Those claims, more appropriate to the carnival midway than as a description of a serious artist, are George Edgar Ohr's own, and he believed them. A potter of mundane functional items as well as extraordinary one-of-a-kind works, Ohr frequently traveled to fairs, both the country variety and the world expositions popular at the end of the last century, to sell his wares. Where he set up his wheel beneath such a banner may not have been a carnival midway, but it was still a long way from the galleries and museums where his work now appears, seen by those who agree with Ohr.
A writer for the New Orleans Times-Picayune, Lyle Saxon, describes a 1922 visit to Ohr's storeroom, four years after his death:
“You are holding a…tea-pot, a beautifully conceived and executed design, simple and lovely in line…. [Y]ou are almost shocked at the ungainliness of the piece next to it, an unwieldy jar, top-heavy, fantastically, comically ugly with three handles, all placed awry, as if with malicious intent. A veritable monster of a pot. Perverse, but humorous, too. A slap in the face of conventional art - futuristic.”
A Cache of Pots
Saxon's use of the word futuristic has proven to be prescient. Underappreciated during his own time (he was active from the early 1880s to 1910), Ohr's work has only recently been "rediscovered." The seven thousand pieces that Ohr left unsold at his death remained together until the collection was purchased by an antique dealer, James W. Carpenter, from Ohr's sons in 1970. Carpenter, a collector of classic automobiles, had come to the Ohr Boys' Auto Repairing Shop in Biloxi, Mississippi, in 1968 hoping to find a vintage Cadillac or a Model T. Instead he discovered a cache of their father's pots. It took two years of negotiations and reportedly $50,000 to acquire the collection.
Selling the pots from his shop in New Jersey, Carpenter and his wares eventually attracted the attention of the serious collectors that Ohr had destined them for. Last year the American Craft Museum mounted a major retrospective of his work, and monograph was published by Abbeville Press. These events firmly establish Ohr as a major, if eccentric, player in the Arts and Crafts movement.
Ohr's work is astonishing in many ways. A shameless self-promoter, Ohr Frequently boasted of the uniqueness of his work. In a typical statement. Ohr wrote,
“According to the Good Book, we are created from clay, and as Nature had it so destined that no two of us are alike, all couldn't be symmetrically formed, caused a variety to be wabble-jawed, hare-lipped, cross-eyed, all colors, bowlegged, knock-kneed, extra limbs, also minus of the same, all sizes from 30 inches to 75 ditto. Everyone of us sees different, has a different voice, and don't all like cabbage or chew tobacco! …I make disfigured pottery - couldn't and wouldn't if I could make it any other way.”
Ohr was born in Biloxi on July 12, 1857. With little formal schooling he tried many trades, including his father's blacksmithing, before discovering his true calling. Around 1879 he received an invitation from a childhood friend, Joseph Meyer, to come to New Orleans to learn pottery. Ohr remembers that "when I found
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