The ‘Mad Potter’s’ Revenge

In a dim exhibit room beside the town library, the strange babies of George Ohr are ready for when the world finally embraces their misfit creator.

It will not be long.

Nearly a century after the artistic establishment snubbed Ohr and his unusual pottery, leaving thousands of pieces to languish for decades in a dusty car-repair shop in this Gulf Coast community, the long-ignored artist is at last receiving the adulation so frostily denied during his restless life.

Ohr’s pots -- he called them his “mud babies” -- are now coveted by collectors. The pots, glazed in unpredictable patterns and recognized by their mischievous twists, folds and dimples and the physics-defying thinness of their walls, can fetch $20,000 or more from among the small but growing universe of Ohr cognoscenti.

His admirers say the potter, dismissed by many contemporaries as a grandstanding buffoon, should be considered a pivotal figure in American art -- and not just in pottery. Some argue that Ohr, working on a Biloxi side street far from the big-city salons of cultural innovation, may have been among the world’s pioneering abstract artists.

“He was doing abstract ceramics at the time Picasso and other modern artists in Europe were just beginning to think about it,” said Robert Tannen, an Ohr aficionado who lives in New Orleans. “He was not just a potter, not just a sculptor ... but an innovator, working alone in Biloxi, Miss.”

Now, long after his death in 1918, Ohr’s work is about to get its biggest nudge toward mainstream acclaim. The current collection -- about 225 pieces -- will move from its makeshift gallery beside the Biloxi library to a $20-million museum complex designed by Frank Gehry. The four-acre site, on a grassy parcel with giant live oaks overlooking Mississippi Sound, will house the pottery, plus a collection of African American art, in a series of pavilions that appear in drawings to have been frozen in mid-twist, very much like Ohr pots.

The involvement of Gehry, a renowned architect who rarely takes on projects as modest in size as the museum, is bound to steer fresh attention to Ohr from beyond the usual ranks of pottery buffs. Ground is to be broken in March. The museum is scheduled to open in 2005.

Gehry, who calls his own attempts at pottery years ago “terrible,” said Ohr brought to mind the sculptor Claus Sluter, a Flemish artist from the 14th century whose accomplishments went largely unrecognized by the world. “Ohr could very well be much more important than people give him credit for,” said Gehry, who was recruited for the project by Tannen and his wife, Jeanne P. Nathan, both longtime friends.

The newfound appreciation would undoubtedly amuse the potter, who went to absurd lengths to gain the public’s notice. Acting more like a midway barker than a man of the arts, Ohr plastered signs up declaring himself the greatest art potter on Earth. He penned silly epigrams and posed for gag photographs that made full use of his flowing mustache, which drooped so long that he could knot it behind his head.

Ohr was noisy and unabashed. He called his studio the “Pot-Ohr-E” and dubbed himself the “Mad Potter of Biloxi” -- a playful moniker that only made people wonder more as his behavior grew increasingly bizarre. (Nine years before his death, Ohr was subjected to a sanity hearing amid a dispute over land. He was found sane.)

Today, Ohr is still known fondly as the mad potter. But the new Gehry museum represents a redeeming final chapter in the tale of the colorful iconoclast.

“He is now about to be all the things he predicted he would be someday,” said Marjie Gowdy, executive director of the Ohr collection. “Unrivaled, unequaled, undisputed -- the greatest art potter of all times.”

The idea of artistic genius belatedly recognized is as familiar as a Van Gogh painting. Ohr’s saga features a headstrong artist who was in many ways his worst impediment to fame, working in a medium -- pottery -- that has long struggled for legitimacy in the fine arts. His vindication came on a stroke of plain luck.

It was a chance visit to Biloxi by a New Jersey antiques dealer that would rescue the potter’s creations from a cluttered storage shed, paving the way for its introduction into some the nation’s finest galleries and museums and planting the seeds for Ohr’s long-delayed celebrity.

Modern-day Biloxi, where beachside casinos are replacing shrimp boats as the region’s main providers, offers scant sign of Ohr’s life. The current pottery collection, most of it borrowed, is housed in the former Biloxi cultural center, a block off the boulevard of casinos. The site where Ohr made his pots is today a parking lot.

Ohr was born in Biloxi on July, 12, 1857, the second of five children. His father, George, was a blacksmith, and his mother, Johanna, ran a grocery. Even within his family, the young Ohr didn’t fit in. The children consisted of “3 hens, 1 rooster and a duck,” Ohr wrote later. “I’m that duck.”

Ohr’s was a laborer’s youth -- a succession of menial jobs, from file cutter’s apprentice to tinker’s helper to warehouse worker. The offer of work as a potter’s helper from a Biloxi native named Joseph Meyer lured Ohr to New Orleans and introduced him to the medium that became his obsession. For a salary of $10 a month, Ohr would learn a trade.

“When I found the potter’s wheel,” Ohr recalled in a brief autobiography, “I felt it all over like a wild duck in water.”

Meyer taught Ohr the basics of pottery -- “how to boss a little piece of clay into a gallon jug,” Ohr said -- and about glazes. It was not long before the apprentice was ready for the next level in his artistic education. Instead of choosing formal arts schooling, Ohr hit the road.

For two years, he traveled a zigzag route around the eastern United States, finding pottery studios and shows wherever he could. “I sized up every potter and pottery in 16 states, and never missed a show window, illustration or literary dab since that time, 1881,” Ohr recounted.

Ohr returned to Biloxi in 1883 and threw himself into his trade. He built his pottery and kiln by hand and took to scooping the grainy clay from the banks of the nearby Tchoutacabouffa River and hauling it back on a barge. His early years as a potter were devoted to the practical. He produced household essentials: inkwells, flue pipes, jugs and flowerpots. They were mundane and so, for the moment, was Ohr’s life. He sold his kitchen goods by pushcart to housewives and produced tacky novelty items, such as trick cups and souvenir clay medallions with bawdy captions, for the tourists who flocked to the Gulf Coast.

He returned to New Orleans to help Meyer again, this time to throw pots for a women’s arts club that would later be attached to Newcomb College. At the time, pot makers were considered craftsmen. The vessels became art once they were painted -- flowers and symmetrical shapes were favored decorations, often rendered with painstaking detail and repetition. The prevailing attitude toward artistic pottery was that of the Arts and Crafts movement, which tended to value ornamentation of handmade pieces that were disciplined, traditional, uniform and lovely.

Back in Biloxi, Ohr kept at his folk pieces, selling his household goods from his shop and at country fairs, where he’d set up his wheel and perform for the crowds. By the 1890s, he was also embarking on his own art pottery -- an adventurous version that broke free from the starched-collar rules. A fire in 1894 left his pottery in cinders and destroyed his stock. Instead of quitting, Ohr returned to the potter’s wheel with newfound daring.

His pots were like no other. While capable of creating vases with all the ruffles and beauty of classical works, Ohr preferred turning familiar forms into something exotic. He threw pots that were as thin and delicate as eggshells; to this day, ceramics experts express awe at the feat. When he failed, Ohr turned flaws into part of his art; if the rim of a pot was chipped, he would chip the rest and glaze over it.

His designs betrayed a mischief-maker’s glee. He made round bowls like everybody else, then pinched them into barely recognizable square forms. He gave pitchers huge flowering mouths that were useless for pouring and punched holes in vases so they couldn’t hold water. He festooned some pots with complex, interlocking dimples and etched others with flowers, only to glaze right over the engravings with a cavalier defiance. Still other vessels were smoothed unmistakably into the shape of female genitalia. At some point, he abruptly quit applying glazes, saying it was the form that mattered most.

Stare long enough at an unglazed Ohr cup, with its undulating folds and flares, and the plain vessel gives way to other forms: a face, a woman’s body. It is as if the pots are props in a magic show.

“His stuff is fast and vigorous and energetic. He spins the pot in a matter of minutes -- spins it, bends it, smashes it. It’s Jackson Pollock standing over a canvas hurling paint,” said Eugene Hecht, co-author of a book on the artist’s work.

During an age when pottery’s effete leading lights were obsessed with precision, the thick-armed Ohr flung pots with plebeian abandon. He was a cowboy at a cotillion, a reckless inventor whose pots were as extreme as their maker. While some visiting critics poured warm praise over the work, Ohr mostly met with sneers from the top ceramics figures of the era, who thought him a lowbrow.

“He came across as hokey, particularly to this sort of rather grand and elegant set of the Arts and Crafts,” said Garth Clark, an Ohr expert who runs ceramic studios in New York City and Long Island.

Although Ohr marketed his work through clowning and shameless sloganeering -- “No two alike,” he crowed -- little of his art pottery sold. He’d haul his pieces from one fair to another, including some of the nation’s major expositions, and invariably drag them back. (One tragic exception came after an exposition in New Orleans in 1885, when all 600 pieces were stolen, apparently by his hired hauler.) Ohr managed to win a silver medal once, but he complained that “my name is mud” when it came to collectors.

In large part, this was because of his rigid insistence that any buyer purchase his entire body of work -- as many as 10,000 pieces -- or nothing at all. Selling the pots piecemeal, Ohr sniffed, was akin to selling Shakespeare by the line. And Ohr’s prices -- $10 to $15 apiece -- were exorbitant for that era. Ohr eked out a living for his wife and 10 children by making conventional pots.

The all-or-nothing stance cemented his eccentric image and ensured that his mud babies would never make it out of Biloxi, at least while he lived. After his death from cancer in 1918, his wife offered the pots, but found no takers. So, Ohr’s creations were tossed by the hundreds into crates and stored on the property, where his sons fixed cars.

The pots remained there, all but forgotten, for 50 years. Then, in the late 1960s, a New Jersey antiques dealer named Jim Carpenter was touring the Gulf Coast with his wife, Miriam, hunting for vintage car fixtures -- horns and hood ornaments. Someone steered him toward the Ohrs’ shop in Biloxi.

There, Ohr’s son Ojo offered to show the couple something else. In a cinder-block shed surrounded by junk cars and discarded refrigerators were the neglected pots of George Ohr. There were “a couple of hundred packing crates, like orange crates, with pottery teetering around the edge of it and some stuck here and there,” Miriam Carpenter recalled. “It was so filthy dirty.”

The New Jersey couple ultimately wrangled a deal to buy the lot -- at least 6,000 pieces -- for a price that has never been made public. Soon, the pots were making their way into the New York galleries and into the hands of such art figures as Andy Warhol and Jasper Johns. In ensuing years, as word spread, Ohr’s work was snatched up by new devotees; selected pieces were displayed in some of the nation’s elite museums, including the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History.

Some pieces remained in Biloxi, where an Ohr cultural center was set up in 1994. That was the foundation for the new Ohr-O’Keefe Museum of Art, for which officials have raised about half of the $20-million cost. (O’Keefe is the name of museum benefactor Jerry O’Keefe, a former mayor, who donated $1 million in the name of his late wife, Annette.)

Alongside the museum effort is a separate campaign to persuade the far-flung private collectors to donate or lend their Ohr pieces. It is called “Bring George Home.” The posthumous salute to the artist also promises a measure of glory for the town that spawned him, even if it once scratched its head at his antics.

“He was here in this little coastal village, way down on the Gulf Coast of the United States, experimenting with an art form,” said Gowdy, the Ohr collection director. “And taking it to the limit.”