Emily Ralph

Overbeck Sisters

October 7 2000

The pottery of the Overbeck sisters is a refreshing sight to the confused contemporary art student’s eyes. This paper is based on the exhibit Hanna and Her Sisters at The Richmond Art Museum, the Cambridge Overbeck Museum, a tour of the Overbeck house, Kathleen Postel’s book, The Overbeck’s and various newspaper clippings and articles reviewing their work. The sisters have a legacy of works that they left for others to put together piece-by-piece. The colors of their unique glaze including various shades of blues, pinks, reds, greens, and purples can all be found in the backyard of their family home. The raspberries, strawberries, green vegetables, plants, flowers, and animals are reflected in their pottery and make nature the center of their work. Nature and art intertwine as the sisters mold the clay from their backyard to the designs in their imaginations.

The sisters: Ida, Mary, Margaret, Hanna, Elizabeth, and Harriet, are world renowned for their pottery and have been exhibited in Paris, San Francisco, New York, and Chicago. The sisters lived and worked together making a living from their art. Postel states, "Overbeck pottery must be regarded as the work of a highly empathetic group of women who found joy and color in creating, almost as if in contrast to a frugal, abstemious way of life" (Postel 90). The sisters have their own unique style; even though the sisters were aware of the Art Deco and Art Nuevo movements of the time they stuck to their roots. The family farm where they choose to live and work gives their art a specific context and identity. The sisters were committed to the saying, "Borrowed art is dead art." In other words the sisters did not imitate other pottery movements. They created art out of what they knew out of the elements that they interacted with everyday in nature. The sisters molded the images from their backyard into clay. Their pottery includes swimming fish, insects, birds, flowers, leaves, and even people. Their work reflects the sights and sounds of Cambridge City. The Overbecks clearly marked their own works with their initials and even wrote ‘The Property of OBK’ on numerous pieces. These initials show their claim to their own artistry. The clay from their own backyard was used to make many of their pieces and later when they started using clay from Georgia and Tennessee they still often mixed the clay from their backyard with the softer southern clay. The sister’s created their own unique vision out of their backyard in Cambridge City Indiana on their own terms.

When I went to the museum the first time I thought that the Overbeck sisters were fascinating. The picture in the Richmond art museum of Hanna, Elizabeth, and Mary shows three intimate women gazing off into their yard. The Overbeck pottery is overwhelming and complex. The sisters used multiple steps in the process of making a piece. First they made the design for the pottery, which were often sketches or watercolors. Examples of these were displayed on the walls of the Richmond Art Museum. Looking closely at the sketches you can see the word ‘used’ written next to certain designs. This marking indicated a design that had already been used once for a piece of pottery. The sisters never reused a design. Postel states, "the decorative work of the Overbecks was motivated by two principles: All good applied design is organized and all borrowed art is dead art (55). The sisters carefully planned every piece and threw away pieces that were not perfect. The owner of their house today still finds old pieces of pottery in the backyard that was thrown out because of imperfections. The Overbeck sisters used nature and everyday people in their works in order to claim their own unique art.

Next, I decided that I should drive fourteen miles to see the Overbeck house where they lived and worked. I thought that I was going to write my paper on the Overbecks since I had already seen Richmond’s exhibit and read Postel’s book but the librarian at the Overbeck museum shifted my interest. She gave me major insight into the local color of the Over beck’s town Cambridge City. Initially I was going to talk about pottery being timeless, cups, pictures, glasses, functional art, and validating women’s crafts as art. But then I started talking to the librarian who surprisingly was only interested in their figurines.

The figurines were displayed in the Richmond exhibit as well but in a hallway generally out of view. The librarian said that the most popular comment people make about the sister’s exhibit is that the figurines look like children made them. Her response was that her idea of an artist is someone who can overcome all of the conventions of adulthood and express himself or herself clearly like a young child. Didn’t Picasso say something similar? So I started focusing on the figures which were both the sister’s personal response to the people in their daily lives, a function in making pottery, and a way to get money from those who paid them to depict a certain family member or favorite animal.

Postel makes a distinction between the figurines as representational and grotesque. The representational figures are those, "representational sculptures: small figurines, usually consigned, drawn from real life, models, or photographs or daguerreotypes, of both human and animal subjects" (60). The representational figures realistically represent local people in town and various animals. Elizabeth stated that the figurines were the, "Humor of the Kiln". The figures function in terms of pottery was to test out new colors and glazes for the pottery. However another function was for the sister's own amusement. Like Charlie Chaplin in his silent movies the sisters take the reality of life and show the absurdity that coexists. Some of their figurines are tragically comic like one entitled Bartender in which this man seems so fat that he will soon explode. His rosy checks and one arm in front of the other give a clear sense of motion and activity. In another piece entitled The Orchestra numerous figures are shown blowing horns and stringing violins. These figures tell a story about their lives. Harriet was a musician and often gave music lessons to local kids in the neighborhood. In another piece entitled The Carpet Taking women are shown taking carpets to make quilts. Here the women clearly reap their own fruit and form a circle of solidarity as they make the blankets that will keep them warm in the winter.

Another figurine that the Overbecks made is what Postel calls grotesque sculptures. She states, "grotesques are sculptures created with a sense of humor and fantasy, depicting a well-known figure, or animal, each with a salient trait caricatured in bizarre imagery" (60). These figures explore the fine line between fantasy and reality in life. Dreams and real life are both seen in these figurines. Some examples of these clearly unrealistic figures are purple cows, diabolical cats with twisted tails, and little boys with wings, pink monkeys, and distorted people. The figures are roughly finished and are also the most unique. Like comics these figures resemble well-known people in the community often to critique them. Postel gives some examples of people they made fun of, "the head of a banking firm, a long-time auctioneer, and a corpulent bartender" (56). The use of these figures is significant because the sisters are clearly making a political statement. The banker, auctioneer, and bartender are all greedy, wealthy people in the community who hold power. The sisters on the other hand created their own business out of the support for their work from the community. While I was looking through their family home, now privately owned, the owner showed me a grotesque figure of a woman in a rocking chair. The figure had a huge nose and big aqua cylinders for glasses. The figure contrasted greatly with the delicate southern belle realistic representational figurines. I commented on the figure’s big nose and the owner suggested that the figure was someone the town had called ‘nosy rose’. The owner explained how the woman was very gossipy and everyone called her nosy nose as a result. The figure can be interpreted as a means of making fun of the traditional gossipy woman who ‘puts her nose in everyone’s business."

After leaving the backyard of their house and driving home to Joni Mitchell’s Blue I was thinking about how mysterious the sisters lives were. They grew up as children playing in the grounds of the house and most had their funerals in the parlor. A generation of sisters lived and died in one house creating some of the most influential art in the field of arts and crafts. Postle writes, "These strange, angular and dreamlike people seemed their purpose, perhaps a dream turned inside out." In other words their lives are like a fantasy and yet their work is real. Kathey Postel, who chronicled the sisters lives (and was a long time art teacher at Earlham College) had her last wish to see the Overbeck’s exhibited in the Richmond art museum. She died two days after the exhibit opened but her passion did not die in vain. Her obsession with the sisters lives on and is helping to reawaken the world to the sister’s incredible life’s works. One Richmond High school student spent hours, (while the other students were writing about their favorite piece of pottery), he choose to write about the large picture of Hanna, Mary, and Elizabeth. Through all of the years the sister’s lives have continued to mystify this region of Indiana and the Arts and Craft field. One art critic stated, "True artists all, their results show much variety and originality of shape, style of decoration, and glazes." The sisters show that women can create their own unique art and reflect their own culture simultaneously.