Collecting American Art Pottery

Q: Why do you think people collect pre-war American ceramics?

American art pottery offers a window into an exciting time in the decorative arts. They reflect this country’s growing embrace of the rest of the world, as we emerged from a more nascent and isolationist perspective. In a scant twenty years, from about 1880 to 1900, our ceramic artists evolved from copying European and Asian precedents to forging their own, clear path to contemporary design. It was also a time, prior to World War I, when labor was less expensive than materials, which allowed for factories and studios to produce artware from Boston to Santa Barbara, and many points in between. The variety and vitality of the ceramic arts in America have not yet been matched qualitatively. 
 

Q: What do you see as the future of collecting this type of pottery? Are there any emerging trends people should be aware of?

This is a difficult question to answer. Work by some of the period makers, like Ohr, have not dropped in price, while artist-decorated Rookwood, which was the best of its kind on the planet, has inexplicably declined in value by quite a bit. I’m not sure why there would be such a disparity, though, with Ohr being our most important artisan, very little can keep pace with his body of work. I don’t know whether the new pricing paradigm for certain companies means this is the best time to buy the ware in two decades, or if the prices will continue to falter. But certainly, the more “modernist” the decorative ware, the more longevity it will have in the marketplace.
 

Q: Who are your favorite pre-war American ceramics makers, and why?

The artists and companies I favor, after nearly fifty years, are a combination of the truly great and those for whom I still wax most nostalgic. George Ohr and Frederick Rhead are exceptional in ways that separate them from the rest of the pack. The former was the wild card, the joker in the pottery deck whose singular creative genius elevated the medium to far more than simply craft.  And in Rhead, if one follows closely his picaresque travels from England and across America, we can see the evolution of the ceramic arts. Rhead transformed early, somewhat predictable and extravagant decorative ware into a more subtle and sublime expression, painting the Earth on pieces of earth. And I have to include Adelaide Robineau, of course, who served as a brilliant counterpoint to Ohr. But her work was always so rare that it was probably a decade into my career before I even got to hold a piece. On the other hand, I’ll always have a soft spot for Roseville, since it was my first love. I initially learned of Della Robbia, the company’s premier art line which Rhead designed in 1906, in the spiral-bound pamphlet published by the White Pillars Museum, and it was something so mythical that I thought I’d never even get to see a piece of it up close. Such emotional flames are never extinguished, providing yet another reason to hold Rhead in such high regard.
 

Q: How have your personal tastes changed since you first began your career, and are there any specific potteries or potters that you disliked and later changed your mind about?

I’ve made no secret of how much I hated Ohr’s body of work early on, fueled in no small part by my having purchased dozens of early fakes, right here in Lambertville, at the flea market in about 1975. They were, in fact, authentic pieces, but had originally been only bisque-fired, something everyone thought constituted “unfinished” ware. Some misguided souls in New Jersey, in an effort to make them more saleable, put dreadful glazes on hundreds of such pieces. I bought my share and lost several thousand dollars at a time when that was pretty much all the money I had in the world, and swore I’d never buy another piece of George Ohr pottery. That changed in the early 1980s, while I was working at Jordan-Volpe Gallery in New York. The best of the best passed through there and, one day, being a ceramiphile at heart, that particular light bulb in my head flicked back on. I became illuminated, and there was no looking back.

I also harbor a special place in my heart for the California potters of the period, like Grand Feu, Arequipa, Frederick Rhead, Robertson Los Angeles, and Valentien. These were people who benefitted from creating art pottery a few years later than the east coast makers, employing new techniques and greater technical knowledge. Older and wiser, one might say. They made what were arguably the most sophisticated and intelligent works of American clay, with decorative elements subtle and nuanced, and glazes that were among the most evolved ever produced outside of the Orient, up to that point. The California clay deposits were, by the potter’s own assessment, among the best in the country, and that played no small part in the overall quality of the work. These elements, combined with the awe-inspiring natural beauty of the state, think pre-freeway, contributed to a body of work that remains mostly under-appreciated, especially by collectors who live west of the Golden State.