TEFAF New York
Giorgio Morandi & George Ohr

The first major retrospective of Ohr’s work, George Ohr: Modern Potter (1857–1918), was held at the American Craft Museum (now the Museum of Arts and Design), New York, in 1989. “The first time he sat at a potter’s wheel,” Roberta Smith observes in a review of the exhibition, “Ohr knew he had found his life's calling.” Smith aligns Ohr with contemporaries including Thomas Eakins, Louis Sullivan, and Frank Lloyd Wright.

No two pieces by Ohr are alike. His obsessive devotion to his craft resulted in works that epitomize the values of the 19th century Arts and Crafts movement, an international trend in art and design with practitioners who prized the handcrafted over the industrially produced, and—in proto-modernist fashion—embraced the inherent material and visual qualities of their media and sought to convey the process of the work’s creation in its form and appearance. As the critic Ken Johnson notes, “Beginning each piece on a potter’s wheel, Ohr produced thin-walled vessels that he then subjected to all kinds of manipulations. Crumpling, crimping, folding, dimpling, twisting, squashing and stretching, he fashioned objects that appear organically animated. Those glazed in a wondrous variety of colors, patterns and textures resemble exotic puffballs or tropical sea anemones. Others riff on traditional conventions to playfully absurdist effect.”

Ohr never sold his art pottery, wishing for it to be kept together. After his death, his artworks remained overlooked for decades until the late 1960s, when the vast majority of them were rediscovered. Since then, Ohr’s works have been acquired by countless museums and major collections worldwide. A museum devoted to his art—in a campus designed by Frank Gehry—was opened in his hometown of Biloxi in 2010. “I was shocked when I saw my first Ohr pot,” Gehry joked, “I decided that one of us was copying the other. I decided that Ohr was mimicking me!”