Jeffrey Herr’s Obession Started With a Single Bowl From His Grandparents and Turned into : A Rare Exhibit of Pottery From Turn-of-the-Century California

Pottery curator Jeffrey Herr recalls the first piece of art pottery he ever owned. It was an oval, “Persian rose” colored bowl with scalloped edges that his grandparents bought for about 50 cents in the 1930s on their way through Colorado Springs, Colo.

From that fortuitous encounter came a lifelong interest first in art pottery and, more recently, with the California manifestations of that craft.

That interest eventually led Herr to drop a banking career to pursue a master’s degree in art history from Cal State Northridge and, starting Oct. 31, to guest curate his first gallery show, at CSUN: “California Art Pottery, 1895-1920.”

Herr, 38, spent more than two years researching the handful of small potteries that sputtered briefly into production from Marin County to San Diego at the turn of the century, only to be snuffed out by the Depression. He has tracked down and assembled a number of rare pieces from private collections--including some never shown publicly.

“California Art Pottery, 1895-1920” exemplifies how potters were inspired by the Arts and Crafts movement, a nationwide design style that encompassed the decorative arts from furniture to pottery and was manifested in architecture by Craftsman homes--such as those designed by Greene & Greene.

The Arts and Crafts movement evolved as a reaction against the ornamental flourishes of the Victorian age. It stressed the integrity of building materials, the importance of functional design and the need for clean, spare lines.

Art potters embraced this aesthetic in the late 19th Century, and large East Coast potteries were soon churning out bowls and vases by the cupboardful.

Because of California’s geographical isolation, a distinct regional style arose, one that emphasized native clays and depicted indigenous plants and animals found in the back yards and semi-rural settings where the potters worked.

Herr, whose thesis is also titled “California Art Pottery, 1895- 1925,” agreed to curate this show at the request of Northridge gallery director Louise Lewis. The 80-piece exhibit, which runs through Dec. 2, has already received praise from decorative art scholars for its contributions to California art pottery, a field that has long languished in obscurity because of the better-known Eastern names and is just now attracting national attention as interest in the Arts and Crafts movement expands.

“We’ve only recently rediscovered it and . . . Jeffrey has heightened our awareness of this little-known material,” said Kenneth Trapp, curator of crafts and decorative arts at the Oakland Museum.

The show includes decorative tiles by Ernest Batchelder, the Pasadena Arroyo craftsman who built a kiln in his back yard and fired such pieces as the 2-foot peacock with the gray-, blue- and yellow-spangled wingspan.

Batchelder studied at the School of Arts and Crafts in Birmingham, England. Beginning in 1904, he headed up the arts and crafts department at Throop Institute in Pasadena (now Caltech) and wrote “The Principles of Design” and “Design in Theory and Practice,” which discussed the philosophy of design as applied to the Arts and Crafts movement aesthetic.

In the show, there are also examples of Arequipa Pottery, such as the elegant, dark-green vase with an ivy leaf motif created as art therapy by tubercular women at the Arequipa Sanatorium in the Northern California town of Fairfax.

Herr says some of the women enjoyed their therapy so much that they stayed on after recuperating, and he speculates that other women might have used their skills to continue creating art pottery. At Arequipa, hired men prepared the clay and threw the forms while the women did the glazing and decorating in an idyllic, pastoral setting.

“The designs were taken from plants and trees on the grounds that they could observe from nature,” Herr said.

Another piece is a 1-inch-high, ocher-colored camellia bowl with an olive green interior by Santa Barbara potter Frederick Hurton Rhead, one of California’s best-known art potters. Yet another is an 8-inch taupe-colored Valentien vase embossed with an exotic-looking moth made by Anna and Albert Valentien in San Diego.

Subtle, earth-toned colors prevail throughout this exhibit, providing a feeling of harmony with nature in keeping with the Arts and Crafts movement, Herr says.

“The clay was often left unglazed because they wanted to demonstrate the variety and the beauty of the California clays,” he added.

“California Art Pottery” also spotlights California Faience, Redlands Pottery, Halcyon Art Pottery, Stockton Art Pottery, Alberhill Pottery, Grand Feu Art Pottery, Fred H. Robertson Pottery, Markham Pottery and Roblin Art Pottery, which take their names from people or regions.

Herr says that items in the show would fetch between $500 and $10,000 at auction and that prices for California art pottery in general have skyrocketed in recent years.

The erstwhile banker began collecting California art pottery about five years ago after he received the scalloped bowl from his grandparents’ estate.

When he considered thesis topics, Herr says he first thought about art pottery in general. But he soon stumbled upon a better idea.

“I realized California art pottery had been neglected in a scholarly way,” he said. “There’s very little information and it’s very scattered. I became fascinated with who made it, what they were trying to do . . . and I realized there was a significant difference between the aesthetics of California art pottery and the art pottery that was made east of the Mississippi River.”

From this initial interest sprang a 100-page master’s thesis that Herr later adapted into a 40-page catalogue that explains the genesis and history of California art pottery.

Herr found that California potters celebrated the Golden State and things Californian in a distinctive way: Local flora and fauna were depicted in raised relief, with vessels sporting images of sharks, peacocks, lizards, grapevines and eucalyptus branches.

Potters used clays from deposits at nearby industrial and commercial clay-extracting facilities such as the Alberhill Coal & Clay Co. in Riverside and the Stockton Terra Cotta Co. in Northern California. Extracting clay for building was big business in turn-of-the-century California, and Herr found in his research that some large companies had art pottery divisions.

California art pottery was also produced in much smaller numbers here than in the East, where factories were more automated and potters more closely influenced by Gustav Stickley, father of the American Arts and Crafts movement and founder/editor of Craftsman magazine.

Because of this, the art pottery world until recently focused primarily on Eastern works, scholars say. A 1972 show assembled by Princeton art historian Robert Judson Clark featured only a few California pieces, Trapp notes.

But as interest rises and supplies dwindle, regional arts and crafts of all kinds are beginning to undergo more scrutiny--and command higher prices, Herr says.

For instance, “you’ll see articles on Cincinnati women furniture carvers,” Herr said. He adds that collectors today are roaming further afield and snapping up obscure handiworks from the Arts and Crafts movement and that California art pottery benefits.

So far, CSUN is one of only a handful of institutions to mount a show spotlighting California art pottery. But the Oakland Museum is planning a large show devoted to the California Arts and Crafts movement in which art pottery will figure prominently, Trapp says.

The CSUN Art Gallery is open noon to 4 p.m. Monday and 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesday through Friday. For information, call the gallery at (818) 885-2156.