Pitcher with figures

Adolf Odorfer

1937 · Earthenware · The American Wing

Austrian by birth, Adolf Odorfer spent time in Brazil and Mexico before settling in Fresno, California, in 1935. He made a series of elongated pitcher forms in the mid-1930s, shortly after he settled on the West Coast. In a bold palette of lemon yellow, white, and black, the two sides feature designs that show that Odorfer was responsive to the modernist language of French painting. In particular, the female nude, holding a jug, is flattened and painted in the arbitrary blue slip that one cannot mistake as bearing the influence of Matisse’s dancing figures of a decade or so earlier.

Artist

Adolf Odorfer

Date

1937

Medium

Earthenware

Culture

American

Department

The American Wing

Credit line

Gift of Martin Eidelberg, 2020