Potter Poor

For most people pottery is too familiar an accessory to life to have much importance. Tiles, plates, saucers, cups, flower pots, vases are so necessary they are commonplace, manufactured and bought by the million. Normal purchasers exercise a natural regard for what is pleasing in pottery, but to select pottery as the distinctive work of a gifted individual would seem precious to most people.

Yet every great civilization has brought its pottery to an artistic level commensurate with its painting, sculpture, architecture. The Grecian urn, hymned by Poet Keats has become symbolic of rare beauty. Wedgewood is a name which added lustre to the reign of George III.

In rural Rockland County, N. Y., lives Potter Henry Varnum Poor who works with the diligence of a Greek, who never duplicates, who sells every piece he produces to pottery cognoscenti at prices often mounting into three figures. In U.S. ceramics, he is at the top. Last week his work was on exhibition at both the Montross and American Designers galleries in Manhattan.

Potter Poor's method is Persian and difficult. Known today as "under-glaze decoration," his method involves metallic oxide colors which must fuse with a glaze fully to reveal their tones. Most pottery methods involve repeated firings, which allow plenty of time for the potter to decorate and redecorate if he is not satisfied. Not so with the oldtime Persians, and Potter Poor. He must do his decorating swiftly and surely, and only once, for the glaze must quickly follow and the piece be fired without delay.

Potter Poor justifies his exacting process by showing that it necessitates brisk, simple design -''the subordination of technique" -and produces "depth and brilliance of color." The resulting ornaments -leaves, flowers, nude figures, abstract patterns -are so sketchy that the temptation is to call them naive. They are the simplification of form to only the essential contours, graceful and spontaneous. They are not precise and intricate geometry.

His color range is limited and there are no circus tints. But often, with deep browns and blues, cream, dull reds and yellows, the tones seem caused by years of exposure to the decorative whims of nature rather than by a deliberate, conscious process.

It is this earthy naturalism of Potter Poor's work, timeless and styleless as so many lustrous beach pebbles, which constitutes its solid, enduring value and which has quietly made its creator his reputation. Acceptance by the Metropolitan Museum, profuse with classic pottery, has dignified a career as unceremonious and sincere as that of a medieval illuminator.

Henry Varnum Poor is a snub-nosed husky, dark from the sun. He was born in Kansas in 1888, attended Stanford University, studied painting at the Slade School and with Walter Sickert in London, and at the Julian Academy in Paris. After painting for several years, he found himself distressed by "the devitalizing isolation of the studio." Believing that modern art naturally tends to enhance utilitarian objects, Painter Poor became Potter Poor. He has now thoroughly infused his art with mundane strength. From shaping delicate urns and saucers, he turns cheerfully to designing a series of mosaic tiles for the Byzantine ceiling of the Union Dime Savings Bank in Manhattan, or a bathroom of mellow tiles for modern ablutions.

Near "Crow House," Potter Poor's rude and congenial workshop home, is a purling stream which he has dammed to provide water power for his ceramics apparatus. In the building are his kilns and potter's wheels. Much of "Crow House" was built by its owner. Even the door knobs are of Poor pottery. The Poor hobby: sailing boats.