produce. Laughlin
Pottery in East Liverpool, begun in 1871, produced 25,000 to 35,000 different dinnerware patterns by the 1920s. Rookwood Pottery in Cincinnati, founded in the late 1870s by
Maria Nichols Storer, was known for providing consumers with mass-produced wares that bore high-quality glazes.
170
In contrast to mass-produced pottery practices, folk pottery of the South was created under much smaller, more intimate familial conditions. Unlike mass-produced pottery, which originated for profit making, folk pottery began in small agrarian communities and was inextricably tied to the needs of locals and the resources of the land. Simple functional forms for food storage and serving ware were the primary products. Clay was dug from local pits, glazing techniques were simplified and used natural minerals, and kilns were built by hand and fired using logs cut by the potters.
Folk pottery was a family endeavor and the tradition was often passed down through generations. The lack of formal or academic training for folk potters preserved the phenomenon of early handicraft traditions.
The third form of pottery, art pottery, refers to an idea linked with the emergence in the late nineteenth century of the Arts and Crafts movement, which strove to beautify all aspects of ordinary life. It was not something distinct to Ohr (Van Briggle, Chelsea
Keramic, Rookwood, Teco, and Newcomb all described their wares as art pottery), but was a phenomenon that rejected the impersonality of mass-produced ware and sought to elevate the craft status of folk pottery.
While fine art was often thought of as elite, expensive, and inherently useless in a practical sense, art pottery and the Arts and Crafts movement sought to break artistic hierarchies and instill functional everyday ware with the same kind of beauty and value found in high art. Furthermore, this functional ware was intended to be less expensive and more accessible to the everyday person, rejecting mass production and maintaining the individuality and one-of-a-kindness found in fine art.
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Ohr’s Experience as a Traveling Potter
Exactly which or how many potteries Ohr visited is not known, though some evidence has been retrieved. He seems to have covered a lot of ground from 1881 to
1883. Hecht has provided conclusive proof that Ohr spent time at the Pison Pottery in
Madison County, Tennessee. Found at the pottery was a clay stamper inscribed with ‘Geo
Ohr’ and the following poem:
If you want to Shit with ease Put your Elbows on your knees. If you Shit to fast just shove Your Nose up my Arse Sheakspear
In Chapter Two I described how both Ellison and Mohr linked Ohr to the Kirkpatrick brothers in Anna, Illinois, through their commonly used pig flask form. While there is no documented proof, Ellison has linked Ohr to various other potters through like forms and motifs, including teapots (1820s–30s) by Thomas Haig of Philadelphia; ruffled flowerpots from the James Pottery in Chester County, Pennsylvania, from the 1820s
(Figure 19); the John and Solomon Bell brothers of the Shenandoah Valley who manipulated vases; the handled vases (c. 1870s–90s) of Anthony Baecher of Winchester,
Virginia (Figure 20); Ott and Brewer’s Belleek ware of Trenton, New Jersey; the deformed bowls and vases of English designer Christopher Dresser while he was at the
Linthorpe Pottery (Figure 21); works at Rookwood Pottery in Ohio and the Chesea
Keramic Art Works in Massachusetts; and the molded and functional works of the
Salamander Works in New York City. As previously discussed, because Ohr “sized up every pottery” in sixteen states, going as far west as Dubuque and all the way up to
Albany, it is very probable that he was at least aware of each of these and many more
172 potteries. Interestingly, Ellison notes that “most members of the contemporary art pottery movement were painting floral motifs on largely standardized shapes, although a few adventurous souls were making asymmetrical vessels on the potter’s wheel.”201 Ohr’s
stylistic choices differ significantly from most of his contemporaries, yet his relationship
to these seemingly dissimilar potters establishes the framework that he was working both
within and against.
Ohr was also influenced by earlier sources. Ellison has demonstrated that Ohr’s
pots are at times reminiscent of works from the Chinese Sung and T’ang dynasties
(Figure 50) and even the Ancient Greeks (Figure 51). By and large it is not possible to
determine the direction of exchange between Ohr and contemporaneous potteries, as is
the case with Rookwood and Chelsea. Regardless, it is obvious that Ohr was engaged in
some kind of dialogue, even if only on a visual level, with potters all over the United
States.
The sixteenth-century French potter Bernard Palissy is one specific master to
whom Ohr consistently compared himself, although it’s unlikely that Ohr had seen any of
Palissy’s work. Palissy’s forms often employed bright colors and animal forms such as
snakes and lizards, which occasionally appeared on Ohr’s pottery (Figure 52). However,
while Palissy decorated his forms with actual representations of animals and plants, Ohr
distorted the vessel shape itself in a way that is more abstract and seems to embody a universal grotesqueness.
Ohr may have likewise been drawn to Palissy because of the legends that surrounded him, establishing him as an innovator and artistic rebel. Palissy was known for his obsessive search for Nuremburg faience enamel—a search so compulsive that,
201 Clark, Ellison, Hecht, Mad Potter of Biloxi, 65–66. 173 according to his biography Palissy, The Huguenot Potter (1860), he purportedly burned all his furniture as well as some of the supporting woodwork in his home to pursue his quest. Most people around him, including his wife and family, thought his behavior was insane. When he finally achieved his goal, he became famous and was patronized by
Catherine de Medici, but his period of success was relatively brief. Because of his
Protestant faith, he was thrown in the Bastille, where he died at about the age of eighty.
Palissy’s reputation as an eccentric and outcast would surely have appealed to
Ohr, who never did get the recognition he felt he deserved. While Ohr did not burn his home or furniture, as Palissy had, Ohr was a controversial figure—a social outcast.
According to Naomi Miller, Palissy was well known as a maker of grottoes, a garden form that gained popularity during the Renaissance. Interestingly, Miller points out that the source of the word “grotto” is “grotesque” defined as “an underground place or capricious ornament,” according to Huguet’s sixteenth-century French dictionary.
Miller states that “grottoes, especially in the sixteenth century, were associated with the grotesque, the Italian grottesca”202 because of their rugged unpolished surfaces. In
Palissy’s grotto designs (only fragments of realized grottos survive), a direct and
empirical observation of natural phenomena is the principal concern. In fact Palissy
strove for a look that could be mistaken for that of nature itself :
Shells were indeed a source of natural inspiration for Palissy whether in his plans for a fortress city or in the chambers he designed for gardens as places of retreat. To accentuate the natural character of the chamber—its enameled interior, a cave in the form of a coiled shell—he had it covered with earth so that having planted several trees in the aforesaid earth, it would not seem to have been built.203
202 Naomi Miller, Heavenly Caves: Reflections on the Garden Grotto (New York: George Braziller, 1982), 9. 203 Ibid., 56. 174
We know that Ohr christened himself the “second Palissy” in a quote that has already been cited, “When I’m gone (like Palissy) my work will be prized, honored and cherished.”204 However, one may well ask whether Ohr’s identification with Palissy was
based more on affinities they shared as potters or on their mutual repudiation of
conventional norms. (I will return to the ways in which Ohr alluded to, transformed, and
modernized Palissy’s work in the following chapter.)
The education Ohr received from his contemporaries was not limited to issues of
form and practice. The following discussion, which I have divided into two main
sections—New Orleans Art Pottery and Newcomb Pottery and New Orleans as Cultural
Center—describes these specific environments and outlines their impact on the
philosophies and methodologies Ohr would employ.
New Orleans Art Pottery and Newcomb Pottery
As discussed in Chapter Two, even after he returned from his pottery sojourn and
began his own business, Ohr often supplemented his earnings by working at the New
Orleans Art Pottery with mentor Joseph Meyer. While his 1881–83 tour of American
potteries was clearly imperative to his development as a working potter, Ohr’s first job
with Meyer marked the beginning of a more cultural education that informed his
decisions as an artist. From the moment Ohr moved to New Orleans to study with Meyer
he was exposed to many of the components inherent in a cultural and capital-based
204 Times-Picayune, October 1894. 175 metropolitan area including cultural diversity, art, philosophy, advertising, display, and showmanship among others.205
Ohr’s and Meyer’s pottery operation, the New Orleans Art Pottery, was a small
one, located on Barrone Street in the French Quarter. Scant literature exists on the New
Orleans Art Pottery (indeed much of the information in the following pages was garnered
from a single crucial source, Jessie Poesch’s Newcomb Pottery: An Enterprise for
Southern Women, 1895–1940, published in 1984) as it only existed from about 1885 to
1890. Further, the history of the New Orleans Art Pottery is often merged with that of the
Newcomb Pottery because they shared the leadership of William and Ellsworth
Woodward and the ideals of the newly evolving southern pottery enterprise.
Though Newcomb Pottery went on to achieve great success, both contemporaneous and more recent scholars agree that it was the New Orleans Art Pottery that was significant to the development of the art pottery movement in New Orleans.
Indeed it was one of the first true art potteries established in the U.S. as well as the first art pottery to be associated with a college:
The Newcomb enterprise was begun in 1894, while the art pottery movement was still new. However, there was already quite a following—the New York Society of Decorative Art was founded in 1894, Rookwood in 1880, and Chelsea in 1891. Grueby Faience was reorganized in the same year Newcomb was founded and the Dedham Pottery the following year. As well, in New Orleans the precedent had already been set by the New Orleans Art Pottery. 206
205 Hecht, After the Fire, 14, notes that the New Orleans city directory for 1889 carries the entry: “Ohr George E Potter, r. 249 Baronne” so we know he was in residence there for at least that year. We also know that Ohr split his time between Biloxi and New Orleans because his wife Josie, still in Biloxi, became pregnant with their second son, Leo Ernest, during this time. 206 Jessie Poesch, Newcomb Pottery: An Enterprise for Southern Women, 1895–1940 (Exton, PA: Schiffer, 1984), 18. 176
The New Orleans Art Pottery, in effect, provided the foothold for Newcomb Pottery, which would eventually usurp the services of Meyer and Ohr as well as their facilities, processes, and artistic vision. The New Orleans Art Pottery and the better known
Newcomb Pottery are inextricably linked, yet began as distinct entities.
As employees of the New Orleans Art Pottery, Meyer and Ohr were responsible for throwing the pots that the women of the Decorative Art League at Newcomb College would decorate. H. Sophie Newcomb College was Tulane University’s answer to exclusively female colleges of the North and was “to the South what Vassar, Wellesley,
Smith and similar colleges are to the North.”207 First president of Newcomb College,
Brandt Dixon, explains that Newcomb College was conceived of and funded by
Josephine Louise Newcomb, whose daughter Harriet Sophie died at the age of twenty-
five in 1870. Josephine’s husband, Warren, had died in 1855, leaving his fortune to his
wife and daughter. In 1885 or 1886 (sixteen years after her daughter’s death) Mrs.
Newcomb donated $100,000 to Tulane University for the formation of a girls college that
would be named after her daughter. Newcomb College opened in 1887.208
As the art department flourished, Newcomb absorbed the responsibilities that Ohr
and Meyer once held and in the early part of 1890 took over the facilities of the New
Orleans Art Pottery as well. Meyer stayed on, but it is doubtful Ohr remained much longer: “There is a strong oral tradition that he [Ohr] worked as a potter with Meyer at the Newcomb Pottery sometime after 1896. There are no official records of his
207 King, “Ceramic Art at the Pan-American Exposition,” 15. 208 Information regarding the history of Newcomb College from Brandt V. B. Dixon, A Brief History of the H. Sophie Newcomb Memorial College 1887–1919: A Personal Reminiscence (New Orleans: Hauser Printing, 1928). 177 employment.”209 However, Ohr’s relationship with Newcomb potter Jules Gabry provides a strong link between Ohr and Newcomb, suggesting his involvement if only for a short period of time.
Poesch notes that Jules Gabry was hired by Newcomb as its first potter in 1894–
95, preceding Meyer and Ohr, who began working at Newcomb c. 1896. Gabry committed suicide by drowning in 1897. Ohr’s relationship to Gabry can be confirmed by inscriptions he made on several pots. An example:
Jules Gabry born in France 1829 SUISIDE in Biloxi’s water Aug 18th 1897 68 years, poverty cause
Ohr knew Gabry enough to be saddened by his death, and the most rational place for their meeting was at Newcomb. It is also rumored that Gabry lived with the Ohrs for a time,
but this cannot be verified. That they were friends is commonly accepted since Gabry left
his kick wheel to Ohr who gave it a place of honor in his studio and used it throughout
his career.210
The importance of the New Orleans Art Pottery to New Orleans, and perhaps the
rest of the country, was matched only by its importance to Ohr himself. For the first two
years of his pottery career Ohr traveled around the country, hungrily digesting any
information about pottery he could get. After that he focused on his own pottery, though
209 Poesch, Newcomb Pottery, 94. Poesch gives no documentation as to why she thinks Ohr was at Newcomb c. 1896 and admits that there are no surviving records. However, 312n2 cites Blasberg’s article “Newcomb Pottery” in Antiques, no. 94 (July 1988): 73–77, and his correspondence with Paul Cox as part of the oral tradition to which she is referring. Part of that oral tradition most likely comes from the fact that Meyer started work at Newcomb in 1897 and brought Ohr with him. That Ohr started c. 1896 and Meyer in 1897 may at first seem a discrepancy, but Ohr’s start date is tentative and could just as easily have been 1897. 210 Gabry jumped into a river in Biloxi, though it is unclear which one. Reporters at this time were often more interested in romanticizing events than in recording accurate facts. 178 his goal was to master basic logistics and techniques. Ohr was still building his pottery workshop, and the pots he produced though quite competent and skillful were mainly practical forms such as pitchers or chimney flues, often derivative of established folk wares. Therefore, the New Orleans Art Pottery (and eventually Newcomb) and the people he met there provided Ohr with the first taste of what pottery could be when not shouldered with the responsibilities of functionality and tradition.
While at the Art Pottery and Newcomb Pottery, Ohr was engulfed in the cultural and intellectual activity of the Tulane college environment. In the foreground of a drawing by William Woodward from 1889 (Figure 53), Ohr maneuvers to throw a rather large vessel, while Joseph Meyer concentrates on his work in the background. The setting is the New Orleans Art Pottery with which the Woodwards were directly involved before it eventually gave way to Newcomb’s pottery department. William’s watercolor portrait of Ohr (Figure 54), also done in 1889, captures the long mustache and beard while presenting his dark, intense eyes with knowledge only gained through a personal relationship. His paintings provide a fascinating record of the interlocking relationships between the Woodward brothers, Ohr, and Meyer, and reflects the significant role these men played in Ohr’s life during this time.
Joseph Meyer
Though Meyer and his relationship with Ohr was discussed briefly in Chapter
Two, I would like to return to this topic and further explore Meyer’s importance to Gulf
Coast Pottery and the effect he had on Ohr.
179
Paul Cox, historian, critic, and fellow potter at Newcomb College, wrote in 1935,
“Joseph Fortuné Meyer is the impressive and outstanding figure in the story of the Gulf
Coast potteries . . . [he] is the foundation for all that has been done in fine ceramics along the entire Gulf Coast.”211 Given that Meyer introduced Ohr to the potter’s wheel and the
two worked together for many years, it is clear that they had a close relationship. Nine
years older than Ohr, Meyer had no children and may have acted as a kind of father
figure and role model to Ohr—he willingly shared the wisdom he (had learned through
his years of experience.212
Meyer’s pots, nothing like Ohr’s mature art pottery, were traditional and folksy,
imbued with subtle gracefulness, neutral glaze tones, and functionality (Figure 55).
Meyer’s surfaces were more conducive to decoration, which is most likely one of the
main reasons that Ohr did not stay at Newcomb Pottery as long as Meyer did (according
to Poesch, Meyer worked at Newcomb from 1896 to 1927, the longest of any employee).
Most scholars believe that Ohr’s early works resembled Meyer’s folk wares.
However Meyer’s stylistic precedence, I argue, was not nearly as imperative to Ohr’s
development as was the image of intelligent, learned, spiritually liberal mentor Meyer
projected.
Cox describes Meyer as “an incessant reader” and “agnostic as to faith” though he
was married in the Catholic Church. Meyer’s agnosticism must have been a novelty to
the Episcopalian Ohr. Meyer was most likely Ohr’s introduction into a world that was
exactly the opposite of small town Biloxi.
211 Paul E. Cox, “Potteries of the Gulf Coast: An Individualistic Ceramic Art District (first installment),” Ceramic Age, no. 25 (April 1935): 118–19. 212 Meyer had no children, but “reared the daughter of a servant woman as his own,” according to Cox in “Potteries of the Gulf Coast,” 119. 180
The following quote suggests that Ohr was a constant and thoughtful reader:
I who happened to know him intimately, knew there was a second and very serious side to George Ohr. What did he read— foolishness? No, but such literature as ‘Dawn,’ ‘Mirty,’ ‘The Christian,’ ‘Nantilus,’ ‘The Philistine,’ Etc. He clipped much of poetry . . . To his friends he showed a depth of thought none would ever believe he had who remember only his Eccentricities.213
Perhaps Meyer’s worldliness nudged Ohr toward more “serious” literature. It is not too difficult to accept that the older, wiser, and more sophisticated Meyer made an impression on the younger and less experienced Ohr.
The Woodward Brothers
According to Poesch, William Woodward and his younger brother Ellsworth were prominent figures in New Orleans cultural life. It was the Woodward brothers who formed Newcomb College, later to become the revered Newcomb Pottery. Both brothers were members of Tulane’s faculty, William starting in 1884 and Ellsworth following in
1885. Though Ellsworth was the brother who worked with the Newcomb Pottery, it was
William who led the New Orleans Art Pottery. Together they formulated the artistic vision that took root at the New Orleans Art pottery and was cultivated at Newcomb.
We learn from Poesch that the Woodward brothers represented the growing trend of industrial arts in the United States that had been provoked by European dominance of decorative arts at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition in 1876. In part, the growing industrial arts movement endeavored to educate American citizens about art culture from
213 Sumner W. Rose, “Gone But Should Not Be Forgotten,” Biloxi Daily Herald, 19 August 1921, 2. The Philistine to which Rose refers was Elbert Hubbard’s periodical. The Christian is most likely another nineteenth-century journal. Despite researching literary databases and contemporary sources I have been unable to identify “Dawn,” “Mirty,” or “Nantilus.” They could be character names, novel titles, or other periodicals. 181 the perspective of manufacturing and mass production. In order to “compete more successfully with the manufacturers of Europe,” the Massachusetts Normal Art School
(now the Massachusetts College of Art) opened in 1873 and was the first institution of its kind to emphasize art culture in American manufacturers. The goal was to unite art and industrial labor so as to integrate art more fully into everyday life. Not only would this
“raise man above the level of savagery,”214 but it would allow America to compete in
other markets.
By 1878 the Normal Art School was boasting that it was not only “rearing
teachers of industrial art for the state’s schools, but sending teachers to many of the
remoter states of the Union,” Poesch states. Through “the development of skill, the
improvement of popular taste, and the enhancement of general well being” the school
intended to benefit the industrial field and “deepen the river of life.” The school
maintained that “artistic, moral and ‘civilized’ values were all intertwined.” William
Woodward and Gertrude Roberts Smith, who joined the faculty at Newcomb in 1887,
both received part or all of their training at the Massachusetts Normal Art School.
Ellsworth received his degree from the Rhode Island School of Design.215
Poesch suggests that William may have been partly responsible for the
Massachusetts Normal Art School’s educational exhibit at the World’s Industrial Cotton
Exposition in New Orleans in 1884–85, which acted as an impetus for development of
the New Orleans Woman’s Club in 1884 and ultimately the New Orleans Art Pottery.
William and Ellsworth, native New Englanders and proponents of the Normal Art
School’s mission to educate the country on aesthetic matters, represented the infiltration
214 Poesch, Newcomb Pottery, 10–11. 215 Ibid. 182 of northern ideas into the entire country including the deep South. Their presence in New
Orleans was significant because it revealed that, despite the ideological separation, the
North and South had a symbiotic relationship. Further, Ellsworth was known for his zeal and devotion to the power of “lower” art forms (read craft): “his energy filled the lecture hall. . . . The work absorbed him, and he attacked it with a zealot’s singleness of purpose, within the classroom and without. He was at once teacher, practitioner, and promoter of art.”216
Their efforts in educating the women at Newcomb College on ceramic decoration
far exceeded a mere extracurricular purpose. To Ellsworth, the pottery classes were social
experiments performed in the petri dish of the agricultural South. Aware that industrial
opportunities available in New England were absent in the still-recovering post–Civil
War South, he wondered how anyone, women in particular, could earn a living from his
or her artistic training. Especially when considering that “The most unfavorable
conditions under which an art school can maintain an existence are beyond doubt
experienced in those cities remote from manufacturing and publishing centers”217 such as
New Orleans. So Newcomb became a kind of model for the practical application of artistic training.
Ellsworth strove for a simple, sensible and practical form of beauty available to all that would counteract the debasing materialism rampant in America’s industrial age, similar to William Morris’s Arts and Crafts movement in England. Beauty was a
216 Richard Megrew, “The Most Natural Expressions of Locality”: Ellsworth Woodward and the Newcomb Pottery,” in John Lowe, ed., Bridging Southern Cultures: An Interdisciplinary Approach (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005), 35. From Woodward’s speech entitled “What has Art to Do with Practical Things?” 217 Ellsworth Woodward, “The Work of American Potters. II. Newcomb Pottery Typical of the South,” Arts and Decorations, no. 1 (January 1911): 124–25. 183 civilizing factor that every human craved, and Ellsworth insisted, “It is therefore no light matter this gospel of the holiness of beauty.”218 Ellsworth declared: “Art begins at home.
We are learning that the museum and the picture gallery are not the natural and exclusive
home of art, but that civilized life demands it in its daily routine.”219
Like Morris, Ellsworth viewed the cheapness and offense of industrialization as a threat to nature, beauty, and the human spirit. However, he did not declare it evil as
Morris did—merely misguided. Industry’s potential force could be of great value. To
Ellsworth, industry was the foundation for any great art center in the modern world. He reasoned that, as with most consumer products, competition forced higher quality, and in the case of art, a higher artistic value. Logically, a high concentration of quality art and artists would demand the creation of schools to train aspiring artists while also educating
the general public about art appreciation. Museums and galleries would be established
and “beauty would flourish within the heart of the industrial beast.”220 The result would
be a community uplifted by the surrounding beauty. To Ellsworth, art and industry were
very successful business partners.
Further, art and industry could be united and applied to the manufacturing
process, thereby allying the craftsman and the industrialist while simultaneously putting
beauty and art within the reach of every American citizen. Ellsworth’s strategy would
stop the influx of ugliness into the marketplace and destroy the barrier between higher
and lesser, fine art and craft.
Ellsworth’s choice to develop the pottery medium in particular is logical. It also
gave him an opportunity to advance another of his teachings: to emphasize the identity of
218 Megrew, “Natural Expressions,” 136. 219 Ibid., 138. 220 Ibid., 137. 184 the region. Traditional southern crafts were hand made because industrial or technological advancements were absent. Poesch states that in 1899 Mary Sheerer, who was hired as director of pottery decoration in 1894 and shared Ellsworth’s ideas, summarized three basic guidelines of the Newcomb Pottery: to establish a pottery where the students of the art school could continue their work; that “no two pieces should be alike, but that each should be fresh-inspired by the form and demands of that special vase or cup”; and the process in its entirety should be a “southern project, made of southern clays, by southern artists, decorated with southern subjects.”221
As a result, the look of Newcomb Pottery was precise. Because the choice to
make Newcomb a pottery business was founded on the southern culture of hand crafts,
the colors and designs should also call upon local flora and fauna. Newcomb Pottery
relied on a range of blues and greens, as well as typical floral forms found along the Gulf
Coast and Louisiana swamps. Wild flowers such as blue flag, yellow jasmine, and tiger
lily were emphasized as well as the forests of pine, magnolia, and cypress. Poesch notes,
“There was an infinite variety of plant life to be observed year round, and to be adapted
for the designs of the artist who decorated the pottery. The trees and flowers found on
Newcomb Pottery provide a miniature guide to the flora and fauna of Louisiana.”222 Such ideals were in keeping with those of John Ruskin and later critics who wanted to get away from the imitation of historical forms in favor of finding a distinct style for the modern age. As well, the elaborate design and regional characteristics further connect these works to Art Nouveau, also popular during this time.
221 Mary Sheerer, “Newcomb Pottery,” Keramic Studio, no. 1 (1899): 151. 222 Poesch, Newcomb Pottery, 21. 185
As previously mentioned, Ohr built his own pottery, felled his own trees, dug and treated his own clay, mixed his own glazes, and individually produced each pot, which is clear evidence of his similarity to the Arts and Crafts philosophies espoused at Newcomb.
Further, after Ohr had left Newcomb, around 1890, he began describing his wares as “art pottery” and impressing upon them Newcomb’s doctrine of “no two alike.”
Ohr’s time at the New Orleans Art Pottery and at Newcomb was also responsible for the formation of many of his ideas about the nature of art and pottery as well as the purpose of art in the world. Ohr’s pottery and that of Newcomb appeared to be two peas within the same distinct pod when set against other developing contemporary potteries such as Rookwood, Grueby, and Dedham, which used a division of labor organizational system. In its early years Newcomb had a simplified system of creation, consisting mainly of two steps—throwing the form and decorating it. Ohr of course threw and decorated his own wares. As mentioned, larger potteries that relied on a division of labor system involved several craftsmen in the creation of a single pot, effectively removing the individual artist from the process. Finally, both Ohr and Newcomb were products of the deep South whose origins were connected with the educational program of a college;
Ohr with Newcomb and Newcomb with Tulane.
However, Ohr was not always faithful to the Arts and Crafts ideal, the philosophies of Ellsworth Woodward, or Newcomb’s business and artistic practices.
Ellsworth intended to elevate Newcomb’s clay medium by applying the philosophies on industrial art he learned at the Massachusetts Normal Art School. He wanted Newcomb pots to combine beauty and function, and in so doing facilitate a harmonious, coordinated, yet useful and practical home environment. The harmonizing beauty to
186 which Ellsworth aspired was manifest in the decorative elements of the pottery. Because the design of a pot was realized by at least two different people (men would throw the forms and women would decorate them), the “no two alike” ideal that Ellsworth insisted on was rooted in the surface design rather than the form itself. In fact, formal originality was discouraged:
A wide variety of shapes were employed through the years [at Newcomb]. However, from the beginning there was no special effort to create new shapes, nor to make the shapes a distinguishing mark of the pottery as was, especially a little later, to be true of Grueby and of Van Briggle wares. . . . Such forms . . . would have been chiefly the work of the potter. If a basic aim was to show the role of artistic training—in design, drawing, painting, even sculpture—and to employ the talents of young women so trained, then the character of the decoration could best be set off by traditional forms, unobtrusive in themselves.223
The extent to which Ohr embraced the “no two alike” philosophy should now be
evident. However, for Ohr, the true interest of a pot was not in the surface decoration, be
it hand-painted or glazed en masse. The true value of a pot was manifest in its form.
Tradition has it that Ohr was fired from the Newcomb Pottery because his work was too
“eccentric” for a woman’s college. Given the persuasive oral accounts regarding his
behavior, along with the suggestive shapes of his pottery, “too eccentric” was most likely
another way of saying “too sexual.” Nonetheless, the reality, at least in part, of the
situation is that Ohr’s thin and twisted pieces were not suitable for the kind of surface
decoration that Newcomb desired. His pots exemplified the “no two alike” philosophy to
an extreme.
According to Poesch, Newcomb continued to develop along the ideals that its
pottery be individual works of art, but maintained a characteristic formula that readily
223 Poesch, Newcomb Pottery, 21. 187 identified them as Newcomb, ultimately forcing its pots into conformity. The designers were so restricted by the popularity of the trademark Newcomb design (Figure 56) that
Sadie Irvine, a lead decorator at Newcomb said, “I was accused of doing the first oak tree decoration, also the first moon. I have surely lived to regret it. . . . And oh, how boring it was to use the same motif over and over though each one was a fresh drawing.”224 Since
the oak tree and moon designs were among Newcomb’s most popular, it is telling that she
uses the word “accused.”
Eventually, Poesch concludes, the desire for their affordable, functional, and
unique wares demanded an increase in production, that could only be met by abandoning
handmade procedures in favor of the mass manufacturing against which they had been
reacting—the fate of many Arts and Crafts ventures. Not only did this process remove the
hand of the artist, but it drove up prices, effectively reversing the very ideals they had
espoused.
Ohr’s wares, which were often nonfunctional and rarely beautiful in the Victorian
sense, managed to escape the repetitiveness into which so many art potteries, Newcomb
included, had fallen. Perhaps fortunately there was never a craze for Ohr’s pottery as there was for Newcomb pots, though he went to fairs, even winning the previously mentioned medal for most unusual pottery at the St. Louis exposition in 1904. As a result, he never needed to meet a high demand for his pots, and therefore never needed any labor but his own. Ohr’s consistent originality, and his lack of success, precluded any potential need to choose between originality and mass production.
224 Ibid., 176. 188
New Orleans as Cultural Center
Tulane University and Newcomb College profoundly influenced the intellectual
life of New Orleans. Grace King, writer for a national magazine, made the following
comment in 1896 about the effect Tulane had on New Orleans:
Within the decade . . . since the University began its active work in the community, the whole framework of intellectual expression in society . . . has received a new and healthy impetus. Scientific, literary, and art circles have sprung into being where before existed only desultory efforts, or, more accurately speaking, longings: old, neglected libraries have been rehabilitated . . . extension lectures have been given, free drawing classes maintained.225
In this period, New Orleans was one of the most prosperous and culturally vital cities in the South. Between 1850 and 1950 New Orleans was the busiest southern seaport, the chief route through which cotton was exported, and the gateway to the Upper Mississippi
River Valley before the rise of Chicago. New Orleans had more European immigrants and more native-born free people of color than any other southern city.226
The endless flux and flow of diverse people and foreign goods made New Orleans
a major artistic and cultural hub, one that drew artists from other parts of America as well
as from Europe. A strong economy likewise promoted a strong circle of patronage. New
Orleans was the largest and most cosmopolitan city in the South, even having its own art
market. For all these reasons New Orleans was the South’s artistic center.
As artistic and cultural centers for southern and northern society, New Orleans
and New York, are analogous. But these comparisons cannot be extended to their
225 Joy Jackson, New Orleans in the Gilded Age: Politics and Urban Progress 1880–1896 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1969), 259–60. 226 Randolph Delehanty, Art in the American South: Works from the Ogden Collection (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1996), 156. 189 respective artistic styles. Southern art collector Randolph Delehanty has described the
South artistically as remaining distant and separate from the North:
Southeasterners created visual art in the nineteenth century, but the region was far from the national centers of opinion and publishing, and its art got little attention from northeastern critics. American art came to mean northeastern art; everything else was relegated to merely ‘regional’ status.227
Thematic and compositional choices of southern artists also contributed to their regional
status. The South, in its desire to be identified as separate from the North, incorporated motifs from its own regions such as landscapes, flora, and fauna. As a result:
Nonrepresentational art came relatively late to the South, and unlike impressionism, abstract expressionism never became widespread in the region. Representational and narrative art, on the other hand, endured in the South, and they continue to thrive today, finding new interpreters and interpretations.228
As previously noted, Ellsworth Woodward strongly encouraged students to stick with
local subjects, borrowing British writer Violet Piaget’s concept of “genius loci,” defined
as “a substance of the heart and mind, a spiritual reality.”229 Woodward’s philosophies on
which subjects were appropriate for southern designers at Newcomb Pottery reflected the
general perception of what southern art should be as well.
The self-imposed segregation of northern and southern art markets, and
Ellsworth’s insistence on southern locality, did not preclude artistic dialogue between the two sections of the country, however. If the North paid little attention to southern art, nothing stopped northern artists from visiting the South or southern artists from relocating to the North.
227 Ibid., 3. 228 Ibid., 11. 229 Piaget published novels under the name of Vernon Lee and was a strong proponent of the Aesthetic movement. 190
Delehanty’s book, one of only a few to relate a history and survey of southern art, lists many artists working in New Orleans at the time Ohr was there (see Appendix I).
The importance of New Orleans as an artistic center is indicated by the fact that of the
199 southern artists of the early nineteenth to late twentieth century listed by Delehanty,
115 lived or worked in New Orleans at some point. Most of them had come from some other place, and 98 were associated with northern cities.
Abstract painter Arthur Dow had a close connection to Newcomb, as seen in his letter to the pottery dated 15 November 1899:
All who have at heart the development of art industries, who recognize the value of beauty in its relation to every day life, will be interested in the Newcomb pottery. It is a serious effort in the direction of uniting art and handicraft. The examples I have seen were beautiful in form and color, simple in design, and of excellent workmanship.230
The effect these New Orleans experiences had on Ohr is best expressed by the primary documents discussed at the beginning of the chapter. The ads he placed in the
Biloxi Daily Herald illustrate that prior to his time in New Orleans Ohr considered his
wares to be primarily functional, while the 1892 photograph shows that by then he had begun to think of himself as an art potter (Figure 49). Clearly his experiences at
Newcomb and in New Orleans caused, at least in part, Ohr to shift his perception of himself from a utilitarian potter, as seen in this 1885 ad, to an art potter.
Ellsworth’s philosophies of “no two alike” became the hook upon which Ohr hung his reputation. His experience with other artists in New Orleans provided artistic substantiation to the clay medium, and in so doing freed Ohr from the constraints of
230 Ormond and Irvine, Louisiana’s Art Nouveau, 32. 191 traditional folk art. Northern ideology freed him from the constraints of southern regionalist art.
The Process of Making Pottery
When we look at Ohr’s strange pottery it is easy to suppose that his pieces are
some sort of joke. But if so, they were a joke that took a great deal of hard work. Unlike
most modern potters, Ohr did not just go to the store to get his materials. We know that
constructed his pottery studio, dug and sifted his clay, built his kiln, and felled trees to get
the logs with which he fired his pieces.
Before the twentieth century, most potters had to find and treat their own clay.
Potters would locate a vein of clay, usually in low-lying spots along creek and river beds
or even by the side of the road. Before digging and transporting it, the clay had to be field
tested for suitability. Spitting on the clay, rolling it into a worm shape, or twisting it
around a finger were all ways to test its plasticity or roughness. Clays that were not
plastic enough could not be thrown into large vessels. Likewise, clays with too much
sand or grit would cut the potter’s hands while throwing.231
Locating and testing the vein was the easy part. It was then necessary to collect
several hundred pounds of the clay (enough to last for at least a week) and transport it
back to the studio. Ohr rafted sixteen miles down the Tchoutacabouffa River to reach his
favored clay vein. The process of mixing the collected clay was even more laborious and
231 Much of the following technical information is based on Nancy Sweezy, Raised in Clay: The Southern Pottery Tradition (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1984), 34. 192 time consuming, consisting of five different processes: drying, pulverizing, screening, wet mixing, and compacting.232
After the collected clay was brought back to the studio, it was left in the yard to
break down, which had the effect of sifting out larger debris. As the clay was needed it
was remoistened and left to soak for a few days. At this point the clay still contained
unwanted debris so most potters used some version of the dry-pan method: rolling a large
wheel over a perforated surface to crush the clay and small stones. The resulting powder
was filtered through a screen and the fine grains sifted into a bin beneath.
The clay, which needed to be churned and made consistent, was placed in a barrel
and ground in a beam mill drawn by a mule walking in circles. Water was added to the
clay at this point. Surviving photographs of Ohr’s studio often picture a donkey,
confirming he used at least this step in the process (Figure 57). After an hour of grinding,
the batch of clay was removed, shaped into large blocks, and stored for use. These blocks
were covered by wet sacks to prevent the clay from drying out. Most potters would
continue this process throughout the entire day in order to process at least a week’s worth
of clay at one time.
Before the clay could actually be thrown on the wheel one more step was
necessary. After retrieving a block from storage, the potter would thinly slice the clay to
remove by hand any roots or stones still remaining. He would then throw these slices on a
slanted board and knead them together like bread. This process, called wedging, would
removed further debris and also eliminate air pockets. This step was crucial, and it is still
used by potters today because leftover debris (no matter how small) and air pockets not
232 Ibid., 35. 193 only interfere with the balance of a pot on the wheel, but could also explode in the kiln destroying that piece and those around it.
Turning or Throwing Pots
Because of the nature of clay processing folk potters “have always made up a batch of balls at one time, weighing them for the size pot to be turned.”233 The ware of
folk potters was predominantly utilitarian, dictated by the needs of the individual potter
and the community. In his book Turners and Burners, Charles Zug explains that as a
result folk potters were judged on just a few simple criteria. It was important that a potter
could produce quickly—one hundred gallons of clay a day in various forms (fifty two-
gallon jugs or twenty five-gallon jars, for example) was good, though two hundred
gallons a day was not unheard of. Though the pot was a simple form, it still needed to
have a pleasing shape. Along with a nice shape, there was also a degree of smoothness
required. A rough pot would be difficult to handle and difficult to clean. A pot especially
intended for storing wares had to be free of interior grooves, glaze pocks, or any other
crevices in which food could become trapped.
Thinness was also a major concern. A three-pound pitcher is not too heavy, but
filled with liquid it can become quite cumbersome. As well, a potter who did not know
how to throw a two-gallon form from one pound of clay was wasting clay and therefore
lowering the efficiency of the pottery. Indeed, “consistent output combined with prudent
233 Ibid. 194 use of the clay and relative neatness, as opposed to roughness, in finishing off a piece were the marks of a mature turner.”234
Zug lists the most common forms used by folk potters: jars, jugs, milk crocks, churns, bowls, pitchers, cups, mugs, plates, teapots, pipes, candlesticks and lamps, animal
feeders, grave markers, flowerpots, vases and urns, and objects of whimsy including miniatures, puzzle and ring jugs, “monkey” jugs, and face vessels.
Most of these forms are self-explanatory, used predominantly for food storage, preparation, and service as well as other practical purposes. However, articles of whimsy do exist, though in much smaller numbers. Their relative scarcity suggests they were done in the off season or in moments of down time during the day. Because they consumed more time than the average vessel, they may have been done most often upon request or as gifts for friends or family. These objects of whimsy give us a glimpse into the creative workings of the folk potter—a skill he used daily, but one that was kept in check most of the time.
Miniature vessels were used as toys for children, samples to advertise full-sized pots, or as tourist items. They are very detailed and exhibit perfect shape despite their small size. The necessary skills and tools needed to create these impressive miniatures assures that their creation was a time-consuming process.
Puzzle jugs (Figure 58) are ancient practical jokes from European potters, Zug explains. They are drinking vessels constructed with perforated necks, hollow handles and rims, and various mouthpieces designed to embarrass anyone wishing to drink from them. Ring jugs, though not practical jokes, were more whimsy than function (Figure 59).
234 Charles G. Zug, Turners and Burners: The Folk Potters of North Carolina (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), 251. 195
The center was hollow, forming a doughnut shape. In this way the jug could be carried over the arm or hung on a hook. While this sounds convenient, they did not hold enough water to slake a workingman’s thirst.
“Monkey” jugs look like regular jugs except rather than just one opening, they contain two openings, one on either side of the handle (Figure 60). It is thought that one opening was for drinking and the other for pouring or refilling. The origins of this kind of vessel are still uncertain. The form itself is very common throughout Spain and also occurs in Africa and the Caribbean. Because the monkey jug is a practical one, it is very likely that many cultures had developed similar forms, each one making its way to the southern United States. 235
The origin of the term “monkey” jug is equally unclear. Some suggest it comes
from the phrase “suck the monkey,” referring to someone who drinks directly from the
bottle and therefore drinks too much. The word “monkey” is also common vernacular in
South Carolina to describe a strong thirst, allowing the function to suggest the name.
Finally, the word “monkey” has a racially derogatory history, suggesting that one spout
was for a black or slave, while the other was for the white or master. Zug contests this last hypothesis saying that the double spouts have a practical purpose—the larger for filling the jug and the smaller for drinking from. Further, the extra spout serves as a vent, which allows air to escape or re-enter the jug when it is used. However, given that
“monkey” jugs were most likely used while working in the fields, and given the loaded nature of the term “monkey,” especially in the southern states, it is logical that, as least on occasion, the name was used to derogate African-American labor.
235 Ibid., 378. 196
Face vessels, also known as “face jugs,” “ugly jugs,” or “voodoo jugs,” are perhaps the most well-known objects of folk potter whimsy (Figure 61). Face vessels can range from simple lines etched into the surface to suggest a face to three-dimensional noses, ears, eyes, mustaches, and even teeth made of porcelain or stone. They are no less common than the other objects, but interest perhaps comes from their ugliness and suggested supernatural purposes such as voodoo or burial rites, though Zug states, “none has been discovered that dates before 1920.”236 Possible inspiration could stem from
African masks or Etruscan funerary urns. Usually their origins are not so dark, often
serving as practical jokes or simply to attract tourists. It is perhaps these “ugly jugs” that
most closely link Ohr to the traditions of the southern folk potter. Like the “ugly jugs,”
many of Ohr’s wares were disfigured. And while I have yet to hear anyone describe
Ohr’s pots as “supernatural” or “voodoo,” they did exhibit aspects of nature that were not
always pleasant or idyllic. Aside from his trinkets and snake pots (to be discussed below)
Ohr’s wares rarely exhibited literal translations of reality, whether they be faces, flora, or
fauna. However, Ohr’s pots seem to be an abstraction of “ugly jugs,” ultimately granting
the two very similar meanings.
Glazing
The most common form of glazing among folk potters was salt glazing, a process
in which salt was literally thrown into a hot kiln and allowed to melt over the pots. Zug
explains that this method would seal the pots, making then watertight, but also provide a
nice decorative finish. Salt glazing was popular because it was easy and less expensive
236 Ibid., 384. 197 and less time consuming that any other glaze options. Most salt-glazed forms are blue, gray, or green (Figure 62).
Ohr’s pots were not salt glazed, which is evident by the variation of colors for which he has become known. Instead, Ohr appears to have used some form of alkaline glaze, which became regionally popular in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
Though salt and alkaline glazes are similar in appearance, according to Zug, alkaline glazing tends to have more ingredients and is therefore much more variable than salt glazing (Figure 63). The descriptor “alkaline” refers to the flux—the element that lowers the melting point of the glaze to the proper level. Folk potters commonly used lime or wood ashes as flux since both were readily available. The actual body of the glaze is glass based, made from silica, sand, quartz, feldspar, or any combination of these.
Therefore, a typical alkaline glaze usually consisted of ashes, some form of powdered glass, water, and clay that was all ground to a smooth consistency. Ohr must have mixed ground minerals with his glaze to achieve his colors. For example, cobalt, copper, and iron would yield blue, green, or brown, respectively.237
As with clay, glazes require just the right combination of ingredients to be successful. A glaze must melt at the temperature suitable for the clay in the pot. It must
also be runny enough to spread over the surface of the pot and also allow bubbles of gas
to escape from the clay. However, it can not be so runny so that it slides completely off
the vertical sides of a pot. In a kiln both the clay and the glaze will expand and then
237 Ibid., 70. 198 shrink again once the kiln cools. It is necessary that the clay and glaze expand and shrink at similar rates.238
Construction of a Kiln and Firing
Like the other aspects of pottery making, the building and firing of a kiln is labor
intensive. Potters today have more convenient options from small electric kilns to gas
kilns, neither of which require construction or the gathering of wood for fuel.
The most popular kiln type for eighteenth- and nineteenth-century folk potters
was called a groundhog kiln, so named because it was built into the side of a hill. This
kiln’s elongated design took advantage of the natural landscape for greater insulation and
support of its walls. Surviving photographs of Ohr’s studio show that he did not use this
type of kiln, using instead a more square-shaped, free-standing structure with a large
chimney (Figure 64). In either case the process and ingredients for construction would
have been similar.239
The first step in building a kiln in Ohr’s time was to level the ground for the ware
bed and chimney, around which a brick foundation wall and side walls were constructed.
These side walls were ten to twelve inches thick, with the height depending on the kiln
design used. If the kiln was to incorporate an arch, which made the flow of the flame
more even and efficient, a framing structure made from wood was constructed. Wedge
shape bricks were fitted into this wood frame and then packed with a mix of fireclay and
sand mortar.
238 Ibid., 168. 239 Sweezy, Raised in Clay, 22. 199
A firebox was also built at the front of the kiln at or beneath ground level and about eighteen to twenty-four inches below the ware bed. Its purpose was to provide ample space for loading large logs and pieces of wood without interfering with pots inside the main kiln body.
Chimneys were also a key element in the construction of a kiln because they draw the flame back evenly through the kiln. Chimney stacks were usually straight and not more than ten feet high. However, chimney height was determined by the drawing power—longer kilns needed taller chimneys. Because the main part of Ohr’s kiln was large, his design required a tall chimney.
In the past, an entire kiln was constructed of brick that was made by the potter.
These bricks were a mix of fireclay and straw, about eight inches square and four inches thick and formed in wood molds. The bricks were then stacked in rows on the ground, surrounded by previously fired brick and in essence fired in a temporary kiln in order to prepare them for use. The bricks were considered fired at a temperature of 815 degrees
Celsius. The entire process of constructing a kiln was repeated every one to two years, as a kiln broke down or became eroded by salt, especially when used frequently.240
As this author knows from experience, loading a kiln is also a tricky task. Some
designs, such as the groundhog, forced the potter to load much of the kiln while lying on
his side. Even taller and more regular shaped kilns, like Ohr’s, presented a challenge. In
order to make each firing as efficient as possible, the kiln must be packed with pots.
However, pots cannot touch one another or be stacked because the glaze, salt or alkaline,
would fuse them together. Further, the stacking of the pots had a direct effect on the flow
of the flame and therefore its heating efficiency. After the first couple of firings, a potter
240 Ibid., 60–64. 200 learned where the “cool” and “warm” spots of the kiln are, which dictates what type of pots are placed where.
After the wares had been loaded, the firebox was partially sealed with bricks, with an opening left through which wood can be inserted to stoke the fire. The wood, a prominent resource in the South, was cut and gathered by the potter. The heating of the kiln began very gradually as a small fire that was kept low overnight. This gradual start was an effort to warm the pots and eliminate moisture. Moist pots or sudden changes in heat could cause pots to crack. After the kiln had been thoroughly warmed, the potter began to increase the frequency of the stoking in an effort to get the kiln to its proper temperature. Ohr did not use high-fire glazes so his firings would most likely have reached a maximum temperature of 945 to 1,110 degrees Celsius. Achieving this temperature probably took two to three days, and it must be held there for several hours in order for the glazes to melt and fuse to the pots. High-fire kilns could be fired for as much as five to seven days.
Nancy Sweezy provides a good description of both the inherent complexities of a firing and the skill it requires of the potter:
Judging the fire is an intuitive act, demanding a full play of the potter’s senses and memory of other firings. His expertise is based on many factors: the prior performance of the kiln in a particular firing, the load of the kiln, the weather, the color of the heat. The melting of glaze cones, either commercial or homemade of dried glaze, or test pieces hooked out of the kiln may aid the potter. These clues provide only partial evidence, a sudden flame may melt glaze in one area and not another or fell a cone.241
After the kiln had successfully reached temperature, the potter had to wait three or four
days until the kiln cooled to see if the firing was successful. In total the firing process
241 Ibid., 65. 201 could take anywhere from seven to twenty-one days depending on the desired temperature and the size of the kiln.
Despite the work involved with getting a pottery up and running, it was a relatively simple endeavor. All the necessary materials could be garnered from nature and the equipment constructed by hand. Little investment was required to start a business and begin earning an income.
Similarities and Differences Between Ohr and Folk Potters
The demands on the folk potter often required that he enlist help. A pottery
business required at least two men, so the potter often hired a turner, whose sole
responsibility was to produce wares, or a general worker, who would help with the other
tasks of the pottery.
The potting life was also often a family affair. Potter Enoch Reinhardt states:
You had to work your wife, and if you had children, work them too. Taking the whole family. All the help you could get. . . . I was hauling wood, grinding clay, beating those cinders, help putting the kiln of ware in, help taking one out, carrying it out to dry, and all that stuff, you know. There was always a job. You go around a potter’s shop, you had a job. You didn’t lay down under a shade tree.242
It seems that Ohr followed this same template, hiring Harry Portman as his helper and
enlisting his children. That this was a hard life was no secret and may have caused more
than a little resentment among his children. Bobbee Davidson Smith, a neighbor of the
Ohrs, stated that Leo Ohr hated his father for making him perform such chores. Such resentment may partly explain why Leo burned his father’s papers after he became an adult.
242 Zug, Turners and Burners, 237–38. 202
As was typical of folk potters, Ohr’s pottery education began at a relatively early age. Zug observes that the “key teaching institution was the family”243 and, while Ohr was the only potter in his family, Meyer was a close friend of the Ohr family. No formal or academic training was required for a folk potter. “Classes” took place in the evenings or whenever the participants were available. In this way folk pottery became a profoundly familial and regional practice of passing skills and advice from one generation to the next.
The working practices of Ohr’s pottery as well as some of the wares he produced make him very closely related to the traditions and methods of other southern folk potters. However, there are some important differences. Zug describes the environments of traditional folk potters:
Such hamlets provided a reassuring, stable world, one filled with familiar people, common tasks, and shared values. Here life changes slowly. New ideas and practices were only gradually integrated into an existence attuned to the eternal cycle of the seasons and shaped by a pragmatic wisdom informally transmitted from one generation to the next.244
Traditional pottery was rarely a fulltime business. In most instances it was a seasonal activity, one that dovetailed neatly with the natural cycle of planting and harvesting. Ohr,
however, was a fulltime potter, making or selling pots throughout the year. He had no
farm or other business that would detract from his time at the wheel, or conversely
supplement his income when his pots were not selling.
243 Ibid., 237. 244 Ibid. 203
Chapter Eight Ohr’s Pottery, Its Types and Its Development
A photograph taken April 1896 showing Ohr, his pots, his children, and his studio provides a tantalizing introduction to his unconventional world (Figure 65). The first impression is simply of clutter—pots are seemingly piled everywhere. He obviously was proud of the sheer quantity of what he had produced. The photograph provides a testament to his physical prowess, his ability as a hand craftsman to compete with the output of industrial methods. At first the arrangement seems utterly random, but in fact he seems to have placed his most prize pots near the center of the photograph, both scattered on the ground and sitting atop the bats. Careful study reveals that these pieces are the most interesting in form, and many of them (notably the large, ambitious urn at the extreme right) show up in other photographs, an indication that Ohr considered them signature examples of his work. In fact, from the frequency with which Ohr photographed some of these pieces, it seems clear that most of the time they were kept in a safe place, away from trampling feet and the work activities of the shop. As our eye moves into the distance, we discover that the nature of the work changes. Neatly arrayed along the back fence are a group of blackened pots, his “burned babies,” which had been damaged in the 1894 fire. Rather than discarding them, Ohr gave them a place of honor in his new studio. Finally, and perhaps most interesting from the psychological standpoint, is the way that Ohr actually placed his children within his pots, so that they blend into the pottery and appear to be sprouting from the pottery itself. I have mentioned previously that in several statements Ohr equated his children with his pots. This photograph is a
204 visual representation of that notion—if Ohr conceived his damaged pottery as “burned babies,” surely he must have conceived his finished pots as “live babies,” essentially equivalent to his own children. Making children and making pottery was a process of procreation that was closely linked in his imagination. Making pots was at some level a sexual process, and their forms were not inert but alive, biomorphic, and uniquely individual.
The 1894 Fire and the Dating of Ohr’s Work
Blasberg has proposed an inexact and misleading method of dating Ohr’s pottery,
“since all the pottery in the building was destroyed by fire, Jim Carpenter estimates that
95% of the extant Ohr pieces date from the years between 1894 and 1906.”245
The Mad Potter is a good example of how this presumption has been accepted. Of
the 133 pots pictured, only three have nonapproximate dates. Eighty-nine are assigned
with a date range of c. 1895–1900, which seems unbalanced; seventeen in the range of c.
1898–1907; and five in the range of c. 1902–7. The remaining pots are divided into specific years, rather than ranges, dating from c. 1894 to c. 1903; one or two pots were attributed to each year, except c. 1900, which has seven pots.
Hecht, Blasberg, and Clark all agree that the fire marked the juncture between
Ohr’s “early work” and his “genius work,” but this turns out to be untrue, or at least an exaggeration. As noted, it has been notoriously difficult to produce a chronology of Ohr’s oeuvre because Ohr rarely dated his pots. However, recent research by Hecht has made it
possible to date many of Ohr’s works, in some cases specifically, in other cases within a
range of a few years.
245 Blasberg, Unknown Ohr, 16. 205
By assembling the evidence provided by dated pots, signature types, documents, photographs of Ohr’s studio, and similar evidence, Hecht has been able to identify groups of closely related works that can be dated, either precisely or within one or two years.
Based on the observation that there is a much greater percentage of pots dated after 1900 than in the remainder of his oeuvre, Hecht asserts that Ohr started to date his pots religiously somewhere around 1900–1901. The fact that no pot with a glaze dated after
1903 has been discovered so far discovered strongly supports the belief that Ohr stopped glazing his pots around 1903. 246
Taken in conjunction with Ohr’s statement that he started signing his pots after
1898:
A visitor asked me for my autograph and since then—1898—my creations are marked like a check. The previous 19 years mark is like any old newspaper type, just like this G.E. OHR Biloxi, Miss.247
Hecht has created a system that can be used to assign pots to specific periods with
reasonable assurance. Thus, he distinguishes pots made before 1898 (stamped, not
signed), pots made after 1898 (bearing a signature), pots made right around 1897–98
(bearing stamp and signature), many pots made between 1901 and 1903 (dated), and pots
made after 1903 (dated, signed, and unglazed). This process cannot be applied to every
pot, nor can it provide dates for his entire body of work, but it offers a point of reference
from which to start, and provides an alternative to the uncertainty and whimsical
246 Because Hecht has not published his methodologies, though he plans to in the future, I will refrain from describing them in depth. However, his continuing research has yielded much valuable information about the dating of Ohr’s oeuvre, which has previously been arbitrarily assigned. 247 This quote is on a sheet of paper full of Ohr sayings that I discovered while doing research the Kovel home in Cleveland, Ohio. Ralph and Terry Kovel are well-known collectors and appraisers of antiquities. Later I found, when visiting Hecht on Long Island, that this sheet full of Ohr-isms was the flier Ohr was including in the flower-pot shipments he had been hired to do for someone else. 206 speculation that has directed the theories of some scholars. Reflecting Hecht’s research,
Ellison’s recent Apostle of Individuality has allowed him to provide more specific dates than those put forth in his Mad Potter essay.
Early scholars imagined that Ohr had an “early” style, generally consisting of derivative and unimaginative forms, and that his “late” style is characterized by the well- known twists and manipulations. When we use Hecht’s criteria for dating, however, it becomes clear that this is not true, because Ohr made derivative pots in his later career and also made inventive, complexly manipulated forms early on. Ellison cites pots charred in the 1894 fire featuring such motifs as folding, crinkling, and ruffling as “sound evidence that Ohr had begun to alter and manipulate his pots well before the fire,” though
“how long before the fire is not known.”248 Further, Eileen Knott, assistant curator of the
Montgomery Museum of Fine Art in Montgomery, Alabama, states:
Eager to create and decorate his own artistic ware, Ohr established the Biloxi Art Pottery in 1888 and, in that same year, challenged himself to create unprecedented form in each ceramic vessel. From then on, Ohr tested his medium by twisting, crushing, folding and denting it into revolutionary shapes.249
Clearly Ohr’s distinctive style was strongly evident in his wares at least six years before
the 1894 fire.
By 1894, Ohr had developed the twisted, manipulated, tortured forms for which
he is known today, often dressed in vibrant and eruptive glazes. It is clear that Ohr’s
pottery, despite having both contemporary and historical influences, was unique and
radical for the time. He tossed aside the traditional functionality of claywork, instead
248 Ellison, George Ohr, Art Potter, 29. 249 Essay for “George Ohr: Art Potter, Mud Dauber, Mad Hatter” show, Montgomery Museum of Fine Art, 7 March–19 April 1992. 207 manipulating, twisting, and crumpling the medium into malformed, anomalous, and even deviant forms.
Despite the size and diversity of Ohr’s body of work it is possible to impose some loose categorizations.
Types of Pots
Ohr’s works in clay can be subdivided into four categories: early traditional and derivative forms; art pottery, consisting of his famous twisted and manipulated works; functional pots such as pitchers, chimney pipes, and flower pots; and trinkets, primarily
small cheap wares such as puzzle mugs, coin banks, Lincoln cabin inkwells, and prank
creamers.
Early/Derivative Forms
Just as any other artist or craftsman, Ohr had to start somewhere. Anyone who has
ever attempted to throw a pot on the wheel knows that it looks much easier than it is.
Often, someone will sit down with the goal of making a nice usable bowl, or perhaps a
vase. Eventually, if moderately successful, she ends up with a deformed flat shape,
commonly labeled an ashtray to grant it some respectability. I have never come across,
either in person or through the description of a collector, an Ohr pot of this extreme early
stage. This of course begs the question of whether or not he kept them, and whether or
not these first attempts were also his “clay babies.” What does exist are early works that
are successful functionally and technically but exhibit few if any of his trademark
208 manipulations, note the bowl Ohr is throwing in Figure 53. His early forms use the fundamental shapes of pottery—vases, bowls, pitchers, etc.
Interestingly, scholars often place works that are obvious imitations from other potters (and even glass- and silverware) into this category, reasoning that Ohr was just accumulating visual data and skill upon which he would later build. Ohr did at times do this, but his derivative wares are not always the same as his early wares, as he borrowed motifs and employed Victorian and traditional forms throughout his career. It becomes clear early on why it is difficult to create a chronology based on form alone.
Functional Pots
If Ohr’s art pottery was criticized for not appealing to the average consumer, then his functional pots and trinket wares were the answer to this. Despite the fact that he never sold a lot of his art pots, Ohr remained in business for many years, owned his home and studio, and supported a wife and ten children. He was of course able to do this by providing the community with its ceramic needs, “if it were not for the housewives of
Biloxi who have constant need of his flower pots, water coolers and flues, the family of
Ohr would often go hungry.”250 The purely functional forms are not given much
discussion in Ohr studies because they bear very few artistic traits. Most are even
unglazed (Figure 66).
Ohr’s functional wares cannot be assigned to late or early in his career as he made
unremarkable and functional pieces, the diametric opposites to his art pottery, throughout
his career. The value of Ohr’s functional wares becomes most apparent upon studying the
origin of the surface decorations. For instance, Ohr created a mold of President Grover
250 McLeod, “Potter, Poet and Philosopher,” front page. 209
Cleveland’s face in an effort to appeal to public awareness of his two terms as president,
1885–89 and 1893–97.
Trinkets
Ohr’s trinket wares were also responsible for a healthy portion of Ohr’s income and have begun to enjoy a deserved elevation of status both in value and scholarship thanks to the insight of Garth Clark. Ohr’s trinkets were often off-color and irreverent, displaying a mischievous and risqué sense of humor, which Clark links to the modern movements of Funk and Dada, as discussed early in the dissertation. However, while
Funk and Dada were tied to complex notions of the fetish and subconscious desire, it seems the motivation behind Ohr’s trinket wares was much more straightforward.
We have established that the two main venues for Ohr’s trinkets were fairs and his studio, which served as his workspace as well as his store. In both environments Ohr’s charge was to attract tourists passing by, which he did successfully through the use of loud, boastful signs, his strange appearance, and his acrobatics on the wheel. Likewise, some pots have been recovered with random names on the bottom suggesting that Ohr may have used an ingenious technique for getting attention. As a tourist passed by he would inquire of her name and before she knew what was happening was watching Ohr spin and swirl the clay into an impossible variety of shapes, completely entertained by his magic show. At the end he carved her name into the metamorphosed clay, simultaneously personalizing a souvenir from the crazy Biloxi potter, while also pressuring her into buying a pot she never really wanted. After all, her name was on it—who else would buy it now?
210
Attracting attention was merely the first step. Making a sale required just as much finesse, because most people were not interested in paying an entire month’s wages for a disfigured and useless pot. I would like to briefly return to his trinket wares (Figures 9,
22, 23, 36, 37 and 67), which were originally discussed in Chapter Two, to explore the purpose the less expensive trinket wares filled. As mentioned, his most popular trinket wares included three-handle loving mugs, puzzle mugs, Lincoln log cabins, inkwells, personalized pots, coin banks, brothel tokens, and feces creamers. It is also significant that the main market for these trinkets was tourists. Citizens of Biloxi had no need for a souvenir trinket from Ohr.
Ohr’s loving mugs, puzzle mugs, Lincoln log cabins, inkwells, and personalized pots are similar to things found in dollar stores today (Figures 36, 37, and 67). They were amusing, fun, innocent, and cheap. They are similar to impulse wares placed at the checkout line. A very simple puzzle mug, having one handle and a single monochrome glaze, would have cost about one dollar, fairly pricey considering the average person made only about twenty-five dollars a month. The construction of these mugs, however, is quite complex. Covered with holes, the user must cover the correct combination of holes in order to get any liquid from the mug. Though I have not found documentation relating to the price of his other trinket wares, it seems safe to assume that their much simpler construction and abundance made then less expensive than his puzzle mugs.
Playful and fun, these trinkets appealed to adults and children alike. The final three trinket types—coin banks, brothel coins, and feces creamers—express a much more mature sense of humor (Figures 9, 22 and 23). This group is quite telling of Ohr’s own naughty and off-color wit. Coin banks often took the shape of droopy and indefinite
211 forms, resembling feces or, at the very least, suggestive organic/anatomical shapes. One bank was modeled after a vagina, complete with pubic hair scratched into the surface
(Figure 35). It contained a slit down the middle where coins were to be deposited.
The brothel tokens (Figure 23) are flat ceramic coins, cast from molds. There are at least five variations, each with an imprint on both sides, providing a total of at least ten risqué phrases. These phrases consist of a combination of words and pictures revealing an explicit message. For example, the words “U Have a Fine” next to a picture of a pear and two baseballs (You Have a Fine Pear of Balls). Also, the words “Good For One” next to a picture of a screw (Good for one screw). Or the words “let’s go” paired with the number
2 and the image of a bed (Let’s go to bed). Some of Ohr’s brothel tokens are even more risqué, with words and pictures making up such phrases as “Leaf [picture of a leaf] me feel your cock” and “You have a hairy [picture of a hare] pussy [picture of a cat].”
Ohr’s feces creamer was a devilish prank (Figure 9). Imagine a small, unassuming bowl set out with coffee and tea. As guests consumed the contents a small pile of feces
(sculpted of clay, of course) emerged, the hook being that the feces were not discovered until the majority of cream had been consumed.
These trinkets were obviously designed for popular appeal and priced similarly.
Clark is certainly not wrong in linking Ohr’s sexual and scatological humor to the fetishistic subconscious of the Funk and Dada movements, but Ohr’s trinkets did not presume to be art as much as money makers, akin to pens with figures that strip when clicked or decks of cards with pictures of nudes.
212
Art Pottery
Though each of these categories share areas of overlap, Ohr’s art pottery is at times the most identifiable. These forms began as traditional shapes—vases, mugs, teapots, bowls, and cups—yet exhibit the extreme colors, twists, and manipulations for which he has become famous. Ironically, these art pots were also the least appreciated by
Ohr’s contemporary public and disparaged by many critics.
By far the most frequent shapes were the vases, bowls and pitchers that afforded him more opportunities to perfect his manipulations while also ensuring a larger output and variety—indeed, he staked his reputation on the oft-repeated “no two alike” philosophy. These forms reveal a fantastic language of shapes and motifs that was distinctly Ohr’s. Further, as I have argued, these imaginative forms arose from a mastery of the medium but are also as responses to new cultural and social phenomena Ohr began experiencing.
It is challenging to try to describe the difference between one of Ohr’s art pots and his other pots, especially in light of modern scholarship, which has interpreted most of his wares from an artistic perspective. How does one define the “artness” of his deliberate art pots, especially when at times the lines between his categories seem to be blurred. The issue is complicated further because it appears that Ohr categorized anything that was not a trinket or functional piece as art pottery, while critics and collectors today have different criteria for identifying his art pots. While some pots may forever remain in limbo, I will outline definite categories, identified by both current scholars and myself, that pervade much of the work considered to be Ohr’s true art pottery. 251
251 Indeed, Ohr spoke as though the mere creation of these wares by the potter himself was justification enough to call them art pottery. Even through in his later years he made bland, derivative, and functional 213
As discussed earlier, at first glance Ohr’s art pottery is neatly aligned with the ideals of the art pottery movement—he emphasized one of a kind individuality, and he worked in clay, a traditionally functional medium, yet vehemently rejected concepts of repetition and mass production. As was also mentioned, he further situated himself within this context by borrowing techniques from contemporaries, such as basic pottery forms, some crumpling and ruffling techniques, and the intermittent use of earthy colored glazes.
However, much of Ohr’s work ceases to be like art pottery of the late nineteenth century
(Figure 4, 5, 6 and 7).
Many scholars agree that Ohr’s work has entered a high-art paradigm, but they rarely agree on why. Some insist it is because of his sculptural use of form, while others dispute this saying his pots did not take advantage of any traits inherent in three- dimensional sculpture. Many critics link his manipulations and contortions to the
Abstract Expressionism of Jackson Pollock, while some challenge the notion that these pots were self-expressive, claiming they were more formalistic than emotional. To an extent, we will never know the answer to these theories as many of them rely on knowing
Ohr’s thoughts. 252
Discussing all the ramifications of what constitutes art and what constitutes craft
would be an exhausting process. Like many such disputes, it is essentially a matter of
definitions, and both the terms “art” or “craft” can be defined in innumerable, almost
limitless ways. It does seem worthwhile, however, to examine this question from the
pots, which he must have separated from his other works, he never discussed this issue. His main qualifiers seemed to be that they be one of a kind and express his “head, heart, hand, and soul.” 252 As discussed earlier, Jeff Perrone insists Ohr’s works should be considered from a sculptural standpoint while Janet Koplos says they do not take advantage of three-dimensional space. Perrone also rejects the notion that Ohr’s pots were expressive, which is espoused by Clark, Ellison, Hecht. 214 nineteenth-century standpoint, since in the nineteenth century this issue was often discussed and debated, and Ohr was surely familiar with the terms of the argument.
If craft is inherently functional and art’s function lies in its aestheticism then
Ohr’s choice to use traditionally functional forms that he then rendered completely dysfunctional was extremely avant-garde for his time. Consider pitchers too small to hold much liquid; bowls filled with wrinkles discouraging any kind of use for fear of the contents becoming trapped (especially food, which would rot); vases that were so visually harmonized that adding flowers would ruin their appeal; and the whole lot thrown too thin, and thus made too fragile, to survive the typical wear and tear of a functional ceramic piece.
This was a period when accepted academic norms were being challenged to reveal deeper emotional or psychological truths. “Finished” paintings by figures such as Kenyon
Cox, William-Adolphe Bouguereau, or Jean-Léon Gérôme were being challenged by more sketchlike works of such figures as James McNeill Whistler or the French
Impressionists. Academic beauty was being contested by various forms of realism, or symbolism, that explored more unusual visual and emotional conditions.
Ohr’s often deformed and impractical pots also defied existing norms. Pitchers that looked like pitchers, but could not perform as pitchers, deformed bowls that were not practical—none could do what was traditionally expected of it. Their distorted shapes seem to provoke existing canons of beauty, while at the same time creating a strange new beauty of their own.
Ohr’s teapots (Figures 68 and 69) provide an ideal example of the difficulty encountered when trying to define and characterize the degree to which his pottery
215 challenged conventional notions of utility. Although they comprise only a small proportion of his oeuvre, the teapots are some of his most fascinating objects, displaying fantastic designs, colors, and/or techniques. For example, he sometimes applied two separate chambers and spouts to a teapot—perhaps one side for coffee, the other for tea.
Or he sometimes used a traditional codagon form (Figures 70 and 71), which required the user to pour the liquid in from the bottom, through an intricate system of interior channels, because the lid has been permanently attached to the pot. Finally, he sometimes glazed two sides of the same teapot in a radically different way, with the result that simply turning the pot around provides the effect of having a new object. 253
His teapots are certainly original and creative, but straddle the line between art and craft in a way his more definite art pottery does not because they are still functional.
If, as I have described above, we can define the “artness” of Ohr’s pots as founded in the
play between a functional form rendered dysfunctional, then where do his teapots fall?
They still use his characteristic radical glazes, but very few, if any, use crumpling,
twisting, or structural manipulation. To be clear, his skill and talent is not what is being questioned. Rather these teapots allow critics to test the definitions of Ohr’s “art” pottery.
It becomes apparent that Ohr defined most of his pots as art pottery and that later researchers, such as Clark, Ellison, and myself, have tried to further categorize what
exactly was artistic about his pots. Their “artness” is not always present, even in pots Ohr
would have considered art pots. It would be extremely cumbersome and ultimately fruitless to speculate, piece by piece, whether or not Ohr strove to cross from craft to art
253 Indeed, the highest price paid for an Ohr pot of which I am aware was for a teapot. The owner paid $100,000 for the work at auction. Unfortunately, I cannot provide a formal citation of this claim, however, upon viewing said pot, the owner confirmed this rumor, which had been repeated by the other Ohr scholars with whom I met. 216 and what qualifiers he used for this. I do not think his knowledge was that specific. What becomes most relevant, however, is that his behavior reflected an awareness of artists whose work was undoubtedly art, and, in emulating their behavior, revealed his conviction in the “artness” of his pots.
Common Motifs
The motifs described in the following section are most often associated with
Ohr’s art wares and some of his early pots. There was no practical place for these decorations on his trinket wares and no need for them on functional wares. There are five distinct decorative motifs Ohr consistently used on his pots, either separately or combined: crumpling, ruffling, twisting, tubing, and surface snakes.
Crumpling
The crumpling effect makes the pot appear to be falling and sagging, as though it is in the process of a slow and certain collapse (Figure 72). Crumpled pots, in contrast to twisted pots, do not exhibit an obvious sense of control. The crumples are often asymmetrical and lopsided, as though the pot has begun to melt. Because the pots have kept their form (never tore or fell apart in any way as a result of their slumping), it is
clear that the chaos was controlled. Ohr had perhaps encouraged a vigorous slump and
allowed it to dictate the shape, but he also prevented the pot from becoming a mere pile
on the floor.
Ohr’s working methods are not clear, but anyone with limited experience working
in clay can begin to interpret how he produced some of his works. He does not appear to
217 have used any type of tool other than gravity and momentum for his crumpled pots.
Unlike other effects, I would hypothesize that his crumpling was done while the pot was still wet, before it had reached its leather state. This effect is most often seen on open- form works such as bowls, pitchers, cups, and some vases, all without lids. The uneven nature of the crumpling made it difficult to fit a lid to the forms.254
Ruffling
Ruffling is a flairlike effect that typically occurs at the top or bottom of a pot
(Figure 15). It appears to be a decorative or superficial feature because it is not engaged
within the structure of the form. Though ruffling is not as structurally precarious as crumpling, it does imply movement, as though the pot was capable of twirling itself.
Ruffles also add an element of suppressed personality and mischievousness. Ohr often used ruffling in conjunction with a smooth, nondeformed pot, allowing the ruffles to break free from the rigidity of the other portion of the pot. Like a little boy in a tuxedo,
ruffling is reminiscent of a struggle to free oneself of restrictions and discomfort.
Ohr’s ruffles can be quite graceful, like flower petals or rippling drapery. Or, in
contrast, they can assume a tattered, thin look. In the former, the soft curves suggest a
process in which Ohr first stretched the clay and then gently rubbed his finger over it to
form a circular dip; the latter process indicates that Ohr pulled the clay thin and then
pinched it together with his fingers.
254 “Leather state” is a term used among potters to describe the state of the clay after it has been taken off the wheel and allowed to dry for some time. The clay is still soft, allowing it to be easily sculpted or carved, but dry enough to support itself. Right after a pot comes off the wheel it is usually very damp and heavy, and the potter must be careful not to jar it too much as it is often too wet to be structurally solid. In mentioning the forms that the effects are most often seen with, I am not suggesting they go only with that form. Indeed, most effects are employed with most types of forms. However, it is obvious that some effects work better with certain forms. For example, long, spindly handles go best with tall vases as they accentuate their height and thinness. 218
Twisting
The twisting effect occurs within the body of the pot rather than at the top (Figure
73). The extraordinary thinness of which Ohr was capable in throwing his pots becomes readily apparent with this effect. A pot of average thickness beginning to twist on the wheel indicates that there is a discrepancy in the thrower’s technique, creating a nonuniform wall thickness. The pot will undoubtedly collapse upon itself because the thinner part cannot support the thicker part. For Ohr to have accomplished this sophisticated effect, he must have thrown the pot with extremely thin walls and kept that thinness uniform throughout the entire pot. This effect was most likely achieved while the pot was still very wet—allowing it to achieve a leather state would cause the dry clay to rip and break.
Perhaps most people envision Ohr placing one hand at the top of the pot and one at the bottom, lifting the form and simply twisting. While this may have been his method for pots whose twists appear at the neck or the thinnest point, it most certainly would not have worked for pots where the twists decorate the foot or appear through the center of the main body. The process of twisting described above relies on the weakest point of the pot, such as the thin neck, but would not work if Ohr wished to place twists in other areas, which he often did.
Twisting is similar to crumpling in that both effects jeopardize the structural integrity of the pot, yet Ohr’s twists are tidy and controlled, not chaotic or lopsided. Ohr most likely made indents with his fingers where he wanted the twist to be and then relied on tools to define and deepen these twists. Twisting was most often used in taller forms
219 such as vases, probably because it was easier to twist a more narrow pot. It was not confined to such forms, however, revealing Ohr’s remarkable technical skill.
Tubing
Tubing, almost exclusive to bowls and vases, symmetrically separates the form into three or four tubes, resulting in an organic shape (Figure 74). This effect is not as frequent as ruffling or twisting, perhaps because it was more time consuming. Ohr would have needed to throw the original shape, allow the form to reach a leather state, cut and shape the body into curved tubes that would then need to be reattached to one another.
What’s more, because this process is more involved, tubed pots do not have the sense of spontaneity and emotional gesture found with other motifs. For someone as skilled as
Ohr, tubing probably would not have taken that long, but the process was more complex.
The final effect, though interesting, is not nearly as electrifying as his other effects.
Snakes
The final effect is the use of snakes (Figure 75), which are far less common than the other effects. The occurrence of snakes on Ohr’s pots has opened a significant dialogue among Ohr scholars since their use was so infrequent and unlike Ohr’s other motifs. The only other animal forms he used were coin banks in the shape of pigs and other farm animals, which were copied from other pots and used in molds.255
255 Both Eugene Hecht and Richard Mohr suggest that Ohr picked up the snake motif from the Kirkpatrick Brothers in Anna, Illinois. 220
Potter Susan Frackelton as well as the Kirkpatrick brothers were known to use snakes on their pots, suggesting a connection among the three potters. Evidence exists that both Frackelton and the Kirkpatrick brothers knew and spent time with Ohr.
Compared to the Kirkpatrick brothers’ snakes, in which distinct species can be discerned, Ohr’s are not very realistic. However, they do have faces, so one knows they were snakes as opposed to long, thin coils. Additionally, they do not intertwine or create a nestlike effect over the entire surface of the pot, as the Kirkpatricks’ do. Rather, they merely encircle the pot once or rest atop a contour in the form. That the long thin handles
Ohr used on vases and teapots appeared to be almost snakelike in form, only lacking a face or reptilian details, suggests that he was merely attempting to develop the motif further.
Types of Glazes
My creations have an intrinsic value; in shape. . . . Can’t read nothing in color R quality in his DESIGNINGS—you paint the house any color you like and you DON’T change his designs. I claim NOTHING in COLOR R QUALITY—only originally in designs—a shape creator and maker. ——George Ohr256
Ohr’s declaration that the true beauty of his pots lay in the form rather than the glaze
stemmed from the accidental nature of the firing process—he preferred to gain attention
from something he did purposely rather than as a result that was out of his control.
Numerous factors influence the success or failure of a glaze, such as consistent quantities
and qualities of glaze ingredients, how thickly the glaze is applied to the pot, the age of
the glaze and even the type of clay. Indeed, glazes applied too thickly or glazes that have
256 From the sheet of paper recovered at the Kovel archives in Cleveland, previously mentioned in note 242 above. 221 a tendency to run will drip onto the pots below, ruining a pot that may otherwise be perfect—a common occurrence.
From the experiences of this author, the success of the firing itself is just as variable. Pots not completely dry can crack or possibly explode if too thick.
Environmental factors such as humidity and moisture can prevent proper oxidation and reduction within the kiln, thus affecting the ultimate color of certain glazes. Additionally, pots remaining in oxidation or reduction too long will result in differing glazes. Even pots made of exactly the same kind of clay and glazed from the same mixture can turn out completely different just based on their location within the kiln.257
These accidents of the kiln were embraced by Japanese potters, who appreciated
the imperfections inherent in natural beauty. Japanese pots are often asymmetrical for this
reason (Figure 76). While Ohr’s imperfections in the forms of his pots may have certainly
been a reaction to this Japanese aesthetic, which was becoming popular during this time,
his denial of the importance of his glazes suggests a different philosophy. However, as
with most aspects of Ohr, this was contradictory. Ohr was certainly nothing like the
Japanese, at least where glazes were concerned, because he exerted a tremendous amount
of effort in achieving these glazes. Too much of an effort, in fact, to believe that they
were as unimportant as he claimed.
Ohr’s glazes illustrate some of the most original and remarkable patinas in the
history of American pottery. To achieve these finishes he sometimes had to fire a pot
three or four times (Figure 77). The amount of effort this took is compounded when one
realizes that Ohr used a wood kiln, requiring his presence throughout the entire four-to-
257 Oxblood glaze or sang de boeuf is especially sensitive to all aspects of a firing, which explains in part why it was so difficult to reproduce the oxblood glaze from ancient Japanese pottery. 222 six day process in order to add wood to the flames to achieve proper temperature. That is a tremendous amount of work for someone who claimed not to think highly of his glazes.
Further, Ohr’s glazes were not accidents, which at times they appear to be, but came from recipes he repeated often. An example of this lies in his pink bubble glaze
(Figure 13), which is often seen repeated either by itself or in conjunction with another glaze on a single pot. This pink bubble glaze features craters on the surface, which are usually undesirable in a glaze for reasons previously discussed.
Likewise, art potters whose main goal was a visually pleasing effect often decorated their pots with drawings or molds. Glazes for these potters were only canvases for their artwork, rarely the finished design. In either case a blistery pink glaze was considered a failure. Ohr, on the contrary, spent countless hours, first inventing the glaze, perfecting the recipe for repetition, and then firing it several times over. These recipes, also allegedly burned by his son Leo, represented a refinement and perfection of a glaze for the purpose of repetition. Again, why would Ohr bother to perfect and repeat glazes if he deemed them unimportant?
Perhaps I am overstating the case. After all, Ohr’s claim that his glazes were secondary does not mean they were inconsequential. It appears that Ohr did feel his glazes were important, but only feigned a casual attitude about them because contemporary critics all but ignored his forms in favor of his astonishing glazes. Both, however, took extraordinary amounts of skill and time. His denial was simply a means of diverting and evenly disseminating attention.
While the majority of Ohr’s glazes were extremely colorful and vibrant, there are two groups that stand out because they are exactly the opposite of this: his metallic glaze
223 pots (Figure 14) and his unglazed pots (Figure 11). These works are significant because they reveal Ohr’s consideration of the form of the pot in relation to the glaze he put on it.
Metallic Glaze Pots
Pots with metallic glazes often diverge strongly from the rest of Ohr’s oeuvre.
Where his other pots have pulsating glazes and uneven and rippling surfaces, contortions that suggest movement, metallic glaze pots are cold, machinelike, and streamlined. They are apt to be slender, tall, and vaselike, often standing two to four inches above the rest of his oeuvre.
While many of Ohr’s pots were organically integrated with a smooth transition at points of direction change, metallic pots appear to be modeled after machine parts that had been pieced together without the same sense of seamless integration. The forms are graceful and show Ohr’s expert throwing skill, but they represent a machine aesthetic that contradicts everything about Ohr.
For these forms, Ohr used a dark metallic glaze, reminiscent of the oil necessary for machines to keep running. Indeed, they display the same kind of rainbow effect that one experiences in an oil puddle on asphalt. As with his other pots, Ohr’s choice of glaze accentuated their distinct shape. He made a conscious effort to unify glaze and form, allowing each to contribute to the final realization. Contrary to his statements, glazes played a key role in his pots.
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Unglazed Pots
It is curious that a group of pots completely lacking in glaze also reveal Ohr’s consciousness of his glazes. Ohr left many pots unglazed throughout his career, though the largest quantity was done between 1903, when he stopped using glazes completely because critics were paying more attention to his glazes than his forms, and 1907 when he gave up potting.
These forms, several made from scroddled clay, often contained more extreme folds, twists, and other motifs, creating dynamic crevices and folds. Because of the multiple steps required for his glazes, Ohr most likely gave up glazing in his old age.
These unglazed forms revealed an intensity not possible with glaze, as the effects would become clogged and coated with Ohr’s glazes. Again, Ohr is conscious of the balance between form and glaze, and compensated for a lack of glaze with these severe manipulations.258
His metallic and unglazed wares highlight his use of glazes in the remainder of his
oeuvre as well. Even the previously mentioned pink bubble glaze is suited to the form.
For instance, pots with the pink bubble glaze are often relatively free of motifs. Though
appearing on curvaceous vases or bulbous teapots, the forms are relatively
uncomplicated, allowing the glaze to shoulder its weight in the design. Ohr’s tall vases
with spindly arms exhibit a range of vibrant glazes from red to pink to speckled (Figure
78). However, the bodies of the pots were only slightly manipulated, and the glazes,
though colorful, are smooth, flat, and shiny. While the three-dimensionality of a pink
bubble glaze, for instance, would detract from the form, Ohr allowed the handles to
258 The term “scroddled” refers to a pot that has been thrown with at least two different colors of clay. When left unglazed, the light and dark clays create swirl patterns within the pot, providing some color without glaze. 225 create undulates of negative space, which enlivened the surface without having to compete with glaze or excessive motif. Conversely, he used these same shiny, smooth glazes to reflect light on the surface of a pot, while also deepening shadows within caverns created by his folding (Figure 79).
Initially it had occurred to this author that some of the unique glazes may provide a means of dating Ohr’s pots. It seemed logical that his pink bubble glaze was so unusual that it would have had to come from the same glaze batch and perhaps even the same firing. In studying many of Ohr’s pots, however, it becomes clear that he used this glaze type too often to be temporally specific.
After Carpenter’s discovery of Ohr’s wares, his glazes again became a main subject of discussion, but for more controversial reasons. Originally, it was thought by
Carpenter and other collectors that Ohr’s bisque pieces, which, according to Hecht, numbered about three thousand, were unfinished and that Ohr simply did not have enough time to glaze them. As a result, about five hundred bisque pots glazed by unscrupulous dealers turned up at auctions.
It was not until Hecht observed that these bisque wares were finished pieces in themselves that this practice came to an end. He wrote a strongly worded letter to
Carpenter pleading with him to stop promoting the reglazing of Ohr’s pots:
Now that you’ve mentioned your tentative plans to have some well known artist glaze and sign Ohr’s bisque pieces I feel even more motivated [to expose the frauds]. You’ve not asked for my advice but I’ll offer it anyway. Having anyone tamper with Ohr’s work for whatever reason—signed or no—is a great mistake! I can only tell you that such a policy would be widely viewed as an outrage. I feel now that any pieces I get from you may well be saving them—even though I recognize that your intentions are honorable, they are short sighted. . . . Please reconsider your intentions to glaze the bisqueware—I cannot imagine a worse
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solution. Honorable men should be able to preserve this treasure—as is—I assure you I would.259
Though this destructive glazing still continues, it is less common and no longer
sanctioned by Carpenter. Furthermore, experts have become more skilled at deciphering
fake patinas, saying they look flatter than Ohr’s glazes and do not exemplify his standard
of making sure the veneer “fits” the design of the pot (Figure 80). Another indication that
a pot may have a fake glaze is that the bottoms of many such pots are unglazed; Ohr
actually glazed the bottom of many of his pots and then wiped it off, leaving a stain
behind.
Spontaneity, Strategy, and Working Practices
As discussed earlier, both scholars and the public alike often describe Ohr’s pots as expressionistic, gestural, and emotional and compare Ohr’s processes to the vigorous and intuitive methods of Abstract Expressionist painter Jackson Pollock and Abstract
Expressionist potter Peter Voulkos. A study of Ohr’s oeuvre and working practices, however, reveals that his pots are not as spontaneous or expressive as they initially appear to be.
The extraordinary thinness of Ohr’s pots has garnered much attention, indeed
Barber claims, “the extreme thinness of the pieces and the great variety of forms are their special characteristics.”260 But it is misleading to believe that all his pots, or even a
259 Only dated “Tues Feb. 2.” From the Ohr archives at the Biloxi Public Library. Carpenter officially denied ever having commissioned the glazing of Ohr bisqueware, claiming that he sold many bisque pots to a certain collector unaware of his intentions to glaze them. This, however, does not seem to be the consensus among Ohr scholars, who for the most part believe it was an attempt on Carpenter’s part to get more money for pots he deemed “unfinished.” 260 Edwin Atlee Barber, Marks of American Potters (Southampton, NY: Cracker Barrel Press, 1971), 155. 227 majority of his pots exemplify this extreme thinness. I have had the privilege of studying close to four hundred Ohr pots through the course of my research, and my first reaction to the very first Ohr pot I touched was surprise at the heaviness of it.
Ohr used thinness not as a constant trait, but as a method for achieving his astounding effects. Pots that contain twists or crumples are necessarily thin because these effects require it. However, pots that do not have twists or crumples are not paper thin because they do not need to be. So, when Ohr sat down to begin throwing a pot, he must have already known what the ultimate design would be because this would dictate how thick to throw the pot. This observation, though seemingly minor, addresses larger issues about his working processes that refute the image of the spontaneous mad potter frantically and intuitively churning out pots, immersed in his own creative trance.
Many of Ohr’s vases suggest premeditation. His vases, as with many of his pots, rarely displayed more than two effects. For example, his vases seem to come in three varieties: elongated and thin with long spindly handles (Figure 78); elongated and thin with no handles, but with ruffling and crumpling (Figure 1 and 2); and finally metallic glaze vases, described above, which lack both effects, appear molded and almost geometric in shape, and do not have the soft organic feel of his other pots (Figure 14).261
Though most of Ohr’s pots are unique and enthralling, some are definitely more
successful than others. The most successful pots have forms, effects, and glazes that all
work together, none overshadowing the other, to form a complete pot. Indeed, some of
his most beautiful works are simple vases with long spindly handles. Their forms seem to
reflect the body of the pot, while softly caressing and accentuating shifts in direction. To
261 With the exception of one or two, most of Ohr’s vases range in height from about five inches to seventeen inches. 228 add additional effects or decoration to these pots would have destroyed the overall design.
It appears that Ohr did not just throw a form and then enhance it with specific effects. He knew which elements could be combined to make a successful pot, and he had an image in his mind (and perhaps even on paper, though those ideas were lost with the burning of his documents) before he even began throwing. Ohr’s pots therefore reflect a premeditation, process and evolution.
Ohr’s teapots, (which were previously discussed from the perspective of their
“artness,”) also reveal interesting observations about his working methods and philosophies. The infrequency of teapots within his oeuvre is easy to explain as they are perhaps the most complicated form to make in pottery. A vase or bowl can easily be completed within an afternoon, or even within one sitting. However a teapot requires multiple steps. All components (body, spout, handle, and lid) must be thrown separately and allowed to dry just enough so that they are solid enough to put together but still moist enough so that they will fuse. Further, a lidded form is very difficult to produce as clay shrinks as it dries and it is quite possible that the body and lid will shrink at different rates depending on how much water was used to throw each piece. So a lid that was measured to fit a pot may not fit after each piece has dried.
Ohr apparently was not good at throwing lids. A successful lid sits securely on a pot and does not move once it is in place. Both Hecht and Ellison, in interviews with the author on 8 and 9 April 2006, respectively, recounted stories of lids falling off or becoming lost, which would not have happened as often had they been secure. In addition, this author checked lids of Ohr pots and found that they were very generic fits,
229 often sliding around the covering. Further, an ad for his wares announces “lidless teapots.”262 Though Ohr made teapots that are complex forms, I cannot recall seeing any lidded jars even though they are not nearly as difficult as a teapot. All of this suggests that Ohr simply did not like to bother with lids perhaps due in large part to his indifference to the practicality of his ceramic ware.
The fact that most of Ohr’s oeuvre consists of simple forms, such as bowls, vases, and pitchers, and that he was not a successful lid-maker suggests that although Ohr praised himself on making unique forms, and challenged others to test his throwing skills, he was more interested in the complexities of his own manipulations than he was in perfecting traditional potting techniques. This is not to say that Ohr wanted to sacrifice quality for quantity, which is certainly not the case since, as pointed out, many of his glazes required that a pot be fired three or four times to achieve the desired effect. It does reveal however that Ohr preferred forms more conducive to his own unique style of twisting and crumpling. Simpler forms were not only more helpful to this because he could complete more, but also allowed him more freedom. As hard as it is to make a lid fit a normal pot, it would be extremely difficult to make a lid fit a warped pot. And why bother? Ohr’s art pots were not intended to be useful.
Just as with his teapots, the rest of Ohr’s oeuvre reveals a compromise between the realities of being a potter and the commitment to his works as art. Ohr’s art pottery is intriguing because it displays simultaneously a remarkable diversity and similarity. As has been noted, one of his main proclamations was that no two of his pots were alike, a statement that is quite true. However, many of his works, though different, are obviously
262 The journal in which this ad appeared is unknown. The document was obtained in the Ohr archives at the Biloxi Public Library. 230 part of the same series, revealing explorations on a common fundamental motif such as vessel shape, handle design, or manipulation within the body. For instance a series of handled vases may be built on a common form with only the handle shape or design differing (Figure 78). A series of pitchers also reveals the similarities within a series
(Figure 81).
Issues of Social Class
In Ohr’s lifetime, many of the leading figures in American pottery detested his work. Charles Fergus Binns, director of the New York School of Clayworking and
Ceramics at Alfred University, told his students that Ohr’s work was vulgar and misshapen, and cited it as an example of what not to do. Frederick Hurten Rhead, one of
the leading mass-production designers of this period—he is remembered today for his
still-very-popular Fiesta Ware—complained that Ohr was “entirely without art training”
and “lacking in taste.”
Such reactions surely reflect dismay over Ohr’s wild manipulations of form and
his seeming disregard as to whether his pots could serve any normal function. But there is
an edge to their derision that seems to go deeper. Rhead’s reference to “art training” and
“taste” alludes to social and educational standards—it implicitly makes reference to the
issue of social class and seems to allude to the fact that Ohr had only a grade-school
education, could not spell properly, used uncouth southern diction, and had grown up in a
slovenly working-class setting that made it difficult for him (or at least so Rhead
evidently believed) to understand proper standards of decorum and beauty.
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In fact, many of the things that make Ohr’s pottery bizarre have an implicit social significance, for, as I have pointed out, rather than seeking to hide his southern, working- class background he flaunted the fact. He not only flaunted it in his bizarre persona, but in his pottery as well. Ohr never forgot that pottery is made of mud. The rough clay of his creations and their rough handmade look proudly proclaim Ohr’s ties with the folk pottery of the South. Allowing an Ohr pot into a well-appointed Victorian parlor was a bit like inviting a common workman with mud-spattered overalls to a fashionable tea.
Ohr’s pottery has a close relationship to folk art—the art of simple, unlettered, low-class folk—in fundamental ways. Ohr dug and ground his own clay, built his own kiln and studio, and fired his wares in a wood kiln. These were all traditional folk techniques. American art potteries—Van Briggle, Teco, Rookwood, and Newcomb, for example—all employed finer clays, higher firing temperatures, and a smoother manner of applying glazes. The roughness of Ohr’s clays and glazes and the free modeling of his forms all proclaimed his ties with the indigenous folk pottery traditions of the South. Ohr also sometimes borrowed forms from folk ceramics. As case in point is the form known as a Ring Jug (Figure 82): a doughnut-shaped vessel that allowed a man walking, to fill his jug with water or liquor and carry it on his shoulder (discussed at the end of Chapter
Seven). However, I summarized it again here in order to inform an intriguing comparison between the formal traits of folk pottery and Ohr’s pottery.
Despite these similarities, Ohr’s work, however, does not fit neatly into the folk tradition, as the case of the Ring Jug illustrates. In Ohr’s rendition of the form, he adds a pedestal foot, graceful handle, and long neck. Thus, the form is no longer simply something to sling over one’s shoulder. It will fit nicely on a shelf or piece of furniture in
232 the dining room or parlor. Indeed, through his keen sense of proportion, he gives the shape the elegant stylishness of a Grecian urn.
Another form that Ohr borrowed from folk pottery was that of the pitcher. The traditional folk pitcher illustrated in Figure 83 is approximately eight inches tall and capable of holding eighty ounces of liquid. Ohr sometimes created forms following this template, as in the pitcher in Figure 84. More often than not, however, Ohr strayed a bit, as in Figure 85 where he began with a standard folk pitcher but then started making changes. He folded the lip down and began to collapse the sides. One could still use it as a pitcher, and the spout still pours, although it is no longer quite so functional since the sides are now only about three and one-half inches high. What is more, the general sense of collapse makes using it feel risky. In short, while folk pottery often provided a starting point, Ohr twisted this tradition into highly personal statements.
Ohr’s methods of surface decoration are also drawn from the folk tradition. For example, he often used sponging. A typical folk design in which a sponge coated in iron oxide was pressed along the circumference of the form is illustrated in Figure 84. While simple, the effect is quite pleasing. Ohr took this traditional folk technique and applied it to forms that are visually unusual. For example, Figures 86, and 87 are both pitchers that use the sponge design technique. While all are recognizable as pitchers, their handles are so flamboyant and impractical, that it is clear that they were intended not for use but purely for decoration. For instance, the irregular zigzags of the handles would make them difficult to grasp. And perhaps more important, the handles appear too thin to support the pitcher by itself, let alone filled with liquid.
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In some cases, Ohr used glazes in a way that seems to clash with their purpose, thus moving his wares out of the usual categories of folk pottery and challenging conventional notions of both use and social class. For example, Ohr glazed the exterior of the pitcher in Figure 85 to resemble the color of stagnant water, while the interior is the reddish purple of intestines or veins. The colors are so unappetizing that it would appear that he was deliberately rejecting the traditional use of the object, and making it purely as an artistic statement. Indeed, who would want to drink liquid that came from a pitcher crusted with mud, slime, or other grotesqueries?
Along with making work that was technically crude, and which echoed the forms of traditional folk pottery, Ohr drew on the folk tradition in another major respect—his interest in obscenity and vulgarity. This is particularly evident in a subcategory of Ohr’s work that survives in great quantity (discussed at length in Chapter Eight)—his brothel tokens.
Classic Forms
If we start with the notion that Ohr’s pottery is a kind of mutant folk art, we have
a good foundation for analyzing his work. One of the things that is interesting about his
work is that virtually everything he produced retains something of a folk quality. He
never worked in porcelain but always in a grainy local clay, and most of his shapes retain
an affinity with folk forms. Perhaps the key aspect of his artistry, the fact that his pots
consistently diverge from perfectly formed shapes, is something that we find in simple
forms of folk pottery, which were cheaply, even carelessly made, but seldom in the
expensive high-class wares of the period, such as Rookwood, which proclaim their
234 perfect symmetry of shape. Yet at the same time that Ohr’s wares proclaim their low- class folksiness, by the 1890s almost everything he produced was eccentric and distinctive in a way that stands out as quite different from the work of other southern folk potters. This divergence does not follow one simple template. Ohr pursued a series of divergent strategies. What is striking, however, is how often he borrowed aspects of
“high art” in pottery making, creating a strange disjunction between “high” and “low” forms of expression. Ohr’s notion of “high art” seems to have evolved over the course of his career. Initially he was impressed by the high-Victorian style with its heavy decoration, then by classic forms, such as those of Chinese pottery, and finally by the effects of Art Nouveau. Ohr’s earlier borrowings tended to be more literal. As he evolved, he did not so much imitate his sources as use them as a jumping-off point for creative experiment.
Much of Ohr’s early work as a potter followed high-Victorian styles. For example, the photograph previously mentioned that depicts Ohr standing proudly beside a half dozen pieces he had made (Figure 49), features pitchers and vases encrusted with curlicue decoration and a sign that reads “Art Potter.” Many of the motifs made reference to the classical art of Greece and Rome, although their sheer profusion, as well as the divergence of the shape from any actual classic prototype, gave the pieces a high-
Victorian character. Other early wares by Ohr are essentially in this high-Victorian style, but have eccentric touches that foreshadow his mature work. A tall handle vase (Figure
88), for example, with an elaborate inscription, encrusted roses for decoration, gadrooning, and elaborate curling handles, is essentially Victorian except for the ruffled rim at the top. Also Victorian in feeling is an elaborate ewer (Figure 89), except for the
235 flared rim, which is freer and simpler in treatment. Many of Ohr’s mature works follow the essential template of shapes provided by Victorian pieces such as these.
Ohr was also interested in the classic forms of both Greek and Sung Chinese ceramics—the two modes of ancient work that were most often held up in this period as standards of perfect formal achievement in ceramics. Ohr reproduced the long neck and rounded vase of a Sung vase—a difficult form to achieve—although he slightly modified the form by adding a twist to the long neck and the extremely protuberant body (Figure
50). He further adapted the form by adding a multicolor glaze of red, yellow, and iron oxide that lent the refined shape a casual and carnivalesque air, especially when compared to the understated glazes of the Sung dynasty (Figures 50, 90, and 91). Ohr borrowed the form repeatedly, see Figure 2 for example, but modified it so that the classic formalism has almost disappeared.
Ohr imitated a well-known Greek vase form but added elaborate and whimsical handles that give the form a character that is new (Figures 15, 75 and 78). Ohr also used glazes to interpret Greek forms in a new way. A subdued and classical vase form, with only slight ruffling at the top and set upon a subtle yet elegant pedestal is illustrated in
Figure 77. However, the entire vase has been covered in a bubbling and blistering pinkish glaze that not only covered the graceful form but repulsed the viewer with suggestions of sores and rotting flesh. Another example of a classical Greek form that achieved a new character because of its glaze is provided in Figure 92. The green glaze with pink eruptions brings to mind earthworms crawling through grass, bloody foam on the top of algae covered water, or sores erupting on a reptile’s back—hardly the things one usually associates with a classical shape.
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Examples such as these reveal that Ohr was well aware of Chinese and Greek ceramics, as well as high-Victorian prototypes. But he interpreted these forms in a highly unusual way. In one way or another, his glazes are generally strange, his shapes eccentric.
In fact, Ohr seems to have drawn on a final mode of inspiration, Art Nouveau. Indeed,
Art Nouveau may have provided the inspiration for much of what is most original about
Ohr’s work: the notion that irregularity rather than symmetry could be beautiful, that color could be strange and unusual, and that beauty had an analogy with natural forms and should express a process of growth and formation and flowering. Ohr’s use of Art
Nouveau was complex, however, for he did not simply mimic the work of others but explored general principles.
Both folk pottery and Art Nouveau pottery are fluid, but in somewhat different ways. Folk pottery is fluid in the process by which it was formed. Made by hand, it is always slightly irregular. Art pottery is fluid in its reference to natural shapes, such as the human figure, or tree or vegetal forms. Paradoxically, however, the fabrication of Art
Nouveau pottery is generally quite rigid. Van Briggle pottery, for example, was cast in molds, with the result that every piece is exactly alike. Indeed, even those art potteries that employed artisans, such as Rookwood, insisted on a rigid conformity of shape. Ohr’s pottery, on the other hand, is fluid in both respects. It is fluid in the process by which it was made; and it is fluid in its conception. Interestingly, the fluidity of Ohr’s shapes is closer to the fabrication of Art Nouveau glass vessels by manufacturers such as Louis
Tiffany, than to the work of Art Nouveau potters. Even Tiffany glass, however, while making some use of accident, stayed within familiar categories of shape. Ohr’s radical experimentation with the fluid shapes possible in clay was unprecedented in any medium.
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In a sense, Ohr combined attributes of the folk and Art Nouveau traditions to create a new form of art strikingly different from either of his sources.
Art Noveau is a style based on metaphor—on the notion that the practical shapes of bottles and vessels have some sort of affinity with the shapes of nature, and thus could be at least partly translated into a natural form. Tiffany glass vases, for example, were modeled to resemble vegetables, trees, roots, or flowers; his lamps usually have tree- trunk bases and shades that resemble such things as magnolia blossoms, wisteria, or clusters of flying dragonflies. The fascination of such forms is that they exist in a realm that is half practical, half fantasy. Are they lamps or trees? Are they manmade or natural things? Do they serve a practical purpose or are they works of art comparable to paintings?
This same aesthetic approach was carried out in Art Nouveau pottery. A Van
Briggle vase, to use another example, with a female figure seemingly breaking out of the form, is partly a vessel that will hold liquid or provide a support for flowers, but it also serves as a piece of sculpture (Figure 93). The sculpture itself was created in a way that heightened the sense of ambiguity about what it was, since while the figure is evident, it seems to struggle to emerge from the material, in a fashion not unlike Michelangelo’s famous metaphor of the figure who breaks out of the prison of a block of stone. While generally speaking, Ohr avoided such literal representations of nature, we often feel that the clay has been arrested in the process of “becoming,” and that we are witness to a similar process of one thing being transformed into something else. Quite frequently, for example Ohr created a vessel that seemed as if it was about to become two, with a similar shape on top of a large one, as if the larger former were giving birth (Figure 77 and 94).
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Even when what we see are simply abstract folds, we have a feeling of stopped motion within a larger process of transformation.
Interestingly, Ohr focused on the deepest principles of Art Nouveau rather than simply mimicking the work of other potters. Indeed, his work seems to have been conceived as a sort of critique of what was being produced by Art Nouveau potters.
The Art Nouveau pottery that Ohr knew best, Rookwood and Newcomb, employed painted decoration on relatively conventional forms—their work was distinctive for its decoration rather than its shape. As has been mentioned, Ohr cited
Rookwood in one of his self-promotional statements, and he knew of Newcomb through his friendship with Joseph Meyer, and may also have worked there for a brief time. Both potteries drew on the flora and fauna of their respective regions to beautify the surface of the pot. Rookwood’s designs (Figure 6) are more literal, while Newcomb’s (Figure 56) are more idealized. But both celebrate the beautiful in a fashion that often verges on the sentimental, with scenes of such subjects as flowering magnolias or oak trees glimmering in the moonlight. Ohr never used painted scenes of this sort on any of his wares, and to the extent that his glazes serve a representational function, they evoke forms of nature that are less benign, such as reptilian scales, or plants or animals in the process of decay.
Indeed, Ohr’s pots do not so much represent nature as seem like strange, hitherto unknown natural growths that have been fished out of a stagnant swamp.
Interestingly, when Ohr reproduced vegetable forms he generally avoided the sinuous graceful forms characteristic of Art Nouveau. One of his coin banks, for example, is a strikingly realistic representation of a potato with buds growing from its sides. Yet, he never represented daffodils, sunflowers, or lilies—popular, sinuous, Art
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Nouveau motifs. He also often introduced a threatening note. Many times the edges of the folds on his vessels protrude in a fashion that is sharp and prickly. The deep affinity between Ohr’s work and that of nature is suggested by the way that some of Ohr’s pots have been “improved” through nature’s activity. For example, several Ohr pots that were stored in a barn for decades became the surface on which mud daubers—insects related to wasps—built cell-like nests out of mud. Remarkably, these forms seem almost indistinguishable from Ohr’s own handiwork, as if the nests were carefully placed by him on the shapes as ornaments. Interestingly, the owner of some of these vessels, Robert
Blasberg, has refused to remove these nests, even when this refusal meant leaving these vessels out of a major retrospective of Ohr’s work.
Shapes
McLeod noted of Ohr that “he does not claim to be the world’s greatest potter in
all senses, but he declares he is the greatest living designer of shapes.”
Ohr exploited a fundamental contradiction of the aesthetic theory of the time.
Most writers felt that hand-formed things were more beautiful than those that were
machine made. At the same time, they equated “beauty” with perfect regularity of some
classical shape. The potter’s wheel tends to push shapes into a symmetrical form, and
producing symmetrical shapes is the first thing a potter learns to do—symmetry is often
equated with perfection. Symmetry, however, is always the same, and Ohr recognized
that the pursuit of perfection and symmetry is an artistic trap. Individuality of shape
depends on something irregular, in some cases a simple pinch in one part of the rim, that
throws off the evenness of the shape. Such pinching immediately endows an ordinary
240 shape with an individuality that distinguishes it from anything ever made before—the principle of “no two alike” that Ohr celebrated. He employed a variety of gestures to break the symmetry of the form—ruffling, crimping, pinching, indenting, and twisting.263
Ohr’s contemporaries seem to have preferred the pots that were only mildly eccentric, particularly when they were decorated with colorful glazes. Twentieth-century collectors, however, have been attracted to his most eccentric shapes, whether or not they were glazed. One of the most notable features of Ohr’s formal experiments is that he applied them not to a raw lump of clay but to a finished pot. This gave his work an interesting conceptual twist—it was not so much “construction” as “deconstruction.”
One can break this process down somewhat to analyze what Ohr did to handles and what he did to shapes. With handles Ohr moved from molded handles in a Victorian style to handles conceived as a single flowing line. Interestingly, this “step forward” was also a step backward since it represented a reversion to earlier craft techniques. While by the late nineteenth century many folk potters molded their handles, in a fashion similar to commercial production ware, the earlier practice had been to “pull” the handle, that is, to make each handle individually by hand. Ohr could have extruded his handles but more likely simply rolled out a thin slab of clay and cut it into long strips. As he progressed, however, he seems to have often pulled the handle out of the side of the vessel, never breaking the attachment of the handle at top and bottom. Interestingly, in choosing to make linear, scroll-like forms, Ohr may have drawn inspiration from outside the realm of pottery: his handles may well reflect his training under his father as a blacksmith. Their curves are more similar to ironwork than to most work in clay.
263 The labels Ellison has employed to describe Ohr’s motifs are similar to mine, but not the same. Ellison’s include “ruffling,” “twisting,” “crinkling,” “indenting,” “off-centering,” “folding,” and “lobing.” See his introduction in George Ohr, Art Potter. 241
Handles often supply a touch of surprise and whimsy to relatively traditional shapes. In at least one case Ohr made handles that form a scroll-like shape at the top, similar to the leaves of a plant, but most often he simply used linear shapes. As Ohr progressed his handles grew increasingly attenuated and fanciful, with improbable curves and cantilevers. One of Ohr’s whimsies was to apply several differently shaped handles to the same form (Figure 67). He often attached three to five freely shaped handles to a vessel.
One of Ohr’s greatest innovations was the handle that is integral with the shape.
To produce them he threw a bowl on the wheel, pinched one side to create a flat protrusion, poked a finger hold into this shape, and then pinched the form to integrate the handle with the shape as a whole, generally creating a flared rim that flows into the handle in a sinuous curve and accentuates its shape (Figure 81). The advantage of this technique was that it allowed a handle that became an integral part of the vessel rather than simply an appendage. The disadvantage was that this method deformed the shape of the vessel itself in an unpredictable way, and thus it was quite difficult to produce two handles of the same size and profile—in other words, to achieve symmetrical effects. No doubt for this reason, or perhaps because symmetry did not aesthetically appeal to him, so far as is known, Ohr seems to have used this type of handle for pitchers but not for vases.
Thus, the irregular shape of the handle is complimented by the irregularity of the other profile of the vessel, where he pinched out a spout. The form becomes a complex play of different visual rhythms, although generally these objects have a strong directional feeling, in which the force seems to be directed in the direction of pouring, that is, in the direction of the spout.
242
Twisting is a tricky operation to perform because if it is carried out too forcefully the whole vessel will collapse. Thus, mastering this wrong way of doing things required considerable technical skill. We know that Ohr threw many thousands of vessels, and he seems to have practiced each maneuver with the diligence of an athlete practicing for a meet. As he practiced he introduced endless variations, exploring every variable. For example, he executed his twists and folds when the clay was in different stages of fluidity, creating folds not only when the vessel was on the wheel but afterward when it had been taken off and allowed to slightly dry. It seems plausible that in addition to adding various twists and folds, Ohr also sometimes placed the clay off-center on the wheel, to eliminate the symmetry found in most ceramics.
On a few occasions, Ohr made thoroughly traditional shapes, which are distinctive only for their graceful proportion; the teapot illustrated by Ellison (Figure 95) is a good example. In most cases, however, he gave his work a decidedly unusual and eccentric form. One of the challenges of writing about Ohr is to develop a language for what he did since his work often seems to bridge different categories. As noted, in many instances Ohr’s distortions do not detract from the functionality of the shape, as in a large pitcher with some twisting where the body curves (Figure 96) or pots with ruffled edges at the rim (Figure 97). Indeed, some of Ohr’s ceramics might be mistaken for classical
Chinese or Persian shapes, with the exception of the ruffling at the rim (Figure 51). In other cases, however, Ohr’s folding is so willful that almost all resemblance to any traditional form of vessel is lost and the shapes seem like modern abstract sculpture.
Thus, it is tempting to attempt to divide Ohr’s ceramics between those pieces that are suitable for use, and those that serve no function other than to explore the possibilities
243 of shape. Ellison, for example, described folded and pinched shapes as “novelty ware” if they contain a slot that makes them usable as a coin bank (Figure 98) but as “art” if they have no slot (Figure 12). Ohr surely made some such distinction himself, since forms that were usable as coin banks were more salable than forms that had no use—and he seems to have made much of his income, for example, when he showed his work at the World’s
Columbian Exposition in Chicago, hawking “usable” knickknacks. But in the larger sense, the distinction is almost meaningless. Visually the two groups of forms are nearly identical, and surely Ohr was interested in demonstrating that the distinction between the two forms was not very important.
The question of how Ohr developed his unusual shapes is not easy to resolve.
Most of his techniques of bending, folding, ruffling, and so forth had been used to some extent before. Christopher Dresser, for example, produced vases with bends and indentations, as did the Japanese. Some of Ohr’s work looks quite similar to such earlier experiments, although in his most daring creations Ohr went far beyond any of his possible sources, discarding any traditional notion of function to produce bizarre, folded forms that have no purpose or use aside from their sculptural beauty. In short, Ohr took a secondary direction of experiment in the work of other artists and made it a major direction of inquiry.
To look for prototypes for Ohr’s various shapes, however, may well misrepresent his actual creative process. Surely he was aware that other potters had made vessels of unusual form, but it seems unlikely that he based most of his experiments on any specific earlier prototype. Instead it seems likely that much of his innovation was fueled by sheer delight in experiment and play with technique. In fact, in grasping Ohr’s wild originality
244 it seems most useful to look in another direction—toward Ohr’s activities as a self- promoter and entertainer.
Much of Ohr’s exposure to artistic styles, whether in pottery or other art forms, likely came through his attendance at international expositions. Equally significant, the process of entertaining people and drawing attention to his work at these world’s fairs seems to have led to radical experiments with technique. Ohr quickly discovered that changing one shape into another provided a form of entertainment. In fact, his activities resembled those of vaudeville performers of the period, who would make drawings on a blackboard in which vases would turn into faces, and faces would turn into fish or other animals, in a constant process of metamorphosis. No sooner was an image visible than it would change into something else—often through some surprising shift, such as inverting an image to transform, let us say, a vase with a bouquet into a face surmounted by a hat.
As McLeod wrote of Ohr in the Memphis Commercial Appeal:
To see him take a ball of clay and shape a jug with a corncob stopper in it before your eyes, and convert that into a flower pot with a growing plant in it, and to change this into a tall vase, a squat lamp, a water cooler, and finally mold the whole into a basket of peaches is like watching a magician manipulate an enchanted cloth.264
Ohr himself boasted:
This is what do with four pounds of clay on the wheel— blindfolded—turn a jug, put a corncob stopper in it, change the corncob into a funnel, have the funnel disappear, and have a jar, change the jar into an urn and half a dozen other shapes and turn anything that anyone in the U.S.A. can mention that is syndrical [sic] on the potter’s wheel.265
264 McLeod, “Potter, Poet and Philosopher,” 1. 265 Clark, Ellison, Hecht, Mad Potter of Biloxi, 126. 245
Ohr’s finished creations often suggest such a process of bizarre metamorphosis. He liked to combine shapes in an unexpected way, for example, placing two pots on top of each other to create a strange hybrid shape. Another instance is the previously mentioned teapot with two spouts, two handles, and two lids, as if two teapots had collided and merged into a single form (Figure 99).
Interestingly, some of Ohr’s humorous methods of self-promotion have parallels with his artistic strategies in pottery. Among his numerous promotional photographs, for example, are a group that seemingly portray him standing on his head beside a bottle of wine that is chilling in a bucket or performing such tricks as balancing a vessel on his foot and pouring a glass of beer. In fact, these photographs are inverted (Figure 100). Ohr was actually standing on furniture (concealed by cotton and fabric, which looks like clouds) and the bucket and bottle were glued to the ceiling. In short, these photographs play with the magical effects that can be produced by simply turning things upside down.
Many of Ohr’s double vessels play with a similar trick. They combine a familiar shape with the same shape inverted upon itself to create a hybrid that is both intriguing and humorous.
Even Ohr’s oft-discussed and extravagant moustache, which he twisted into fantastic shapes for his publicity photographs and which he tied back around his ears when he was making pottery, may have inspired some of the malleable shapes he explored in clay. The strange curving handles he applied to his forms, for example, resemble his moustache.
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Imagery
In Chapter Seven, I discussed Ohr’s fondness for the sixteenth-century French potter Bernard Palissy and proposed some psychological traits they seemed to share that would have fostered Ohr’s appreciation for Palissy. Not to belabor the point, I would again like to raise this topic, but approach it from a formalistic standpoint and explore the ways in which Ohr alluded to, transformed, and modernized Palissy’s work.
Palissy’s plates and platters, which were glazed with rich blue and green glazes, were covered with highly naturalistic leaves and plant life, as well as representations of a variety of cold-blooded creatures, including snakes, frogs, salamanders, fish, and lobster
(Figure 52). The delicacy of Palissy’s work, and its illusionistic color effects, are quite different from Ohr’s work.266
In fact, Ohr was never greatly interested in painted or decorated ware. In most cases, even early in his career, he did not apply decoration, although there are a few early pieces with carefully molded decorative beading, and one vessel with an incised drawing of a skyscraper (the structure has been identified as the Masonic Temple at State and
Randolph Streets in Chicago, designed by Burnham and Root in 1892). Ohr probably produced the piece for the E. E. Pattison Coal Company, which had offices in the building, and whose name is inscribed on the piece. In a few cases, he produced decorative tiles that are imprinted by means of a stamp of some sort with illusionistic scenes, such as one of a tree branch framing a scene of a sailboat and pier, and another of a log cabin (Figure 101). While by no means outstanding from the artistic standpoint,
266 Garth Clark has argued that Ohr strove to duplicate Palissy’s vivid glazes and incorporated his common use of snakes as surface motifs. This supposition has not been widely accepted. 247 these pieces show that Ohr was familiar with the practice of placing pictorial images on a shape.
Such pieces, however, are relatively rare. Ohr’s major interest seems to have been working on the potter’s wheel. In fact, in some cases Ohr threw the shape and then had someone else execute the decoration. For example, Ellison reproduces a vessel with a vine-and-leaf motif that is signed by Harry Portman, a young man who Ohr raised as a member of his family and who helped out at the pottery for several years. Portman signed the vessel twice: on the base “JHP DECORATOR” and on the inside “JHP 1898.”
Ohr does seem to have been interested in creating sculptural replicas of real objects, often with humorous intention. These pieces may be loosely divided into two categories: those that are relatively crude and have the quality of folk art; and those that display a virtuoso technique. As discussed earlier, the Kirkpatrick brothers often applied snakes to pots and made chamber pots with clay turds inside, things that Ohr did as well.
In most cases the execution of these pieces is crude—Ohr’s snakes are a good deal cruder than those of the Kirkpatricks—and most likely Ohr made these pieces as humorous novelties for quick, inexpensive sale.
In a few instances, however, Ohr made clay objects that are deceptively realistic, again, somewhat in the mode of Palissy. They include an artist’s palette with brush and paint tubes (Figure 102), a hand being pecked by a bird’s head, which comes off to reveal an inkwell (Figure 37), a miniature log cabin, and in inkwell with an iguana like creature that looks into a tree trunk (Figure 103). He also made an impressively realistic wicker basket, apparently as a gift to his mother (Figure 104). Ohr also made highly realistic clay models of shells and shoes. The shoes may allude to his friend Meyer, who had
248 abandoned pottery to open a shoe store. Ohr also produced coin banks that take on representational shapes, including a pear, a guitar, and a fantastic creature (Figure 105).
Perhaps the most interesting of these pieces fall somewhere between these two extremes in their technique, notably a series of representations of hats, which function not as hats but as flowerpots. The game of producing strikingly realistic hats led to some experiments with banging and denting them, as happens in real life. One piece turns the vicissitudes of a hat into a little story. One perfectly shaped top hat represents a hat as it would appear early in the evening; a second, set beside it, and badly dented, shows how the same hat would appear after a night of wild drinking and entertainment. Perhaps what’s most interesting about this pair of hats is that it provides an early instance of Ohr’s method of taking a regular, symmetrical form and subjecting it to distortions.
Interestingly, in a fashion that resembles modern conceptual art, Ohr also took completely ordinary forms and endowed them with meaning by means of words. I would like to return for a moment to the umbrella stand (Figure 30) Ohr donated to the
Smithsonian Institution (first discussed in Chapter Two) as an example of an ordinary form endowed with special meaning. Nothing about the shape of the umbrella stand is particularly memorable. It is a thoroughly ordinary object, made to be placed in an empty corner and forgotten.
But through his inscription (which is reproduced in its entirety and interpreted on page 79) Ohr transformed this object into a metaphor for the empty promises of the world in general and the Smithsonian in particular. Because of the thoughts attached to it, it becomes a work of art. Just as he was interested in the strange beauty of the abject or
249 obscene, Ohr was interested in the notion that the banal could be invested with profound philosophical meaning.
What about the deeper expressive content of Ohr’s work? Should we see his pots as simply an arbitrary play with shapes, or do they carry deeper iconographic meanings?
There is not an absolute answer to this question, but Ohr’s engagement with shape and form appears to be profoundly connected with issues of personal identity, which he played out in both bodily and social terms. He referred to his pots as his “clay babies,” and clearly thought of them as invested with personality and life. Their identity was akin to his own. They were not high-class but working-class creations that never lost their connections with folk pottery. At the same time, their originality and uniqueness gave them an affinity with high-class artistic pottery, whether high Victorian, Chinese, Greek, or Art Nouveau. He seems to have thought of the process of creation as a process of birth, and sometimes mimicked this process in his pottery, with one pot giving birth to another.
One can also visualize his pots as a kind of frozen performance, a captured moment of his performances a world’s fair or other forum, in which he transformed one shape into another as a way of entertaining his audience. In an interesting way, Ohr seems to have merged ideas from both social theory and artistic theory in an original way. In social terms his pots argue that the humble, the low class, the folk can achieve an originality that makes it “high class.” In visual terms his forms argue that the irregular, the misshapen, the grotesque, even the obscene, can become a form of beauty—indeed, that the distorted is more beautiful than the regular because it is unique.
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Conclusion
As a way of reviewing the themes of this dissertation it may be helpful to examine three representative creations by Ohr: a teapot (Figure 13), a bowl with folds (Figure
106), and a compressed vase (Figure 79, right). All three explore a common group of themes, yet at the same time they illustrate a progression towards an increasingly bold and powerful manipulation of form.
Let us start with the teapot (Figure 13). As has been mentioned, Ohr’s creations were never purely “abstract” manipulations of clay. He always started with a traditional pottery form and then subjected to creative distortions. In the teapot, this process is particularly obvious. In fact, the object is still a perfectly functional teapot, although one that looks bizarre. Let us go back to the set of categories proposed in the introduction to this dissertation, each of which has been explored in a chapter of the text:
Crazy/Normal
Southern/Northern
Poor/Rich
Grotesque/Beautiful
Useless/Useful
Our initial reaction is that this looks like a piece of southern folk art—it is obviously hand-made, and its roughness is emphasized by the unusual glaze, which is blistered and pock-marked. As we look more closely, however, we discover we need to revise some of our first impressions. True folk forms tend to be simple, practical shapes.
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Most true folk teapots take the form of a simple ball with a spout and a handle. In fact, the shape of this teapot with its bulbous body and loopy handles is more similar to some sort of extravagant, mass-produced Victorian ware, although its hand-made quality conflicts with this reading. And the glaze is not quite typical of folk pottery either. Its colorful reddish-purple tones are more characteristic of “art pottery,” while its blisters are a little too blistery. A true piece of folk pottery might have a few blisters of this sort, but the exotic colors and exaggerated texture of this piece suggest some sort of consciously artistic art nouveau concoction. One of our powerful first reactions to the piece is that it looks grotesque in both form and color. And as with many expressions of grotesque this is in part because the vessel has disturbingly creature-like qualities. The blistered surface looks like badly burned or blistered skin. The end of the spout looks like the head of a snake. Yet paradoxically, the fact that the piece looks grotesque makes us take it out of our usual categories of useful pottery and examine it as an aesthetic object. That is to say, we stop for a moment to evaluate its qualities of color and form. And when we do so we discover that the piece has a strange, slightly crazy sort of beauty. And was we discover the fact we move from considering the object as a functional teapot to a useless but fascinating expression of beauty—that is a something largely useless, except as a work of art.
Of course a paragraph like this does not quite do justice to our actual reaction.
While it lays out the essential terms of our analysis, it does not quite capture the speed with which our mind and senses jump from one response to another, from one category of judgment to another.
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When we move on to the folded bowl, we can virtually repeat the terms of analysis that we used for the first piece: the play with the notions of folk/manufactured ware, low-class/high-class, southern/northern, grotesque/beautiful, useful/useless, utilitarian object/work of art. Nonetheless, the terms have a slightly different inflection.
In large part this is because the reference point is a little less specific. A teapot serves a very specific purpose, and Ohr’s use of shapes and glazes makes specific standard teapots come to mind, both manufactured and folk, which then serve as reference points for
Ohr’s divergence from the norm. In the case of the bowl (Figure 106), Ohr’s reference point is less clear. Bowls can serve a variety of purposes, from holding knick-knacks to holding food. But Ohr does not specify that he is thinking back to one kind of bowl rather than another. Formally, as well, bowls have a generic quality. They are such a clean, simple form that the difference between a folk bowl and a manufactured bowl is not very noticeable. As a consequence of this fact, our experience of Ohr’s bowl is slightly different from that of the teapot. We recognize that the folds and spear-like edges of
Ohr’s creation make it not very useful for most of the purposes that a bowl generally serves. But rather than discerning a roster of stylistic references, we tend to accept the object as something that exists largely in its own terms. Or to put this somewhat differently, in the teapot Ohr seemed to have consciously pulled binary oppositions from identifiable cultural reference points. In the bowl this process has become less obvious.
The binary oppositions he is playing with are less clear-cut but have become fused into a more unified sort of expression.
When we move to the compressed vase (Figure 79, right), this process of assimilating oppositions has gone further. In fact, what immediately strikes us is the
253 beauty of the shapes as pure form. Indeed, if we did not have Ohr’s earlier creations that lead up to an object such as this, we would not imagine that he was playing with a collection of cultural oppositions—the object seems so unified and coherent in its own right. Overall, in short, Ohr’s art developed from a collection of binary oppositions, to objects which, for all their strangeness, convey a sense of unity and coherence.
Experiencing Ohr’s Oeuvre
In much of the art history of the past, artists were treated as “geniuses” who
worked almost outside of history. More recent scholarship, however, has increasingly
moved away from this paradigm and endeavored to study art and artists as products of
society rather than gifted outsiders. Artists have been removed from the ivory tower, and
declarations of supernatural genius and talent have been replaced by more concrete forms of explanation. At the least, their work has been seen as a reflection of the culture and values of their time, though perhaps creatively reconfigured to serve special expressive purpose. Such a view does not necessarily eradicate the notion of “genius,” or at least the individual of exceptional expressive talent, but it supposes that this talent consists in making creative use of its own culture. George Ohr’s work is only enriched when we view it in this way.
George Ohr left few instructions on how to understand his pottery. We know that he claimed that the form of the pot is more important than its glaze, regardless of how amazing or even unique the glaze. While his glazes are often remarkable, he evidently conceived them as a way of enhancing the qualities of the form. Second, he declared that his oeuvre should be experienced as a whole, as though each pot was a line contributing
254 to a finished poem. As we recall, Ohr attempted to give a large group of his pots to the
Smithsonian, although his wishes were disregarded and they kept only a few.
What this suggests is that our experience of Ohr’s work now is a fragment of what he intended. There are only a handful of people who have seen Ohr’s pots as he intended, and even fewer who are alive today to talk about it. Carpenter’s collection of some 6,000
Ohr pots has been scattered into collections all over the world, so one must rely on the observations and generosity of those lucky enough to have large collections. This author has been fortunate enough to be in the presence of large collections of Ohr pots, and even though they represent only a small fraction of his entire body of work, his intention that they all form parts of a single whole is still conveyed, only in a more concentrated form.
When seen as a group, the opportunity to compare each piece with the works around it only enhances the sense that each work has a distinct, unique personality.267
Each pot has a personality as definite as any person you have met. The forms
lunge toward, pull away from, attempt to embrace, stand primly, or strike a seductive
contrapposto. Alone, a pot will talk to the viewer, who often lacks the language to talk
back. But in a group of other pots the conversation is animated. As with any circle of
friends, the personality of each in a group becomes more pronounced and obvious. And
as with Ohr’s pots, their grouping serves to bring out the individual personalities, much
more than if each stood alone and silent. The glazes add to this sense of uniqueness, as
one contrasts, for example, a pink bubble glaze on a continuously erupting surface with a
smooth glaze on a sleek form. When as few as two or three pots are together they interact
267 Jim Carpenter, the Kovels, Robert Blasberg, and other early buyers are a rare few who bought straight from Carpenter’s trove and were able to see most of Ohr’s oeuvre before it was scattered. 255 and talk as readily as neighbors on a street making animated complaints or conspiring over a secret.
When we look at them in this way, however, we recognize that Ohr’s “pottery people” are not beautiful in a traditional way. They evoke the dark processes of nature, of life and death: they are often scabby and oozing; indeed, at times the imagery is sexual and irreverent. Like the Post-Impressionists, Symbolists, and Decadent artists of his time,
Ohr searched for a beauty that was unconventional, even bizarre. The most common descriptions of Ohr’s pottery emphasize their difference, often using such words as
“unique,”268 “odd,” “strange,”269 “eccentric,”270 “unusual,” “grotesque,”271 “queer,”
“bizarre,” “peculiar,”272 and revolve around ideas of sexuality, impropriety,
rebelliousness, and even vulgarity. What is more, his pots give an impression that goes
beyond their physical eccentricities to suggest irreverent personalities and ideas.
Ohr clearly anthropomorphized his work and thought of his pots as people. In
speaking of his work, he echoed the biblical story of creation, observing that just as
nature had not created two people alike, so too were all of his pots different. Likewise,
not everyone could be “symmetrically formed,” and many were “wabble-jawed, hare-
lipped, cross-eyed, all colors, bow-legged, knock-kneed, extra limbs, also minus of the
same.” He proudly states that he makes disfigured pottery and “couldn’t and wouldn’t if I
could make it any other way.”273
268 “Biloxi Pottery,” Brick, 287. 269 “Concerning Biloxi Potteries,” 49. 270 Cox, “Potteries of the Gulf Coast,” 140. 271 Hutson, “Quaint Biloxi Pottery,” 225. 272 King, “Palissy of Biloxi,” 4. 273 “Concerning Biloxi Potteries,” 448. 256
Ohr’s assertion that the value in his pottery was derived from these imperfections engages significantly with the late-nineteenth-century society which was consumed with issues regarding appearance and status. Social Darwinism justified both the economic and moral position of the upper class and provided a strong rationale for inequality for the black population. The antebellum South in particular would have seized on these inherent genetic “differences” between races in order to justify the continuance of slavery. The pseudoscience of phrenology even claimed to determine the character and disposition of a person merely based on physical features of the skull and face. Indeed, the success of such men as P. T. Barnum, who built much of their fortunes on social misfits such as
Tom Thumb and the FeeJee Mermaid, preyed on people’s fascination with separateness.
Simultaneously threatening and comforting, freaks of nature both reinforced the diverse variation Mother Nature was capable of and affirmed the “rightness” of the common person, i.e., the white European.
In a world deeply concerned with normality and superiority, Ohr’s pots became representations of the marginalized and the curious. Indeed Ohr created a persona of this sort for himself, one that if not quite monstrous or freakish nonetheless must have seemed frighteningly off-center. Not only was his appearance bizarre, but his manner epitomized many qualities of the South, which had become America’s “other” once the industrial
North triumphed over it with both armies and industries. Ohr’s pots thus speak to a process of physical and emotional disfigurement. They are crippled, blistered, scabbed, broken, and overly colored (read nonwhite). They embody all the physical traits that are not part of acceptable society, and yet that, in some curious way, are marvelously beautiful.
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Perhaps what becomes most shocking about Ohr’s pots, and inversely about outcasts of society, is their perceived inability to be functional. Ohr’s pottery is based on traditionally functional forms made with a traditionally functional medium. Yet he purposefully rendered them dysfunctional. I would like to suggest that to Ohr this dysfunction actually raised them to a higher plane. Their purpose is no longer couched in ideas of use, but in their peculiar beauty. In creating this beauty, Ohr was not even fearful of sexual suggestion or scatological humor. At some intuitive level he clearly felt a spiritual relationship between nature, sexuality, defecation, and other normal processes of the human body.
One of the greatest oddities of Ohr’s career is the way in which his own persona merged contradictory qualities. While he devoted immense effort to marketing his work, often in a manner reminiscent of a commercial huckster, he was reluctant to sell his wares, and most of his production was never sold in his lifetime. At some level, it is clear that Ohr was not chiefly interested in money. Ohr wanted to be legend. He wanted to be a great artist.
Ohr hoped his artworks would be “praised, honored, and cherished” as treasures before their time. He hoped that he would live on as a legend. Much Ohr scholarship has taken up that torch. Yet it is unsettling that scholars have allowed Ohr to dictate how future critics and the public should respond to his work. The notion that Ohr was a genius is one he certainly propagated himself, but it is curious that so many recent writers on
Ohr have accepted this judgment without thinking more deeply about its implications.
While “provincial” in notable respects, Ohr was clearly keenly aware not only of what was happening around him in the field of pottery and art pottery. Undoubtedly, he
258 was also aware of the larger discourse taking place in American society about the role of handcrafted objects, the nature of art, the challenges of mass production, and the need for advertising and self-promotion in an increasingly competitive society.
Ohr’s pottery, in short, should be looked at not simply as a group of physical artifacts but as an intellectual construction. Ohr was a boundary crosser in many ways: in the unusual forms of his pottery, in his dress and mode of speech, in his frequent challenges to propriety and normal standards of decency, in his ingenious methods of self-promotion. Perhaps above all, in fascinating ways, Ohr was a craftsman who thought and acted like an artist. He was one of the first American craftsmen to cross the art/craft barrier. His eccentric, and astonishing, achievements as a potter were profoundly indebted to his willingness to challenge the normal boundaries of craft pottery, as was his claim to be a genius.
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ILLUSTRATIONS
Figure 1. George Ohr, vase, c. 1895-1900, 6 ½ inches.
Figure 2. George Ohr, footed vase, c. 1895-1900, 7 ½ inches.
Figure 3. George Ohr, pitcher with snake, c. 1895 – 1900, 7 inches.
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Figure 4. Vase by Van Briggle, c. 1900, 8 inches.
Figure 5. Vase by Teco, c. 1900, 8 ½ inches.
Figure 6. Vase by Rookwood, c. 1900, 12 inches.
Figure 7. Vase by Grueby, c. 1898-1902, 10 inches.
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Figure 8. Vase by Newcomb Pottery, c. 1900, 8 inches.
Figure 9. George Ohr, feces creamer, date unknown, approximately 3 inches high, 2 inches across.
Figure 10. George Ohr, vase, c. 1898, 6 ½ inches.
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Figure 11. George Ohr, two double-necked bisque (unglazed) vases, c. 1898-1910, 7 ¼ in (left), 5 ¾ inch (right).
Figure 12. George Ohr, unglazed vase, c. 1892-94, 4 inches.
Figure 13. George Ohr, teapot, c. 1902, 6 ½ inches. Example of pink bubble glaze.
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Figure 14. George Ohr, tall vase, c. 1895-1900, 13 ½ inches. Example of metallic glaze.
Figure 15. George Ohr, handled vase, c. 1895-1900, 8 7/8 inches. Example of ruffling.
Figure 16. Peter Voulkos, untitled plate, 1995, 5 inches high and 20 inches in diameter.
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Figure 17. Peter Voulkos, Noodle, 1996, over 47 inches.
Figure 18. Jasper Johns, Ventriloquist, 1983.
Figure 19. Vase by James Pottery of Chester County, 1824 (left), vase by George Ohr, c. 1895-1900 (right).
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Figure 20. Vase by Anthony Baecher of Winchester, VA, c. 1870-89 (left), vase by George Ohr, c. 1898-1907(right).
Figure 21. Vase by George Ohr, c. 1895-1900 (left), vase by Christopher Dresser, c. 1879-92 (right).
Figure 22. George Ohr, collection of coin banks, various dates, ranging from 3 inches to 5 inches.
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Figure 23. George Ohr, “brothel tokens,” various dates.
Figure 24. George Ohr, Pig flask, 1882.
Figure 25. Cornwall Kirkpatrick, Pig flask, 1871.
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Figure 26. Ohr’s first studio, c. mid 1893.
Figure 27. Ohr’s second studio, c. late 1890s.
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Figure 28. George Ohr, c. 1900.
Figure 29. Pots Ohr sent to the Smithsonian in 1889.
Figure 30. George Ohr, umbrella stand, c. 1900.
269
Figure 31. Interior of Ohr’s studio, 1896.
Figure 32. Ohr’s studio, mid 1905.
270
Figure 33. Ohr at the Cotton States Exposition, 1884.
Figure 34. Ohr at the Cotton States Exposition, 1884.
Figure 35. George Ohr, “vagina bank,” date unknown.
271
Figure 36. George Ohr, puzzle mug, date unknown.
Figure 37. George Ohr, assortment of novelty items.
Figure 38. Front view of the Ho-o-den building at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, 1893.
272
Figure 39. Caricature of Whistler, c. 1868.
Figure 40. Illustration from cover of Mary Tracy Earle’s The Wonderful Wheel, c.1896.
Figure 41. Ohr’s ad in the Philistine, 1901.
273
Figure 42. Caricature of Elbert Hubbard from The Philistine, c. 1910.
Figure 43. Ohr c. late 1880s.
Figure 44. Ohr, c. 1890s.
274
Figure 45. Pot signed with just the word “Biloxi.”
Figure 46. Pot inscribed “mud from the channel of Biloxi water,” 1906.
Figure 47. Ohr’s studio with banner reading “Welcome Miss. S.P.A.,” c. 1901.
275
Figure 48. Sign from Ohr’s studio.
Figure 49. Photograph of Ohr as “Art Potter,” c. 1892.
Figure 50. Vase from Sung Dynasty, 960-1280 (left), Ohr vase c. 1895-1900 (right).
276
Figure 51. Greek vase, fifth century (left), Ohr vase c. 1900-1905 (right).
Figure 52. Bernard Palissy, platter, c. 1510.
Figure 53. William Woodward, drawing, c. 1889.
277
Figure 54. William Woodward, watercolor, c. 1890.
Figure 55. Joseph Meyer, pitcher. Decorated by Gertrude Smith, c. 1915, 10 inches.
Figure 56. Example of Newcomb Pottery’s trademark design, c. 1900, 8 inches.
278
Figure 57. Ohr with donkey mill c. 1896-97. Harry Portman stands in the background and Ohr’s “killed babies” are along fence.
Figure 58 Puzzle jug, 10” high, date unknown
Figure 59 Ring jug, c. late 1770s
279
Figure 60. Monkey jug, c. 1990.
Figure 61. Examples of face jugs, c. 1890s.
Figure 62. Examples of salt glazing.
Figure 63. Example of alkaline glaze pot, c. 1870, 16 inches tall.
280
Figure 64. Ohr’s kiln after the 1894 fire.
Figure 65. Backyard of Ohr’s pottery, April 1896.
281
Figure 66. Photograph of Ohr with unglazed functional ware on ground and “killed babies” on the fence behind him, c. 1895.
Figure 67. George Ohr, three handle loving mug, c. 1900, 8 inches.
Figure 68. George Ohr, teapot, c. 1895-1900, 7 ¾ inches.
282
Figure 69. George Ohr, teapot, c. 1895-1900, 10 inches.
Figure 70. George Ohr, codagon teapot with double spouts, c. 1895-1900, 8 inches.
Figure 71. George Ohr, codagon teapot, c. 1898-1907, 5 ½ inches.
Figure 72. George Ohr, vase, c. 1895-1900, 5 ½ inches. Example of crumpling.
283
Figure 73. George Ohr, footed vase, c. 1895-1900, 7 3/8 inches. Example of twisting.
Figure 74. George Ohr, vase, c. 1898-1907, 7 ¾ inches. Example of tubing.
Figure 75. George Ohr, handled vase with snake, c. 1895-1900, 4 1/8 inches. Example of snake motif.
284
Figure 76. Japanese pottery with asymmetry, late 1800s.
Figure 77. George Ohr, vase, c. 1898-1907, 8 ¾ inches.
Figure 78. George Ohr, vase series, c. 1898-1910.
285
Figure 79. George Ohr, vases, c. 1895-1900, 6 inches (left), and c. 1895-1900, 7 ½ inches (right).
Figure 80. Example of fake Ohr pot.
Figure 81. George Ohr, pitcher series, c. 1895 – 1907, 3 inches (top left), 3 5/8 inches (top right), 3 ½ inches (bottom left), 3 inches (bottom right).
286
Figure 82. George Ohr, ring jug, c. 1900.
Figure 83. Example of folk pottery pitcher.
Figure 84. George Ohr, early pitcher in folk pottery design, c. 1885.
287
Figure 85. George Ohr, small pitcher, c. 1895-1900, 3 ¾ inches.
Figure 86. George Ohr, pitcher, c. 1895-1900, 8 5/8 inches.
Figure 87. George Ohr, pitcher, c. 1895-1900, 9 inches.
288
Figure 88. George Ohr, tall handled vase, c. 1895-1900, 10 ¾ inches.
Figure 89. George Ohr, vase with Victorian stylings, 1894, 14 ½ inches.
Figure 90. Example of Sung Dynasty celadon glaze.
289
Figure 91. Example of Sung Dynasty oil spot glaze.
Figure 92. George Ohr, tall vase, c. 1895-1900, 17 inches.
Figure 93. Vase by Van Briggle vase, c. 1900, 9 ½ inches.
290
Figure 94. George Ohr, vase, c. 1895-1900, 3 7/8 inches high.
Figure 95. George Ohr, teapot, c. 1897-1900, 6 ¾ inches.
Figure 96. George Ohr, large pitcher, c. 1897-1900, 7 ½ inches.
Figure 97. George Ohr, two pots, c. 1897-1900, 7 ¾ inches (left), 6 inches (right).
291
Figure 98. George Ohr, bank, c. 1897-1900, 4 ½ inches.
Figure 99. George Ohr, teapot and coffeepot, c. 1900.
Figure 100. Trick photographs of Ohr standing on his head, c. 1890s.
292
Figure 101. George Ohr, two tiles, “Biloxi Waterfront Scene” (left) and Log Cabin (right), c. 1907.
Figure 102. George Ohr, artist’s palette, c. 1897-1900, 1/12 inches high, 5 ½ inches wide, 7 ¼ inches long.
Figure 103. George Ohr, tree trunk and reptile trinket.
Figure 104. George Ohr, wicker basket trinket.
293
Figure 105. George Ohr, five bisque objects, c. 1895-1900.
Figure 106. George Ohr, two views of bowl, c. 1897-1900, 3 ½ inches high.
294
APPENDIX I Northern Artists Who Worked in the South274
Henrietta Davidson Baily, (1874–1950) began making pottery at Newcomb College in 1902 and graduated the following year. She then studied with Arthur Dow in Massachusetts in 1904 after which she returned to work part time at Newcomb Pottery. Her works feature the matte glaze characteristic of Newcomb Pottery, and her motifs are inspired by the plant life of the deep South. The pots included in Delehanty’s discussion were thrown by Meyer and decorated by Baily.
Frederick Arthur Callender (?–after 1917) studied in Paris and worked in Boston. He came to New Orleans in 1892 as a visiting artist at Tulane University.
Alexander John Drysdale (1870–1934) came to New Orleans as a teenager and in 1901 moved to New York to study at the Art Students League for two years. There he was inspired by the work of Corot, Inness, Henri, Chase, and Sargent. He returned to New Orleans and set up a portrait studio, later specializing in Louisiana landscapes.
Sadie Irvine (1887–1970) illustrates the trend of New Orleans artists, especially those from Newcomb, who left to train in New York. She studied at the Art Students League in 1906.
Andres Molinary (1847–1915) was born in Gibraltar and studied at the San Lucas Academy in Rome and the Fine Art Academy in Seville. He came to New Orleans in 1872 to join his uncle, a partner in an importing firm. He opened a studio specializing in portraits, landscapes, and genre scenes. He helped found the Southern Art Union in 1880 and the city’s Artists’ Association five years later. He exhibited at the World’s Industrial and Cotton Centennial and at the Isaac Delgado Museum of Art in 1915.
Achille Perelli (1822–1891) studied art at the Reale Accademia di Belle Arti in his native Milan before immigrating to New Orleans in 1851. He was among the founders of the Southern Art Union and specialized in trompe l’oeil.
Lulu King Saxon (c. 1855–1927) studied art in New Orleans under Andres Molinary and Bror Anders Wikstrom. Her work was exhibited at the World’s Industrial and Cotton Centennial and the Artists’ Association of New Orleans awarded her its gold medal in 1888. She was a landscape painter, writer, poet, actress, singer, and musician.
274 The following artist information was summarized from Randolph Delehanty, Art in the American South: Works From the Ogden Collection (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1996). 295
George Louis Viavant (1872–1925) was considered the master painter of nature morte in New Orleans. He began his studies at the age of twelve at the Southern Art Union in New Orleans under Achille Perelli.
Bror Anders Wikstrom (1854–1909) was born in Sweden and studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm and the Julian and Colarossi academies in Paris. He moved to New Orleans in 1882 and became the chief designer for the Rex and Proteus organizations, which designed Mardi Gras [PL?] parades. He served during the gold age of Mardi Gras in the 1880s and 1890s. He helped organize the Artist’s Association of New Orleans and was acquainted with Ellsworth Woodward.
Ellsworth Woodward (1861–1939) graduated from Rhode Island School of Design in Providence 1885 and came to New Orleans after his brother, William. Ellsworth taught drawing and painting at Tulane University and two years later helped found the Sophie Newcomb College for Women where he was appointed head of the art department. He held that position for forty-one years. In 1891–92 he traveled to Munich to study under Samuel Richards and Carl Marr. He was also one of the founders of the Isaac Delgado Museum of Art. He preferred to paint in watercolor as opposed to oil, and his paintings strongly resemble the type of decoration found on Newcomb Pottery, which emphasizes flora and fauna of their local Mississippi.
William Woodward (1859–1939) studied at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence and the Massachusetts Normal Art School in Boston. He came to Tulane in 1884 and soon after corroborated with his brother Ellsworth on the Newcomb College pottery project. William studied at the Académie Julian in Paris in 1886 and founded the Art League of New Orleans and later the Art Association of New Orleans.
296
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