A life’s refined shape

Of the Cabats, the husband, Erni, was the one who cultivated the image of the artist. He grew a handlebar mustache, shaved his head and wore look-at-me hats tilted to the side -- ski caps in the desert, for instance. Erni had some credentials too, having gotten the U.S. government to send him overseas to teach creativity, and talked Las Vegas casinos into letting him do his watercolors in their gambling palaces, where he become another attraction for the tourists, the character painting amid the poker tables. He did occasional portraits as well, including a playful one of his wife with a broom -- plump and plain Rosie posing in her horn-rims with the tool of the housewife, a woman who would disappear in any crowd.

The joke, of course, was that if there was artistic genius in that family, it rested in the fingers holding the broom.

Rose Cabat was 45 when her husband painted “Rose ‘n Broom,” but she’s twice that now, having turned 90 on June 27. Her birthday party drew family, friends and fellow artists to toast her longevity in life and her craft -- and her trademark “feelies.” There were tributes to Erni also, though he’s been dead for a decade, his ashes sitting these days in the living room, in one of those pots that gained his wife the sort of acclaim he so wanted for himself.

Erni sensed the talent in her hands as early as the 1930s in New York, when he brought a lump of clay home to their apartment. A Cooper Union-trained graphic artist and advertising man, he hoped to make decorative plates from it. But Rose remembered playing with clay in kindergarten and got to it first, while he was at work. When he saw what she did, he got them both memberships in Greenwich House, in the Village, where she taught herself how to use a heavy wooden potter’s wheel.

There weren’t such art centers around when they moved to Arizona in 1942, to make life easier for their son, who had asthma. There wasn’t much time for potting, either -- Rose’s hands were needed at a local defense plant, where she became a real-life Rosie the Riveter. But before long Erni was wrangling clay for her from a local brickyard and finding what passed for a wheel -- a converted washing machine. When that wouldn’t do, he ordered a more professional Randall wheel from back East and installed it in a shed behind the bare-bones home that had an outhouse when they bought it on a dusty street on the outskirts of Tucson. The seat beside the wheel? From a tractor.

She made weed pots and wind bells initially. “Girl Scout stuff,” she called it, items people might buy at crafts fairs to put on their porches. “No, it’s archaic,” he’d tell her, and threaten to “tie her to the wheel.”

She didn’t really learn glazing until the late ‘50s, when Erni had a convention in Hawaii and the university there was offering a course. He said, “Why don’t you stay?” -- he’d look after their by-then three kids. Later, he helped her develop a glaze that was so smooth, like a baby’s skin, they called it “feelie glaze.”

Even then, she didn’t come up with the actual feelies right away. When she began experimenting with vase-like pots, the mouths were conventional, with longer, heavier necks, and openings you could place flowers in. But she eventually shrunk them down until most of the pots were 3 to 5 inches tall, the necks tiny and delicate, like the stem of a fruit -- and with no room to stick anything. Then she applied the glaze in a way that made some oval ones resemble onions, so organic-looking that you were tempted to take a bite. Others were midnight blue and emerald green, but all looked so smooth you had to touch them, making the name apt.

Erni loaded boxes of feelies into their station wagon and they went searching for galleries and gift shops that might buy them for $15 each. He wouldn’t let anything go on consignment, saying, “We’re not a bank.” That policy would make it difficult later, when he tried to market his own paintings that way. From the start, however, they found customers who eagerly paid up front for Rose’s pots, like the shopkeeper in Columbus, Ohio, who would take them to her home so they could do their laundry.

But it wasn’t until well into the ‘60s that she put it all together, the forms and the glazes, and her pieces began appearing in museums around the world. “You know, you go from crawling to walking,” she said, “to running to sprinting.”

THE POTS ROLL ON

YOU could look at Rose Cabat’s career in two ways then: One would be “Why did it take her so long?” for she was over 50 by the time she found her artistic vision, the feelie. But you also could ask, “How has she done it so long?” for she is making those same pots four decades later, even if she has to wheel herself out now to the backyard setup that Erni installed for her eons ago.

Perhaps her daughter, June, was stretching things for the occasion, but she told the crowd at the birthday festivities that her mom goes at it four to 10 hours a day, churning out the pots that still sell about as quickly as she can produce them.

A woman who gets to the point, Rose Cabat herself says, at 90, “These are me now.”

Her children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren were arriving in anticipation of the Sunday party, but she kept to her normal routine that Thursday. She caught a ride to the water aerobics at a local pool, her favorite exercise since back problems a decade ago forced her to use a walker, then the wheelchair.

She did allow a daughter-in-law to take her out Friday, to an Indian casino. She set a limit on her gambling, though -- $10 -- and the nickel slots gave her an early birthday present: a profit of $1.90.

It’s never been about the money for this classic child of the Depression. From Day One, she let Ernie handle the business side of things, then had her daughter take that on. “I couldn’t understand how they could ask these prices,” she says of the small pots that once retailed for $25 but now go for $400 -- or for $4,800 in some cases.

Asked how her pieces wound up in various museums, she says, “I don’t know ... Erni could tell you, but he’s not here.” One early breakthrough was in a 1966 “Craftsmen USA” exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, though she’s not sure what she had in there. Perhaps a casserole, she says.

By 1973, it definitely was feelies -- dozens of them -- that the Smithsonian wanted for its National Museum of American History in Washington. A permanent exhibition there documented “Everyday Life in Early America” and a Smithsonian curator, C. Malcolm Watkins, decided to find “contemporary counterparts” of the pioneering American craftsmen. He heard of the self-taught Rose Cabat, checked out her pots and that was that -- they remained in the entrance hall well into 1974.

A few years later, the Tucson Museum of Art loaned out the crystalline blue-green Cabat that Joan Mondale placed in the living room of the vice president’s mansion during the Carter administration. Erni and others had to talk Rose into flying to Washington for a dinner honoring the artists on display. She agreed only because she could share a room with another potter. They were seated at the same table as Andy Warhol, who didn’t have much to say to them. “I didn’t have anything to say to him, either,” she says.

When she started out, her works vied for ribbons in county fairs. About the time she became eligible for Social Security, a feelie became part of the collection of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, the gift of a foundation.

During the Cabats’ first decades out West, the flamboyant Erni had his own ad agency in town, which he promoted with an annual party for which he flew in bagels and lox from New York. But at 62 he retired from the advertising grind, figuring he could support the family selling Rose’s pots, and his own art.

He did a little of everything -- sculpture, ceramics, painting. His specialty was gouache on paper, busy watercolors of old Spanish missions or scenes from their travels. He illustrated children’s books also -- creating fanciful dinosaurs and carousel horses -- and got some of his own pieces in museums along the way. The Tucson Museum of Art did a retrospective on both Cabats when they celebrated their 50th anniversary, the works reflecting their contrasting personalities: his showy, hers quiet.

The problem was, people almost invariably compared his paintings to those of others -- they were Miro-like, or Chagall-like. Or he might be seen as a performance artist of sorts as he did his thing in public, as in “Erni Cabat Paints in Las Vegas.”

Rose, meanwhile, became an artist others imitated, or tried to. But the copycats “don’t get it right,” said David Rago, a Lambertsville, N.J.-based crafts expert and auctioneer who included her as one of five ceramicists featured in a 2001 book “Collecting Modern,” on post-World War II artists who carried on the Arts & Crafts movement that began at the end of the 19th century as a reaction to machine-made goods, and “brought American ceramics from adolescence to adulthood.”

She was not as renowned or high-priced as the others spotlighted, such as California’s Peter Voulkos, whose ceramics were unsettling, ripped sculptures. Her pots were more lyrical, and “easy on the eye.”

But she just as much embodied the ideal of studio crafts, Rago concluded, of an artist seeing every piece through from start to finish, and making each unique in the “one meeting/one chance” spirit of a Japanese tea ceremony. You also could tell from the feelies that she understood a profound reality of working clay on a wheel, that “the potter too must be centered.”

Some dealers who marketed the pots sensed frustration in Erni that his own work did not inspire such reverence. One recalls how Erni would send ahead photos of a batch of feelies in a manila folder on which he would doodle his own designs with a magic marker. “He had to leave his mark on it,” the dealer said.

Rose herself will have none of that. “He was head and shoulders above me,” she says of her husband. “He was egotistical, but he was talented.”And he let her be herself. “He weighed out the glazes, he dealt with everybody,” she says. “I mean, he did all the dirty work. All I did was have fun.”

She did have to set him straight in the early years, however, when he kept asking her to throw pieces that he could decorate. To her, it was all about the form and feel of the object. When he put on a design, it was “something else ... that becomes his.”

“It came to a point where I said, ‘Everything I make looks like him.’ So I said, ‘You make your own things, and I’ll make my own things.’ ”

One thing he made each year was a gift for her on their anniversary. The painting of her with the broom was one. So was his depiction of them, decades later, as two oxen yoked together. But she was unnerved by the anniversary painting he gave her Oct. 17, 1994, when he was 80. It had “a gloomy feel,” she said.

About that time, Erni began writing detailed instructions on how he ran the business and their other affairs. That Nov. 8, they followed their usual routine of cards after dinner, getting in 10 games of gin before bedtime. Then he never woke up.

PASSING IT ON

The 90th birthday party was held at the place they used to go for anniversary dinners, the Tanque Verde Ranch, a foothills resort that in 1983 invited Ernie to do a series of watercolors documenting life on the dude ranch.

A bulletin board in the dining room was covered with old photos assembled by George Cabat, the son whose asthma brought them here 62 years ago: their “old gang” back in the Bronx; installing a bathroom and other additions to the Tucson home; young Rose in a hula dress; old Rose leading the dancing at her grandson’s wedding, in her wheelchair.

Rose once hoped she could pass her gift on to George, so she sat him at the wheel and put her hands over his, showing him how she guided the clay. “That’s when I decided I’d better become a chemist,” the elder Cabat son, who lives in San Antonio, says with a laugh. A second son, Mike, became a sociologist and works for United Way in Indianapolis.

Only the daughter, June, followed her parents into the arts, making jewelry and scarves in Bisbee, Ariz., a scenic old mining town close enough for her to watch over the Cabat Studio in Tucson, which sells the feelies and Erni’s remaining paintings out of what used to be his ad agency.

Old friends worried that Rose might be lost once Erni died, but she kept going -- and working -- with June’s help, and the encouragement of a dealer who met the family soon after. Syracuse, N.Y.-based Bruce Block tells the 77 guests at the party how he had already stocked feelies but got them through another dealer until he advertised the couple on the Internet as “Cabots.” June Cabat saw his website and corrected the misspelling, and soon he was getting feelies from the source, en masse. Block now has 150 in his collection, showcases others at New York’s yearly Triple Pier Antiques Show and retails them at his shop in Provincetown, Mass., on Cape Cod.

“It’s a form of seduction, selling,” he explains at the party, demonstrating how he rubs feelies across the cheeks of curious customers.He acknowledges that one danger with such a long-established craftsperson is that the work can lose its freshness. Perhaps it’s the unrealistic model of a Picasso, who kept evolving into brilliant new periods, but artists who find success with one trademark style -- a Jackson Pollock, say -- often feel pressure to move on from it, worried that they’re repeating themselves.

Rago, the crafts expert who co-wrote “Collecting Modern,” speculates that Rose Cabat may have avoided such pressure because she found her voice relatively late in life, then could spend the rest of it perfecting that “one type of ware.”

At the party, Block compares her to a Zen master who never stops honing one skill. He points to what she did with the necks of her feelies.

“A clogged vessel is very different from an open vessel,” he says. “You’re encapsulating something inside. It is what it is. You can’t add or take away from it.”

Such testimonials continue for half an hour, along with stories about the 90-year-old birthday girl before she became the “feelie queen.” When it’s time for “Happy Birthday,” she wheels to the cakes for the ceremonial cutting.

Then she returns to the house she’s never thought of leaving, and where her routine nowadays has her up working by 7 a.m., then taking a break only to watch “The Price Is Right,” and let her pots dry. She makes about five a day.

That night, a few partygoers stop by for final goodbyes before she retires to a bedroom little bigger than many people’s closets.

One of Erni’s anniversary paintings is at the foot of her bed, and a shelf of feelies is at eye level across from her, most a dark, iridescent blue.

She once confided that she may have turned out so many at first simply because people kept ordering them. But after a while, she felt something happening at the wheel. “It almost seems like I’m not doing it, that something else is raising my hands,” she said. “I hate to be spiritual about these things, because I don’t really want to believe that it’s a spirit. But when I’m working it doesn’t seem like my hands are doing it.

“I have a whole group of them in my bedroom because I like to look at them,” she went on that time. “I love them. I love my pots.”

She was not as introspective, though, on that Sunday she turned 90.

“That was a pretty impressive party,” she said as her guests got set to leave. “Much ado about nothing.”