Art & Design
Major Gift of Art Pottery to Adorn Met’s Restyled American Wing
By CAROL VOGELJAN. 14, 2009
In the early 1960s, when he moved to New York from Fort Worth to pursue a career as a painter, Robert A. Ellison Jr. spent much of his time exploring the city, perusing antiques stores, thrift shops and flea markets for things, he said, “they didn’t have in Texas.”
One of his earliest purchases was a white crackled-glaze plate decorated with blue rabbits that he later learned was made around 1900 in Dedham, Mass. “The design was strong, not fussy,” Mr. Ellison, 76, said in an interview.
His rambles soon extended to New England, where he discovered many other kinds of pottery. “I didn’t know what any of it was,” he said. “It wasn’t in books. I just saw it, liked it and bought it. Prices were low.”
Mr. Ellison has since amassed hundreds of examples of American and European ceramics, from the theatrical creations of George E. Ohr, the self-styled Mad Potter of Biloxi, Miss., to the matte-green Arts and Crafts pieces of William H. Grueby.
Cramped for space in his Village apartment, he has crowded his treasures into cabinets, crammed them atop shelves and packed them away in closets. And while he insists that he doesn’t think of himself as a philanthropist, he now plans to donate 250 American pieces from his collection to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Dating from 1876 through 1956, the works include examples by the greatest late-19th and early-20th-century American potters, from Ohr to Grueby to masters of the Newcomb and Rookwood pottery studios. Experts familiar with the collection say it is worth $15 million to $20 million. It will be displayed at the Met on a new mezzanine level of the Charles Engelhard Court, starting on May 19, when the second phase of the renovation of the American Wing is completed.
The gift, which the board voted to accept on Tuesday evening, is a well-timed one for the Met. “It’s the perfect synergy between a collector’s wishes and the museum’s ability to honor them,” said Morrison H. Heckscher, chairman of the museum’s American Wing.
As a condition of the gift, Mr. Ellison wanted his collection to be shown by itself at first and to have the museum prepare a book about it. The new glass-fronted mezzanine, below the current walkway against the court’s west wall, was purposely designed for decorative objects like Mr. Ellison’s that can withstand the sunlight that bathes the space through windows overlooking Central Park.
The renovated wing will include 53 glass cases, Mr. Heckscher said, about 20 more for decorative objects than it had in the past, 13 of them on the new mezzanine. Much of the space within the wing has been reconfigured through the addition of glass walls, a new glass elevator and a glass staircase in the lofty Engelhard Court. The museum’s 12 historic American interiors are being relocated chronologically within the wing, from Colonial times to a design environment by Frank Lloyd Wright.
Mr. Ellison’s gift fills a significant gap in the Met, whose holdings of American art pottery had been spotty. “It was adequate,” admitted Alice Cooney Frelinghuysen, the museum’s curator of American decorative arts. “But this collection transforms it. Now it will be extraordinary.”
Ms. Frelinghuysen has long been familiar with Mr. Ellison’s ceramics. She first met him when she was organizing “In Pursuit of Beauty: Americans and the Esthetic Movement,” a 1986 show to which he was an important lender. “There are a couple of serious collectors of art pottery, but no more than a handful,” she said. “And this collection is arguably one of the best.”
David Rago, a New Jersey dealer and auctioneer who specializes in 20th-century decorative arts and knows Mr. Ellison’s collection, said it was particularly unusual because he started buying masters like Ohr before they became fashionable. “He was there early on,” Mr. Rago said. “He had the taste, the eye and the drive.”
Among the highlights in the gift are a group of 16 exotic works by Ohr, a picaresque figure who died in 1918 and about whom Mr. Ellison wrote a book published in 2006. (He was a co-author of a 1989 book on Ohr.)
In the 1970s he bought some pieces that had been purchased directly from the artist’s studio. “I was hooked,” he said. “After that I would look for interesting pieces wherever I could find them. I love their quirkiness, their abstract forms.”
Asked why he was drawn so intensely to pottery, of all art forms, Mr. Ellison said, “I can’t answer that question.” He recalled that his early purchase of the white rabbit plate led him to the work of Hugh Cornwall Robertson, the Massachusetts founder of Dedham Pottery, whose heavy drip vases with colorful, lavalike glazes reminded him of the thick paint applied by Abstract Expressionist artists.
“The designs and shapes I discovered were endlessly fascinating,” he said.
In 1985 Mr. Ellison abandoned his own painting to write about ceramics, but he never stopped collecting. He now owns pieces by every major American potter, some of them well known and others quite obscure. The objects headed to the Met range from vessels that are only a few inches tall to plaques, lamps and vases exceeding two feet. In addition to well-known potters, the collection also includes examples by 20th-century artists like Henry Varnum Poor, Hunt Diederich and Peter Voulkos who distinguished themselves in other mediums as well.
Mr. Ellison says he has more or less reached the end of his collecting career. “I may buy something, but only if I haven’t seen it before,” he said. “But I’m going to try not to.”