Product Description

A brilliantly written, lavishly produced volume on an important yet little- known clay artist.

Misunderstood and unappreciated during his lifetime (1857-1918), George Ohr, America's archetypal artist-potter, pushed the form of the vessel beyond mere function to the point of abstraction. Today the genius of this radical and sophisticated artist has finally been recognized. His thin-walled, paper-light pots, labeled grotesque in his day, are now seen as a tour de force of delicacy and restraint and a stunning exploration of the plasticity of clay. Ruffling, twisting, tearing, and collapsing his fragile pots, Ohr anticipated much of what we take for granted in contemporary art and ceramics.

Stunningly illustrated with 140 color images of his most important pieces, this landmark volume, winner of the George Wittenborn Award for outstanding art books from the Art Libraries Society of North America, presents the first major study of Ohr. Beautifully woven together, the text and images confirm a judgment the Mad Potter once passed on himself: "Unequaled! Unrivaled! Undisputed!" he wrote on a sign outside his shop, "Greatest Art Potter on Earth!"

Other Details: 240 illustrations,140 in full color. 10 x 12" trim size. First published in 1989.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #766075 in Books
• Published on: 1989-10-13
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 192 pages

From Publishers Weekly
The self-styled "Biloxi Mud Dauber," Mississippi art potter Ohr (1857-1918) produced thousands of ceramic pieces that were out of step with their time. Detractors have called them bizarre, crude, even ugly, but his supporters saw Ohr as an eccentric genius, a romantic who staked unexplored aesthetic territory with unprecedented shapes and idiosyncratic glazes, and created a polychromatic spectrum of works. A picaresque rebel with flashing eyes and a long white beard, Ohr deemed these pots his "mud babies." Scores of them are on display in this monograph illustrated with 140 color and 100 black-and-white photos. Clark wrote American Ceramics , Ellison is a founder of the American Ceramic Arts Society and Hecht is an editor of Arts and Crafts Quarterly.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About the Author
Garth Clark, a widely published critic and historian of ceramics, is the founding director of the Institute for Ceramic History and the author of Abbeville's American Ceramics: 1976 to the Present and The Eccentric Teapot. Robert A. Ellison, Jr., an artist and author, is a founding member of the American Ceramic Arts Society and has lectured on Ohr. Eugene Hecht is a widely published authority on Ohr and American art pottery and a founding member of the American Ceramic Arts Society. John White is a photographer based in New York whose work ranges from fine art and design to advertising.

Customer Reviews

the most amazing book of pottery I have ever seen!
this man was a a head of his time. i have never seen anythig that has come out of the 1800's that looked any thing like this.The photography is great and the biography is good , but the pottery is the best i have ever seen he had great form and great glaze you could not ask any more from a potter

The most unique and most copied potter in the world.
This book has marvelous images of just some of the fine works that George Ohr created. The summaries of his life are correct to some extent but it failed to provide any deatails of his offspring or how they may have carried on the innate artist abilities, this is why I only give it four stars.