Stanley Rosen’s Love-Hate Relationship With Alligators

Stanley Rosen was 90 years old and had been making ceramic sculpture since the mid-1950s when he first exhibited his work in a commercial gallery in 2017. Decades earlier, Rose Slivka had identified his work as groundbreaking in the article, “The New Ceramic Presence” (Craft Horizons, July/August 1961), which called attention to a group of ceramic artists making innovative work that broke with the past and its focus on functional objects. Instead of capitalizing on this attention, Rosen decided not to publicly show his work. As I wrote in my review of his 2017 show at Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects, “Rosen’s ceramic sculptures are a revelation: they are like a country that many of us never knew was there until now.”

Stanley Rosen: Alligators & Objects at Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects reveals another side of this gentle sculptor’s art. Dating from the mid-1970s and later, this body of work could not be a more unlikely detour for this seasoned ceramicist devoted to architectural constructions and non-figurative work. Rosen explained of the series, begun while he was living on the outskirts of Florence:

I don’t like alligators

Alligators are single-minded killers

I was trying to connect with primordial visions.

Rosen’s desire for perfection ran counter to its accepted versions. Explaining in the press release, “Modeling is not my forte,” he focused on rough ceramic surfaces. When he noticed a coconut chip, he thought of an alligator’s skin. Later, he found the primordial forms he was seeking at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, but when he began creating sculptures he only had photographs of alligators to use as guides. “The substitution of the alligator left something not gratified,” he said. “It’s a bad substitute.”

In substituting the alligator for his ideal primordial vision, Rosen revealed an aspect of his self-effacing drive for perfection: While the history of ceramics is filled with perfectly modeled, symmetrical pots with flawless surfaces and glazes, Rosen knew that any ideal is ultimately impossible.

In the unglazed stoneware sculpture “Untitled” (1980s), hundreds of tiny pinched coils are packed together within grooves. They form a triangle that resembles an abstract restating of an alligator’s lower jaw or head within the context of this exhibition. This piece sits atop two flat, stacked layers, one accented with parallel lines, the other with grooves.

The diminishing rows of pinched coils are evidence of Rosen’s genius. Refusing the lure of artisanal perfection, he has transformed a basic way of shaping into an alternative form of making that breaks the connection between craftsmanship and capitalism, while remaining formal and witty. By obsessively pinching these tiny pieces of clay, which become shorter and shorter as the triangle reaches its peak, he deliberately courts the image of the artist as a madman compulsively repeating an action. Always formal in his approach, Rosen veers closer to the work of the Swiss outsider artist Adolf Wölfli than to that of most ceramicists. 

In “Little Head 1” (undated), Rosen hand-shapes a gray alligator head that is small enough to fit in the palm of your hand. The alligator holds a reddish-brown ball between its clenched jaws, reminding me of a roast suckling pig with an apple in its mouth. It is an odd and unlikely association that only the artist could evoke. 

While none of the works are particularly large, the internal scale changes, defined by the specific subject, such as an alligator resting in mud or a jaw. Consistent throughout his iterations of an alligator is his ambition to connect the shaping of clay with prehistoric visions, to make ceramics that have not lost their identity as baked mud.  

Stanley Rosen: Alligators & Objects continues at Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects (208 Forsyth Street, Lower East Side, Manhattan) through May 31. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.