George Ohr Sophisticate and Rube by Ellen J. Lippert

Description

Twenty thousand mud babies: the mad potter’s legacy. Between 1857 and 1918, George Ohr of Biloxi, Mississippi, threw, twisted, and glazed more than 20,000 ceramic pieces — his beloved ‘mud babies.’ Dismissed as an eccentric showman in his own day, he is now celebrated as a master of American art pottery whose paper-thin vessels and wild glazes anticipated modernism by decades.

In George Ohr: Sophisticate and Rube, Ellen J. Lippert unravels the paradox of the ‘Mad Potter of Biloxi’: the clownish self-promoter who was also a radical innovator, collapsing the boundary between folk art and fine art a generation before the art world caught up. Lippert draws on deep research to separate the showman from the artist — revealing how Ohr’s ‘failures’ were actually breakthroughs, and why museums now treasure what his contemporaries dismissed.

For ceramics lovers and students of American art — the strange, brilliant story of an original.

Twenty Thousand Mud Babies: The Mad Potter’s Legacy

nBetween 1857 and 1918, George Ohr of Biloxi, Mississippi, threw, twisted, and glazed more than 20,000 ceramic pieces — his beloved “mud babies.” Dismissed as an eccentric showman in his own day, he is now celebrated as a master of American art pottery whose paper-thin vessels and wild glazes anticipated modernism by decades.
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nIn George Ohr: Sophisticate and Rube, Ellen J. Lippert looks past the carnival-barker persona — the flamboyant moustache, the outrageous boasts — to the serious artist beneath. Her expansive study of Ohr and his Gilded Age context shows a deliberate craftsman who studied European and Asian traditions, performed his “rube” role strategically, and hoarded his work for a future that would understand it.
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nPublished by the University Press of Mississippi in 2013, this is the essential biography of an American original — at once showman and visionary, huckster and genius. A must-read for anyone fascinated by American art and its great outsiders.