The Mad Potter of Biloxi: The Art and Life of George E. Ohr

The self-styled ``Biloxi Mud Dauber,'' Mississippi art potter Ohr (1857-1918) produced thousands of ceramic pieces that were out of step with their time. Detractors have called them bizarre, crude, even ugly, but his supporters saw Ohr as an eccentric genius, a romantic who staked unexplored aesthetic territory with unprecedented shapes and idiosyncratic glazes, and created a polychromatic spectrum of works. A picaresque rebel with flashing eyes and a long white beard, Ohr deemed these pots his ``mud babies.'' Scores of them are on display in this monograph illustrated with 140 color and 100 black-and-white photos. Clark wrote American Ceramics , Ellison is a founder of the American Ceramic Arts Society and Hecht is an editor of Arts and Crafts Quarterly. (Nov.)