robert maxwell
Image courtesy of the Estate of Robert Maxwell
The entry-point for many to Robert Maxwell’s ceramic work is a series of small sculptural animal figurines, called Beasties or U Name Its, which pervaded exhibitions, department stores, private collections and publications across the United States throughout the 1960s. Beasties were the result of a pot-throwing gone awry during Maxwell’s time as a student at UCLA: the neck of the stoneware pot being formed on the wheel collapsed, and instead of discarding the failed vessel, Maxwell engineered a tail, horn, textured body and features, the genesis of the creative reimagining that would come to define his career in ceramics.
Maxwell’s origin story in ceramics followed a common path for many ceramists in postwar America: after being discharged from the Navy, Maxwell made use of the G.I. Bill to enroll as an art student at the University of California, Los Angeles, and quickly focused on ceramics, studying under luminaries Laura Andreson and Bernard Kester, and alongside David Cressey. Following graduation, Maxwell and Cressey shared a studio in Venice, California, and Maxwell quickly developed his practice as an independent studio potter. In 1961, Maxwell was selected to exhibit alongside many of the country’s most esteemed ceramic artists including John Mason, Gertrud and Otto Natzler, Vivika and Otto Heino, Dora De Larios, and Henry Takemoto, in Arts of Southern California VI: Ceramics which originated at the Long Beach Museum of Art and traveled through several other states, firmly establishing Southern California as the epicenter of a clay revolution during this period.
By the mid-1960s, Maxwell was producing ceramics for the firm N.S. Gustin Co., a Los Angeles-based manufacturing and distribution firm, most notably the manufacturer of Edith Heath and Edward Durell Stone tableware for the iconic Good Design exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1952. The production of the Beasties boomed under Gustin’s provision, securing a spot in the 1964 “Amusements” exhibition at The Museum of Contemporary Craft in New York (now the Museum of Arts and Design), during the height of the museum’s director, Paul J. Smith’s, groundbreaking conceptual exhibitions featuring expansive and progressive definitions of craft.
Image courtesy of the Estate of Robert Maxwell
A move to Fallbrook, California, in 1970, initiated a new independent studio practice for Maxwell, creating handmade ceramics for Neiman Marcus, Bullock’s and other high-end retail establishments, featuring a limited run of objects, vessels and bird feeders. In 1976, he reconvened with former studio mate David Cressey, who by then had enjoyed much success as a designer for the firm Architectural Pottery, and formed a new company together called Earthgender. The firm, which was in operation for just over a decade, produced hand-crafted stoneware ceramics and architectural planters, resulting in a much sought-after body of collaborative work from this period.
Nearly two decades would pass before Maxwell returned to the wheel. By turns salesman and itinerant designer during this period, Maxwell’s next big break would come in the form of a classified advertisement for the position of art teacher at an all-girl Catholic high school, Ramona Convent Secondary School of Alhambra, in 1992. Frequently described as a man with a glass of wine in one hand and a cigarette in the other, Maxwell was an unlikely candidate for a parochial position, yet it was here, with access to a studio and supplies, that his ceramic practice was renewed, honed and reinvigorated for its final act. For the next two decades, until his retirement from Ramona in 2012, Maxwell returned to independent ceramic production, refining patterns, forms and glazes, bringing his whimsical and innovative approach to ceramic production to a rousing finish, and igniting new generations of California ceramists.
Image courtesy of the Estate of Robert Maxwell
Maxwell’s imprint on California’s mid-century clay revolution exists beyond the limited amount of extant artwork sought by his collectors. He was responsible for developing a groundbreaking formula of stoneware slip that could be used in production molding processes, allowing his (and other) ceramics to be manufactured on a larger scale while maintaining the tactile integrity of stoneware clay. His position in this aspect of ceramic production places him squarely at the pivotal intersection of industrial design and craft in postwar America and the experimental materials of mass production.
The present collection being offered at BILLINGS are all works spanning the decades of Maxwell’s creative output from his own private collection with his wife and business partner Gaye Lyn Maxwell. Many of these works have made the move throughout the Maxwells’ lives from their original studio in Venice in the 1960s, to Fallbrook, and back again to Los Angeles at BILLINGS today, offering collectors a most unique opportunity to acquire some of the rarest and most important Robert Maxwell works to ever enter the market.
—Meaghan Roddy, Independent Curator + Ceramics Specialist
Image courtesy of the Estate of Robert Maxwell