This vase decorated by Maria Hoa LeBlanc in 1902 features large-scale animals, a relatively rare type of subject in the Newcomb repertoire. The bowl with rabbits can be seen on one of the shelves in an early photograph of the Newcomb salesroom. Newcomb Pottery, bowl decorated with stylized rabbits, 1902, height 7 inches.
:Grueby, Teco, Rookwood, Marblehead, Saturday Evening Girls… The list of American art potteries from the Arts and Crafts period amassed by the Two Red Roses Foundation is boundless; however, the representative works on view in a current exhibition showcasing the collection is intentionally limited. The reason is simple: the closely cropped examples are representative of the best of the best. The desired end result: to focus the eye not only upon iconic forms of what has been termed by some close to the exhibition as an overlooked era in American history, but also on the movement in its entirety.
The Arts and Crafts movement is one whose theme has continually resonated throughout Twentieth Century history and continues to this day. There have been the art colonies that simultaneously began to flourish in the late 1800s, the more modern back-to-nature themes, the communal groups of hippies in the 1960s that spawned a "Mother Earth" ideology, organic living and, most recently, a movement that has been termed "green." Each conveys the Arts and Crafts theology of hands-on production, simplicity and limiting the influences of the machine age to the greatest extent possible.
With this in mind, the Two Red Roses Foundation and its founder, Rudy Ciccarello, brought together 80 objects to form the exhibition "Beauty in Common Things: American Arts and Crafts Pottery from the Two Red Roses Foundation." The exhibition is on view through April 26 at the Museum of Fine Arts.
Approximately 80 superb examples of pottery from the American Arts and Crafts movement by such esteemed potteries as Newcomb College, Paul Revere, Walrath and Overbeck, as well as those aforementioned, have been painstakingly selected from the collection. Furniture and paintings are also included to help place the ceramic objects into the context of the overall picture in which they were created and intended to be seen and used. The exhibition is curated and the catalog written by Dr Martin Eidelberg, professor emeritus of art history at Rutgers University, and Dr Jonathan Clancy of Sotheby's Institute of Art.
A fanciful bowl with stylized geese, executed 1914, Saturday Evening Girls, probably designed by Edith Brown, executed by Fannie Levine, diameter 11 5/8 inches. Several variant designs with strutting and swimming geese were produced. In some instances, they walk quietly; here, the seven geese all squawk and flap their wings, each somewhat differently.
"Thirty years ago, almost no American museum collected works from the Arts and Crafts movement," stated Eidelberg. A highly respected Arts and Crafts authority, exhibition curator and author on the period, Eidelberg takes great pleasure in what he observes as a change on the horizon. Citing recent "promised gifts" of Arts and Crafts furniture from the Stephen Gray collection to the Wadsworth Atheneum and American art pottery from the Robert Ellison collection to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Eidelberg notes, "All this bespeaks a new movement."
Although many museums have over the past couple decades added "a few representative pieces of pottery and furniture, still, their late concession to the beginning of the Twentieth Century always pales in relation to the way that they have fervently paid homage to the Eighteenth Century," exclaims Eidelberg. "There now is a growing recognition of the disparity that exists, and the entry of Arts and Crafts from the turn of the century into American museums is becoming increasingly significant."
Nowhere is that mindset more evident than at the Two Red Roses Foundation, a repository for what has surely become the world's most important collection of American Arts and Crafts pottery. Although certainly not limited to the ceramics of the period, its dedication to the Arts and Crafts movement has been revealed recently with two landmark exhibitions. "Color Woodblock Prints," an exhibition that closed earlier this year at the Leepa-Rattner Museum of Art in Tarpon Springs, Fla., and "Beauty in Common Things."
