This is to remember Bob A. Ellison Jr. who passed away at 89 on July 9th, one of the last connoisseurs. The legend says that since he saw a small white ceramic plate 60-soemthing years ago in a shop in Greenwich Village, he fell in love with clay art. The rest is history as Ellison has assembled as what is considered the best collection of clay art in this country.
In memory of Bob A. Ellison Jr. (1932-2021) who passed away on July 9th, one of the last connoisseurs. The legend says that when he saw a vintage white ceramic plate 60-something years ago in a shop in Greenwich Village, he instantly fell in love with clay art. The rest is history as Ellison has assembled what is considered the best collection of clay art in this country.
He was self-taught and developed the most incredible passion for learning about ceramics, which made him into the ultimate authority on the medium, developing an eye to identify the greatness. He cared about education and about helping people learning about ceramics, and his gifts to the collection of the Met have transformed the collection into a comprehensive one. Ellison collected what he loved, abstract and the extraordinary forms that can achieved only in clay. He collected it all, American Arts and Crafts; European early modern ceramics; Art Nouveau; ancient ceramics; contemporary; and countless other periods, supporting living artists across the country.
In February the Met opened “Shapes from Out of Nowhere: Ceramics from the Robert A. Ellison Jr. Collection,” an exhibition of works drawn from his latest gift. This gorgeous installation in the South-Western part of the Museum (Gallery 913) comes to celebrate a gift of 125 modern and contemporary ceramics from Ellison, made to The Met in honor of the Museum’s 150th anniversary. The exhibit comes to demonstrate the adventurous, imaginative, and radical expressions and techniques in clay art.
The earliest examples in the show are by George Ohr (1857-1918), the American ceramicist who created expressive, abstract vessels that were ahead of their time. Little known during his lifetime, Ohr studied ceramics at Newcomb College Art Pottery in New Orleans, and was based in the South, moving between New Orleans, Louisiana, and Biloxi, Mississippi. It was not until the 60s that his genius was discovered, and today his pieces are shown in art museums, such as MoMA, as an example of early and abstract modern art.
The mid-century years are represented by some of the world’s leading talents — Axel Salto, Ken Price, Toshiko Takaezu, Katherine Choy, Peter Voulkos, and Wing Ng – with magnificent examples of their oeuvre. Cotemporary ceramics are represented by those talents who demonstrate the power of clay to create the contemporary, such as Aneta Regel, Kathy Butterly, Syd Carpenter, and Lynda Benglis, with striking works that embrace abstraction and nonrepresentational forms.
The related publication ‘Shapes from Out of Nowhere: Ceramics from the Robert A. Ellison Jr. Collection,’ published by August Editions, is a beautiful volume that illuminate Ellison’s extraordinary gift and decades of collecting ceramics, a passion that eventually crystallized into the singular approach of nonrepresentational form in clay. The exhibition will close on August 29th. All images courtesy the Met. Above: Works by Arnold Zimmerman.
