The Arts & Crafts of Newcomb Pottery

Accompanying a major traveling exhibition, this sumptuous volume is the first book to show the entire range of Newcomb Pottery’s creative output in the context of American artistic and social developments in the early years of the modern era. While art pottery crafted at the Newcomb Pottery is among the most admired and collected of all American decorative arts, the enterprise that was the pottery is recognized as an exceptionally advanced social experiment for its time. Elegantly designed and profusely illustrated, this book celebrates the full range of objects created at the renowned Newcomb Pottery, founded by H. Sophie Newcomb College in New Orleans. From the 1890s to around 1940, this remarkable all-woman art school developed a recognizable style based in Art Nouveau and Arts and Crafts aesthetics. All-new, brilliant photographs of 250 objects accompany newly researched essays by respected scholars of decorative arts, a timeline, and artist biographies and pottery decorators’ marks.

Charles Lovell is the director and Sally Main is the senior curator of the Newcomb Art Gallery. David Conradsen is the Grace L. Brumbaugh and Richard E. Brumbaugh Associate Curator of Decorative Arts and Design at the Saint Louis Art Museum. Martin Eidelberg is professor emeritus of art history at Rutgers University. Curator and scholar Ellen Paul Denker has written about American ceramics, furniture, and the Arts and Crafts movement. Adrienne Spinozzi is a research associate in the American wing at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Kevin W. Tucker is the Margot B. Perot Curator of Decorative Arts and Design at the Dallas Museum of Art.