CLAUDE CONOVER (1907-1994)
“Claude Conover quietly went about his business for decades, creating some of the century’s best ceramic artworks...”
~ Glenn Adamson
Claude Conover was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1907, but grew up nearby in New Castle. He moved to Cleveland, Ohio, to attend the Cleveland School of Art (now Cleveland Institute of Art). He studied both painting and sculpture, graduating in 1929. As the artist admitted, “I had absolutely no interest in pottery or ceramics...I went to the Art School to be a commercial artist”. For decades after graduation, he was employed as a successful commercial designer in the print and advertising industries. Throughout this phase of his career, during evenings and weekends, he continued to pursue his passion for sculptured portraits and stone carvings.
It was not until he was in his fifties that he dedicated himself full-time to ceramics. In the early 1950s, he purchased a kiln to produce his sculptures in terra cotta, converting the garage behind his house in the Cleveland suburb of South Euclid to a working ceramics studio. Conover commented, “Sometime in 1958, while wedging a block of clay, a jug shape came to mind, so I added a neck and handle...hollowed it out and then fired it...the next spring entering it in the May Show”, Cleveland’s premier event for craft, calling it Pottery Form A due to its method of production. The piece won a purchase award from the Cleveland Museum of Art. After this success, he began to regularly submit pottery to the May Show and other juried exhibitions, consistently winning prizes.
During this experimental period, he produced animal sculptures, including the Conover Cat; clay bust sculptures; various housewares (ashtrays, plates, bowls, planters, jugs); and bottles in a variety of forms, surface decoration, and neck sizes. Most of these early pieces were sold through art shows and art exhibitions, or sold directly to collectors. In addition to the May Show, the most important catalyst for his career was the Smithsonian Institution’s seminal exhibition, Objects: USA (1969), which toured twenty-two museums across the US and eleven cities in Europe. Viewed by over half a million people, Objects: USA elevated craft to a collected art form. The stoneware bottle showcased in the exhibit, Ulua (1968), a pedestal bottle patterned with lines, was ultimately purchased by the Johnson Collection of Contemporary Crafts, Racine, WI.
By this time, Conover had standardized his methods for production, mixing his own stoneware clay, inventing his own unique way of constructing his pieces using slabs of clay and plaster molds to create two matching hemispheres, joining them together at the rims, paddling the vessel to its final shape, adding a neck, then covering the whole surface of the bottle in a custom-made white slip. After the piece hardened, he added texture and pattern with his own handmade tools and bisque-fired clay rollers. His prodigious seven-day work schedule, from rolling slabs on Monday to inserting a clear plastic flower frog to contain dried stalks or branches on Sunday, resulted in a weekly production of six pots a week, or approximately 4,000 by the time he retired in 1990.
“I think of it in terms of mass and volume instead of looking at it symmetrically like a potter does.”
~ Claude Conover
Each piece was given a Mayan name, from Aaltan to Zopotec, taken from a book of 800 Mayan words that he utilized for this purpose, each used four to five times during his career. Interestingly, Conover’s early bottles all had simple names, such as Pottery Form A or Head or Bottle #2. It wasn’t until 1964 that he started using Mayan names, the first, Mitla, for his entry in the Designer Craftsmen of Ohio show sponsored by the Beaux Arts Club and the Columbus Gallery of Fine Arts (now the Columbus Museum of Art). His interest in Mayan art may have been prompted by a 1959 visit he made to the Detroit Institute of Art to see The Art of Ancient Maya, the first exhibition in the US of the holdings from the National Museum of Archaeology of the Republic of Guatemala, from which Conover kept the exhibit’s monograph in his personal library. By 1969, all Conover bottles had Mayan names.
His bottles were sold in sixty retail and gallery outlets, including Potter & Mellen, Cleveland, Ohio, a landmark artists workshop; ambitious craft galleries like the Hand and the Spirit Crafts Gallery in Scottsdale, Arizona, the Upper Story in Boston, Massachusetts, and Great Things! in Costa Mesa, California; as well as major department stores, such as Saks Fifth Avenue and J. L. Hudson. Like everything he did, he had a well-defined routine for wrapping and boxing the pieces, as well as shipping, and whenever possible, personally delivering his work with his Ford station wagon.
Are these handmade, monolithic bottles ancient or modern abstractions?
Conover said little about his art. It was one of the subjects he refused to discuss, the others being religion and politics. He famously said, “I do not believe the artist should try to make a profound statement or explain his work. The object must speak for itself”. His monochromatic palette, simple shapes, and Mayan titles invite the viewer to experience the object through a personal lens, a contemporary tabula rasa. The pieces are timeless and appropriate to almost any design idiom. Possibly the enduring appeal of Conover’s pieces is due to the artist himself, who eschewed production. As Conover said, “I continually create challenges for myself and that drives me. I am not a production person....When the bottle is ready...I look at it and at that moment I decide what I’m going to do”. Are these handmade, monolithic bottles ancient or modern abstractions? Conover found inspiration in the moment, but ultimately, interpretation lies within the viewer.
Conover’s bottles are in private collections around the world as well as in museums across the country, including the Museum of Arts and Design in New York, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C.
