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NEWCOMB COLLEGE POTTERY, ARTS AND CRAFTS, AND THE NEW SOUTH

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 February 2018

Meghan Freeman
Meghan Freeman*
Affiliation:
Manhattanville College
*
email: Meghan.freeman@mville.edu
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Abstract

In the history of the American Arts and Crafts Movement, New Orleans's Newcomb College Pottery (founded in 1894) is often singled out as distinctive by virtue of its genesis as an experimental educational venture, all the more remarkable for emerging out of a small women's college located in the Deep South. Scholarship on NCP frequently rehearses the regionalist character of its diverse handicrafts and its adherence to the central tenets of Arts and Crafts. This article explores how Newcomb College Pottery was neither so strictly regionalist nor so pure an embodiment of the Arts and Crafts spirit as is often averred. Situating Newcomb College Pottery within contemporary cultural debates concerning the formation of a “New South,” I demonstrate how the architects and advocates of Newcomb, inspired by the 1884 Cotton Centennial, sought to craft a largely aspirational identity that marketed NCP as a model industry that heralded commercial and cultural development in the region. It was only later, I argue, as the Pottery developed from an educational experiment into a widely known and respected handicraft enterprise, that it embraced the anti-industrial rhetoric that animated the broader Arts and Crafts movement and adopted the more sentimental form of regionalism that traded on romantic evocations of the Old South, in repudiation of the socially and economically progressive energies that gave it birth.

Type
Articles
Information
The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era , Volume 17 , Issue 1 , January 2018 , pp. 121 - 144
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 2018 

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References

NOTES

1 Ellsworth Woodward, “Composition Book,” [n.d.], folder 13, box 2, Woodward Speeches, Tulane University Archives.

2 Eidelberg, Martin, “American Ceramics and International Styles, 1876–1916,” Record of the Art Museum, Princeton University 34 (1975): 2 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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6 Woodward, “Composition Book,” [n.d.], folder 13, box 2, Woodward Speeches, TU.

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19 This characterization of the region in Cotton Centennial representations squares with Natalie Ring's claims about the national “fascination with the ‘southern problem,’” and the South's having been characterized as a colony vis-à-vis an imperial power. Ring, The Problem South, 3, 51–58.

20 Flood, Theodore L., ed. “The New Orleans World's Fair,” The Chautauquan: A Monthly Magazine Devoted to the Promotion of True Culture 5:2 (Nov. 1884): 112 Google Scholar. For an excellent overview of the expectations of Northern tourists visiting the South post-Civil War, see Silber, Nina, The Romance of Reunion: Northerners and the South, 1865–1900 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 66–92 Google Scholar.

21 Kelman, Ari, in A River and Its City: The Nature of Landscape in New Orleans (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 135 Google Scholar, notes the overwhelming fear “of appearing backwards” shared by fair organizers eager to “showcase their city's bright future” and to avoid pervasive regional stereotypes.

22 A. M. Mayo, “William Preston Johnston's Work for a New South,” Boston Evening Transcript, Aug. 23, 1899.

23 Bureau of Education, Educational Exhibits and Conventions II, 252.

24 Link, William A., The Paradox of Southern Progressivism, 1880–1930 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 126 Google Scholar.

25 Bureau of Education, Educational Exhibits and Conventions II, 252–53.

26 Ibid.

27 Ibid.

28 Ibid., 253.

29 Ibid., 254.

30 Bureau of Education, Educational Exhibits and Conventions III, 896, 898.

31 Report and Catalogue of the Women's Department of the World's Exposition, Held at New Orleans (Boston: Rand, Avery, and Company, 1885), 17, 234Google Scholar.

32 Bureau of Education, Educational Exhibits and Conventions II, 468.

33 Fairall, Industrial and Cotton Centennial Exposition, 21.

34 Tulane University of Louisiana Catalogue, 1887–88, 65, Newcomb Archives, Newcomb College Center for Research on Women, Tulane University.

35 Tulane Catalogue, 1892–93, 119, Newcomb Archives.

36 See Boris, Art and Labor, 7–11.

37 Tulane Catalogue 1892–93, 84, Newcomb Archives.

38 Morrison, Andrew, New Orleans and the New South (New Orleans: L. Graham & Son, 1888), 74 Google Scholar.

39 Tulane Catalogue 1893–94, 111, Newcomb Archives.

40 Main et al., The Arts and Crafts of Newcomb Pottery, 44–45.

41 American Art Pottery, 95; Main et al., The Arts and Crafts of Newcomb Pottery, 50.

42 Peck, Ferdinand W. and Gore, James H., Report of the Commissioner-General for the United States to the International Universal Exposition, Paris, 1900, Vol. V (Washington, DC, 1901), 534, 538–40Google Scholar.

43 Ibid., 539.

44 Ibid., 539

45 For more on “shelter magazines,” see Cumming and Kaplan, The Arts and Crafts Movement, 144.

46 Daily Picayune (New Orleans), July 7, 1895 Google Scholar.

47 American Art Annual (New York), 1898, 314Google ScholarPubMed.

48 Lears, Jackson, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 65 Google Scholar.

49 For more on the different ideological positions within the broader Arts and Crafts movement, see Boris, Art and Labor, 28–31; Cumming and Kaplan, The Arts and Crafts Movement, 143–78; and Kaplan, The Art That Is Life, 52–60.

50 See Brandt, Barbara K., The Craftsman and the Critic: Designing Usefulness and Beauty in Arts and Craft-Era Boston (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2009)Google Scholar for an astute discussion of how the emerging discipline of design criticism helped the public to define those two central terms in Morris's conceptualization of ideal handicrafts: usefulness and beauty.

51 Mary G. Sheerer, “Newcomb Pottery,” Keramic Studio, Nov. 1899, 151.

52 For more on Stickley, see Sanders, Barry, A Complex Fate: Gustav Stickley and the Craftsman Movement (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1996)Google Scholar; Hewitt, Mark Alan, Gustav Stickley's Craftsman Farms: The Quest for an Arts and Crafts Utopia (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2001)Google Scholar; and Betjemann, Peter, Talking Shop: The Language of Craft in an Age of Consumption (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011)Google Scholar.

53 Cumming and Kaplan, 73

54 “History of Newcomb Art School,” Jambalaya 1901, 97, Newcomb Archives.

55 “American Studio Talk,” The International Studio 12, 1900–1901, xii Google Scholar.

56 “Arts and Crafts in Newcomb College,” Newcomb Arcade, Jan. 1901, 27, Newcomb Archives.

57 Ellsworth Woodward, “Needlework in Newcomb Art School,” Brush and Pencil, June 1905, 313–14.

58 See Main et al., The Arts and Crafts of Newcomb Pottery, 47, for a short history of NCP's identifying marks/ciphers; and Brandt, The Craftsman and the Critic, 122–23, 142 for more on the SACB's jury system.

59 “The Place of Art in the World's Work,” Times-Picayune (New Orleans), Apr. 4, 1902 Google Scholar.

60 Ibid.

61 See Grantham, Southern Progressivism, 33–34.

62 Edwin Mims, “The Function of Criticism in the South,” South Atlantic Quarterly, Oct. 1903, 342. See Foster, Gaines M., Ghosts of the Confederacy: Defeat, the Lost Cause, and the Emergence of the New South, 1865–1913 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 180–92Google Scholar.

63 Sheerer, Keramic Studio, Nov. 1899, 151.

64 Irene Sargent, “An Art Industry of the Bayous,” The Craftsman, Mar. 1904, 71–72. For more on Sargent, see Sanders, A Complex Fate, 67–84; Hewitt, Gustav Stickley's Craftsman Farms, 41–42; Boris, Art and Labor, 62–81.

65 One mark of this shift from a regional to a national focus is Newcomb's participation in Stickley's United Crafts exhibition in 1903. See Sanders, A Complex Fate, 40–41.

66 See Hair, William Ivy, Carnival of Fury: Robert Charles and the New Orleans Race Riot of 1900 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1976)Google Scholar; McGerr, Michael, A Fierce Discontent: the Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870–1920 (New York: Free Press, 2003)Google Scholar; Bennett, James B., Religion and the Rise of Jim Crow in New Orleans (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

67 “Newcomb College,” The Adelphean of Alpha Delta Phi, Mar. 1908, 85.

68 William P. Silva, “Newcomb Pottery,” Art and Progress, June 1911, 231.

69 “Newcomb Artists Will Have a Field,” Times-Picayune (New Orleans), Sept. 3, 1903 Google Scholar.

70 Poesch, Newcomb Pottery, 37.

71 Nathaniel Wright Stephenson, “Newcomb Pottery and Art in Education,” Forensic Quarterly, Sept. 1910, 255–56.

72 Ibid.

73 Nicola Gordon Bove, “The Search for Vernacular Expression: The Arts and Crafts Movements in America and Ireland” in The Substance of Style, ed. Bert Denker, 5. See also Greenhalgh, Paul, “The History of Craft” in The Culture of Craft: Status and Future, ed. Dormer, Paul (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), 31 Google Scholar.

74 For more on the Chicago's Arts and Crafts scene, see Boris, Art and Labor, 48–52, and Betjemann, Talking Shop, 120–21.

75 Boris, Art and Labor, 29–30.

76 Ednah Robinson, “Newcomb Pottery: Its Makers and the Lesson They Are Teaching Southern Women,” Sunset Magazine (May 1903): 132.

77 Forensic Quarterly, Sept. 1910, 257–58.

78 Ibid., 259.

79 Forensic Quarterly, Sept. 1910, 259.

80 Anita J. Ellis, “American Tonalism and Rookwood Pottery” in Denker, The Substance of Style,” 303–5.

81 Poesch, Newcomb Pottery, 84.

82 “Newcomb Art Display at the St. Louis Fair,” Times-Picayune (New Orleans), Mar. 4, 1904, 13 Google Scholar.

83 William P. Silva, “Newcomb Pottery,” Art and Progress, June 1911, 231–32. See Adrienne Spinozzi, “The Pursuits of Paying Work: Challenges to Newcomb Pottery Decorators” in The Arts and Crafts of Newcomb Pottery, 180–217.

84 “Book Binding,” Times Picayune (New Orleans), Sept. 28, 1913 Google Scholar.

85 See Boris, Art and Labor, 140–43.

86 Ellsworth Woodward, “Art in Colleges,” Newcomb Arcade (Jan. 1916), Newcomb Archives.

87 Charles A. Bennett, “Newcomb School of Art: Its Relation to Art Industries,” Vocational Education, Nov. 1914, 125.

88 Ellsworth Woodward, “Art Taught as a Means of Expression,” folder 11, box 2, Woodward Speeches, Tulane University Archives.

89 See Irons, Peter, Jim Crow's Children: The Broken Promise of the Brown Decision (London: Penguin Books, 2004), 24 Google Scholar.

90 Tulane Catalogue 1914–15, Newcomb Archives.

91 Tulane Catalogue 1915–16, 101, Newcomb Archives.

92 Ellsworth Woodward, “Arts as a Means of Expression,” folder 11, box 2, Woodward Speeches, Tulane University Archives.

93 Ibid.

94 “Typical Exhibit of Newcomb Art,” Times Picayune (New Orleans), May 11, 1916 Google Scholar.

95 Megraw, Richard, Confronting Modernity: Art and Society in Louisiana (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2008), 40 Google Scholar.

96 Woodward borrows the term “genius loci” from the British aesthete Vernon Lee, who published a book entitled Genius Loci: Notes on Places in 1899. It first crops up in Woodward's vocabulary in a 1916 article published in the Newcomb Arcade.

97 Woodward, “Art in Colleges,” Newcomb Arcade, Jan. 1916: 31.

98 Other educational that featured stories on Newcomb in its final decades include Manual Training and the Journal of the Southern Educational Association (Dec. 1910).

99 In later years, Woodward helped found the Southern States Art League (1920), and was made president of the Isaac Delgado Museum of Art in 1924. He retired from Newcomb in 1933, dying in 1939. Richard Megraw, “Ellsworth Woodward,” http://www.knowla.org/entry/529/&view=summary (accessed Sept. 10, 2016).

100 In a late writing, Woodward stresses that Newcomb College pottery was to be found in “museum collections in the US and abroad,” emphasizing NCP's legacy, its value as a collectible and a historical artifact. [Newcomb College founded in 1887], folder 23, box 2, Woodward Speeches, Tulane University Archives.