In 1967, when James Carpenter, a New Jersey antiques dealer, climbed up the ladder to the attic of the Ohr Brothers’ barn in Biloxi, Mississippi, he encountered a field of wooden boxes containing thousands of pots by the brothers’ father, George Edgar Ohr. At first the find, whilst big, did not seem that exciting, but as he began to wipe away fifty years of dirt and grime (the barn had been in use as an automobile repair business since 1916), the brilliant colours of Ohr’s radical polychrome glazes began to emerge.
These pots comprised most of Ohr’s output of 'art' pots (he called them 'clay babies') made between 1895 and 1909. Ohr became reluctant to sell his work after bruising encounters with the snobbish North Eastern Arts and Crafts establishment who rejected him as a Southern outsider. Their reviews were often cruel, speaking of his creativity as a kind of insanity, hence his label, 'The Mad Potter of Biloxi.' Ohr began to hoard his own art pots, rarely selling his best work and instead making novelty ceramics to sell at the fairs. He made two predictions about his future. The first was that his work would become highly valued as art but by a later generation. The second was that the Nation would build a temple to his genius. He proved correct on both.
Given the size of Carpenter’s acquisition of these pots it seems there must be a lot of Ohr pots on the market. Yes, smaller bowls are common and some are masterful. But serious collectors of Ohr focus on only about 500 works, his trophy pots that are over four inches in size, handled, manipulated, and subjected to radical glaze painting and experimentation. And, Ohr liked to say, 'God made no two souls alike' so every work he made is a unique creation, never repeated.
Most of the 500 masterworks are owned by avid collectors who rarely deaccession, so when works this dazzling appear, it is a major event.
The first pot, lot 53, boasts Ohr’s most sought-after glaze colour—red—which ranges on this piece from vivid to dark and clotted. Clouds of glaze in blue and other colours break through creating an impressionist storm that serve to heighten the glory of this vase. The surface is partly the achievement of the artist and partly that of his generous kiln. I am sure he never knew exactly what to expect when his kiln doors opened.
If we now look at the form, the element Ohr insisted was the core of his aesthetic, we find a surprisingly cunning composition. The top and bottom halves are composed of two vessel shapes joined together. The matched handles marry the two shapes and give the pot a visual unity. Ohr mostly added handles when he was trying to bring balance to his more complex forms, or to make another kind of statement as in the work that follows. Handles are often missing on his simpler classical shapes. This reveals how considered his process of constructing pots was. He became a master at juxtaposing (perhaps juggling would be a better term) unlikely combinations of mass, volumetric shape, and line, the core components of vessel form. Yet they appear as spontaneous, accidental epiphanies. That was his genius, suggesting effortlessness even in his most extraordinary and laboured works.
Applying handles to pots is how potters draw, a linear element anchored to a dominant volume. At its most banal a handle is merely an appendage for lifting and moving. At its best it is a dynamic element, a moving visual poem in line and few have matched Ohr’s lyricism in this regard. Ohr’s handles are similar to the way wrought iron is used for the lyrical fences, stair railings and balconies of the South. Ohr’s father was a blacksmith and George followed him into the trade before shifting to ceramics. He made his share of wrought iron. Once working with pliant clay, Ohr’s handles could become looser and begin to take on an urgent fecundity, writhing with sensuality and life, almost reptilian (snakes were a fascination of his).
When we look at lot 54, handles play a different role. They emphasize the fact that Ohr has divided one pot into two and meant it to be read that way and not as a comfortably-resolved single vase. This piece has a vertical divide.
He attached two handles that are different in character. On the left there is tension. This handle does not melt into the volume at all, and feels almost mechanical, compressed tightly into itself, keeping itself independent from its host shape. The dark, stormy glazing in that half is troubled, the flashes of light struggle to stop the darkness from closing in fully. The right side, on the other hand, is yellow, bursting with sunshine and optimism. That handle emerges with determination from the wall of the pot, flows easily and reenters its host like a vine.
This pot’s rim is the sculptural focus of the work: the lip has been bifurcated, pulled in, folded, cut and split, a sexual metaphor, specifically feminine rather than male, folds of skin that exit a womblike space. The result is a new liberated form, ripe with intimacy.
In the years that followed Carpenter’s discovery, Ohr enraptured the art world, including collectors, art critics, curators, and others. Why did he achieve such stature? It was not because his work had been lost for fifty years. Yes, the story adds frisson. It is because, when compared with the staider work of his time, his vision was remarkably prescient. Ohr’s muscular clay handling and revolutionary spirit remained unmatched in American ceramics until Peter Voulkos arrived on the scene in the early 1950s. Indeed, Ohr’s art was curiously at ease with the post-war contemporary art scene.
Thus Ohr was correct about a later generation understanding his art. When his work began to enter the market in the 1970s, arts and crafts collectors remained sceptical and only later capitulated whilst the New York fine arts community had no hesitation. Leading dealers such as Irving Blum and artists from Andy Warhol to Jasper Johns avidly collected Ohr’s pots, welcoming him as a peer and kindred artistic spirit. Johns went so far as to feature Ohr’s pots in his paintings, an impressive homage.
Did Ohr get his temple? Yes, he got that too, the Ohr-O’Keeffe Museum in Biloxi that opened in stages between 2010 and 2014, designed by one of the most innovative architects of our time, Frank Gehry. Their aesthetic was remarkably similar, so much so that Gehry said to me that when he saw his first Ohr pot, 'I was not sure who was copying the other but it has become clear that Ohr was copying me.' I assumed he was joking.
-Garth Clark