Peter Voulkos and the Ceramics Revolution of the 1950s

By Charles Kessler

As I noted in a recent post, ceramics, as an art medium rather than a utilitarian craft, has become popular with artists. In fact, discarding functionality for the more purely aesthetic or expressive is happening to all the applied arts: textiles, glass, graphic design. I've even seen jewelry and fashion that's so wildly outlandish it really isn't intended for ordinary wear.

There's a history in the evolution of ceramics that can put this phenomenon in context and enrich our understanding of it. Clay has long been used as a medium for sculpture – prehistoric figurines, Japanese Haniwa, Greek vases, etc..  But for whatever reason, ceramics was shunned as a medium for sculpture during much of the past few centuries. It was considered a craft – an applied art limited by the requirement that it produce something functional, like a plate or a vessel of some sort. As a craft, it was considered inferior to fine art.

The Bauhaus improved matters a bit by treating ceramics, and the other applied arts, with the same respect as fine art. Nevertheless, it was assumed that ceramics, along with the other crafts, would serve a utilitarian purpose.

Johannes Drisch, breakfast service, 1921-22, free thrown high-fired earthenware with slip decoration (private collection, included in MoMA exhibition, Bauhaus 1919-1933, Workshops for Modernity),

Peter Voulkos was the first person to radically change a craft medium into a viable art medium, some seventy-five years ago. Few people have had such an impact on an art medium as Voulkos, both as an innovator and as an inspiring teacher.

Peter Voulkos in his Glendale Blvd. studio with Black Butte-Divide, 1959.

When I came to Los Angeles in 1965, Voulkos and his students John Mason, Ken Price and others at the Otis Art Institute (they were typically referred to as the "Abstract Expressionist Ceramicists"), were regularly exhibited in major galleries and museums, but almost no notice was taken in the rest of the world, including New York. And, with the notable exception of Ken Price, it’s still pretty much the case.

Installation view, Ken Price Sculpture - A Retrospective, September 16, 2012 - January 6, 2013, (Los Angeles County Museum of Art, © Ken Price.  Photo © Fredrik Nilsen).

I believe this is about to change. The fact is, Voulkos is relevant today for the influence, direct or indirect, he's having on many vital young artists.

Until recently, Voulkos's sculptures looked dated, like a lot of the Abstract Expressionist sculpture of this period. Rather than being colorful, polished and relatively minimal like the ceramic sculptures of Ken Price, Voulkos' work looks rough, handmade – what is referred to today (in a good way) as "sloppy craft."  Also there is an emphasis on surface texture and materiality in his work.

Peter Voulkos, Little Big Horn, 1959, polychromed stoneware, 62 x 40 x 40 inches (Oakland Museum of California).

These are just the things that interest some of the most adventurous artists today. In contrast to the over-produced, highly polished art commonly found in Chelsea, there's a refreshing authenticity about handmade art. There's also a growing interest in surface and materiality (perhaps from a discontent with video). You can see evidence of these trends in Bushwick – one of the most vital art scenes in the world right now. (See my posts on Bushwick Open Studios here and here.) And Voulkos has had a direct influence, in this respect, on many important young ceramic artists, Sterling Ruby, Kathy Butterly, Nicole Cherubini, Arlene Shechet, Jessica Jackson Hutchins among them.

Installation view, Arlene Shechet, solo exhibition at Sikkema Jenkins & Co., 2013. 

Jessica Jackson Hutchins, Couple, 2010, couch, ink spray paint, charcoal dust, hydrocal, ceramic, 52 x 67 x 38 inches (Derek Eller Gallery).

Sterling Ruby, Basic Theology, 2013, ceramic, 20 ½ x 42 ¾ x 44 inches.

So what about Voulkos? What in particular did he do that was so revolutionary?

His major artistic breakthrough, in the early 1950s, was to create abstract ceramic sculptures from parts of wheel-thrown pots; that is, to build ceramic assemblage sculptures rather than monolithic vessels. He thereby not only broke away from the utilitarian, but he was no longer limited by what could be thrown on a wheel in one shot.

Peter Voulkos, Untitled, 1956, stoneware, 20 x 14 x 15 inches.

Later Voulkos innovated the use of epoxy glue rather than kiln firing to join parts, and epoxy paints along with colored glazes to add color to the sculptures.

Peter Voulkos, Red River, ca. 1960, stoneware with slip, glaze and epoxy paint,  37 x 12 ½ x 14 ½ inches (Whitney Museum). 

The other big innovation, large-scale ceramic sculpture, Voulkos developed with John Mason, one of his older and more advanced students. They shared a studio from 1957 until 1965 when Voulkos moved to Berkeley. (Update: See Frank Lloyd's clarification in the comments section below.) With the advice of Mike Kalan, a ceramics engineer, they built two industrial-size kilns capable of firing sculptures up to six feet high.

Peter Voulkos and John Mason in their shared studio, late 1950s.

In addition to being a great innovator, Voulkos was an inspiring teacher and, with his students, he spawned the "Abstract Expressionist Ceramics" movement. He was sociable, charismatic, rebellious and extraordinarily energetic. He was about the same age as his students, and he treated them more like colleagues than pupils. He worked alongside them and they exchanged techniques and ideas. Most important, since all Voulkos's students came from the crafts world, he introduced them into the fine arts world, and to the different intentions and values of that world.

As a group they were hard-working, collaborative and highly competitive – but they were also independent and, to Voulkos' credit as a teacher, they all made very different ceramic art. (The term "Abstract Expressionist Ceramics" really only applies to Voulkos and the early work of John Mason. Later Mason became more of a Minimalist making highly refined constructivist tile walls and abstract sculptures.)

Installation view, John Mason, ceramic, 2014 Whitney Biennial.

In addition to Ken Price and John Mason, the other Abstract Expressionist Ceramicists incude: Billy Al Bengston, Michael Frimkess, Mac McClain, Jerry Rothman, Paul Soldner, and Henry Takemoto. And in 1959, when Voulkos moved to the University of California at Berkeley, James Melchert and Ron Nagle came under his influence.



* I'm grateful to my friend Ken Garber who loaned me his informative unpublished 1973 thesis about these artists. It helped put their achievement in context.

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ADDENDUM: 

To prevent this post from getting clogged up, I heavily edited it. Here are some of the things I left out. Feel free to skip it if you want!

Publications about this art and period. Not many good ones, but here are two: 

• the 2012 catalog for a Scripps College exhibition entitled Clay’s Tectonic Shift; 
• and online, there is an article by Garth Clark, and several posts in the  Frank Lloyd Blog.

More on the visibility of these artists in New York – or lack thereof:

• John Mason had three sculptures and a ceramic wall in the 2014 Whitney Biennial, and the Whitney has a large collection of California ceramics — the Howard and Jean Lipman Collection – but they hardly ever show it, and none of it is on their website. (Update: See Frank Lloyd's clarification in the comments section below.)
• The Museum of Modern Art lists no work on their extensive website by Mason or Peter Voulkos, and only four minor lithographs by Ken Price – no ceramics. I contacted MoMA to find out if they owned work that wasn't on their site, and they said they had a Voulkos vase from 1956, and nothing by Mason.

Peter Voulkos, Jar, ca. 1956, stoneware, 22 inches high (MoMA).

• The Metropolitan Museum of Art lists some 400,000 works on their website including more than one thousand ceramic works from 1900 to the present, but nothing by Voulkos, Mason or even Price who was just given a major retrospective there. The Met did have a show of some work by Voulkos and Mason in 1998 as part of a small contemporary ceramics exhibition installed in a glass display case on the Great Hall Balcony. Not the most prestigious space, but it's something – and they continue to occasionally exhibit contemporary ceramics there.
• There are a few museums that seriously collect and exhibit ceramics: the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Carnegie Museum of Art, in Pittsburgh, and the Hirschhorn Museum in Washington D.C..

Hedges and provisos:

• Of course, there have been exceptions to the functionality requirement, such as Gauguin's disturbing stoneware sculpture that made me gasp every time I saw it at the recent Gauguin exhibition at MoMA. It's difficult to see in reproduction, and not easy in person either, but at her feet is a bloody wolf that she probably killed, and she’s holding a wolf cub – probably the cub of the dead wolf. This was Gauguin's last sculpture, and his biggest. He considered it his masterpiece and wanted it placed on his tomb.

Front, back and close-up views of Paul Gauguin’s Oviri (Savage), 1894, partly enameled stoneware, 29 1/2 x 7 1/2 x 10 5/8 inches (Musée d'Orsay, Paris).

• And needless to say, there's nothing wrong with craft ceramics; in fact, all of the ceramicists discussed here continued to make functional objects their entire careers. And, of course, some of the greatest, most breathtakingly beautiful art in the world is functional.

Unknown artist, Qing dynasty vase, 1713-22, porcelain with peach-bloom glaze, 7 ¾ inches high (Metropolitan Museum of Art).

Influences and inspirations for the ceramics revolution:

• In 1954, when Voulkos still considered himself a craftsman, Rosanjin, a well-known Japanese ceramicist, had an exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) that impressed Voulkos because the work was less refined than traditional pottery. Rosanjin's Zen aesthetic allowed for more chance and improvisation in the making, and for asymmetry and imperfection in the end product. In addition, even though Rosanjin continued to make functional vessels, he repudiated the craft tradition and declared himself a fine artist.

Rosanjin, Jar, 1954, 8 ½ inches high.

• Joan Miró worked with ceramics in 1947-48 and again in 1953-56, and Voulkos saw some at a 1959 Miró exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA).

Joan Miró, Monument,1956, earthenware, 28 1/4 x 12 3/4 x 12 3/4 inches (courtesy of the Chazen Museum of Art, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Terese and Alvin S. Lane Collection).

• Especially influential were the ceramics of Picasso who made a mind-boggling 2000 ceramic pieces in 1947-48, and even more in 1953.

Pablo Picasso with some of his painted ceramic works at his studio at Vallauris.

• They were impressed that Picasso and Miró didn't stop after the pot was thrown, but continued working on it, manipulating it, cutting it, and using the clay surface as a medium to paint on. And just the fact that artists with the stature of Picasso and Miro (and, BTW, Fernand Leger) made ceramics lent credibility to the medium as a fine art.

• But perhaps the biggest impact on Voulkos was the time he taught at Black Mountain College (BMC) in the summer of 1953, then a hotbed of experimental art activity. Because Voulkos was naturally sociable, he quickly became friends with many of the other teachers, especially the poet Charles Olson, the composer David Tudor and the painter Jack Tworkov with whom Voulkos traded work. He also met Robert Rauschenberg, Merce Cunningham, and John Cage whose performances profoundly impressed him. And Voulkos spent time in New York where he hung out at the Cedar Bar and befriended Franz Kline and many of the other Abstract Expressions. 

Two small but possibly significant details:

• Voulkos pinned black and white photos of Picasso’s ceramics to his studio wall as inspiration for himself his students. They thought the work in these photos was more brightly colored and bigger than they actually were, which is significant since that might be one reason they ended up producing larger and more colorful ceramics.

• In an interview reported in Clay’s Tectonic Shift, Ken Price said: "We thought we were pretty hot stuff until we saw him. ... Voulkos was capable of an almost inhuman capacity – he made fifteen pieces to everyone else’s one.”  

Some other Abstract Expressionist Ceramicists:

• John Mason, the other great innovator, experimented with the properties of clay, pushing it to its technical limits of thickness, size and weight. He did away with the throwing wheel altogether and instead he would slam large hunks of clay to the floor, mold them, join them together, cut them up into smaller sections that could be fired without exploding, and, after firing, join them together again into large ceramic walls. This was as close to "Abstract Expressionist Ceramics" as it ever got.

John Mason working on Blue Wall, 1959 (Photo from Frank Lloyd's blog).

John Mason, Blue Wall, 1959, ceramic, 96 x 252 x 8 inches (collection of the artist. Photo by Anthony Cuñha). 

• Ken Price, whom I just wrote about here, is closer to the Los Angeles “Cool School,”

Ken Price, G.L. Green, 1964, fired and painted clay on a wood base, 6 1/4 x 5 x 5 inches, Betty Lee and Aaron Stern Collection © Ken Price (from Ken Price, A Retrospective at the Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, 2013).

• as is Ron Nagle.

Ron Nagle, Red and Turquoise Knob Job, 1984, glazed earthenware, 2 ⅞ x 4 ¼ x 2 ¼ inches (de Young Museum, San Francisco).

The others were (and are) all over the place from Pop to Funk to traditional craft pottery.

Michael Frimkess, Jumpin' at the Moon Lodge, 1968, glazed stoneware, no size noted (Scripps College Collection).

Jerry Rothman, Covered Olympic Vessel, ca. 1984, glazed earthenware with colored oxides in sand, 32 ½ x 11 inches.

UPDATE: The Los Angeles Times just published an obituary for Jerry Rothman.

And finally, my pet peeve about Los Angeles artists of this period:

• While the Abstract Expressionist Ceramicists considered themselves artists, they identified with blue collar workers and affected an anti-intellectual, macho, pose. This, unfortunately, set the tone for future LA art groups like the Ferus Gallery artists (below), the “Cool School,” and, to some degree, even the 1980s Cal Arts graduates. It was common for them to say things that used to infuriate me like "I don't look at art (or read about art), I just make it," as if they were proud of it. (Fortunately this wasn't true of most LA artists — my friends Ron Davis, Charles Garabedian, Karen Carson, Robin Mitchell, Allan McCollum, Pat Hogan and Peter Plagens among them.)

The Ferus Gallery Artists, 1959; from Left: John Altoon, Craig Kauffman, Allen Lynch, Ed Kienholz, Ed Moses, Robert Irwin, Billy Al Bengston (photo: Patricia Faure).

• Probably due to this macho ethos, the only women ceramicists I found even alluded to during this period were Susan Peterson, who taught Mason the craft of ceramics before he went to Otis, and two full-time ceramics students at Otis – Carol Radcliff and Janice Roosevelt. But I've never seen any mention of them in relation to Abstract Expressionist Ceramics.