FREE ESSAY ON POUL VOULKOS CERAMIST

POUL VOULKOS CERAMIST

The exhibition of recent stoneware vessels by Peter Voulkos at Frank Lloyd Gallery
featured the sort of work on which the artist established reputation in the 1950s. The
work was greeted with stunned amazement. However now it is too, but it's amazement of a
different order -- the kind that comes from being in the presence of effortless artistic
mastery. These astonishing vessels are truly amaising. Every ceramic artist knows that
what goes into a kiln looks very different from what comes out, and although what comes
out can be controlled to varying degrees, it's never certain. Uncertainty feels actively
courted in Voulkos' vessels, and this embrace of chance gives them a surprisingly
contradictory sense of ease. Critical to the emergence of a significant art scene in Los
Angeles in the second half of the 1950s, the 75-year-old artist has lived in Northern
California since 1959 and this was his only second solo show in an L.A gallery in 30
years."These days, L.A. is recognized as a center for the production of contemporary art.
But in the 1950s, the scene was slim -- few galleries and fewer museums. Despite the
obscurity, a handful of solitary and determined artists broke ground here, stretching the
inflexible definitions of what constitutes painting, sculpture and other media. Among
these avant-gardists was Peter Voulkos." In 1954, Voulkos was hired as chairman of the
fledgling ceramics department at the L.A. County Art Institute, now Otis College of Art
and Design, and during the five years that followed, he led what came to be known as the
Clay Revolution. Students like John Mason, Paul Soldner, Ken Price and Billy Al Bengston,
all of whom went on to become respected artists, were among his foot soldiers in the
battle to free clay from its handicraft associations. By the late 1950s, Voulkos had
established an international reputation for his muscular fired-clay sculptures, which
melded Zen attitudes toward chance with the emotional fervor of Abstract Expressionist
painting. Some 20 works -- including five Stacks (4-foot-tall sculptures) as well as
giant slashed-and-gouged plates and works on paper -- recently went on view at the Frank
Lloyd Gallery. This non single show is his first at a Los Angeles gallery in 13 years,
although a survey of his work was seen at the Newport Harbor Art Museum (presently
carries a different name) in 1995. Voulkos, 75, has lived in Oakland since 1959, "having
left after a fallout with the then-director of the Art Institute, Millard Sheets, who is
best known for mosaic murals on local bank facades." Although Voulkos has been absent
from L.A. for 40 years, he remains something of an icon for artists here. Price, known
for his candy-colored ovoid clay sculptures, puts it simply: In one way or another, he
influenced everyone who makes art out of clay, since he was the main force in liberating
the material. He broke down all the rules -- form follows function, truth in materials --
because he wanted to make art that had something to do with his own time and place. He
had virtuoso technique, so he was able to do it fairly directly, and he worked in a
really forceful way. In the opinion of many artists he is the most important person in
clay of the 20th century, not for what he did himself, but for the ground that he broke.
In his interview with US art critics Voulkos said: "I never intended on being
revolutionary, there was a certain energy around L.A. at that time, and I liked the whole
milieu." "Wielding clay is magic," he says. "The minute you touch it, it moves, so you've
got to move with it. It's like a ritual. I always work standing up, so I can move my body
around. I don't sit and make dainty little things." As a child, Voulkos did not imagine a
future as an internationally influential artist. The third of five children born to Greek
immigrant parents in Bozeman, Mont., he could not afford a college education and
anticipated a career constructing floor molds for engine castings at a foundry in
Portland, Ore., where he went to work in 1942, after high school. But in 1943, he was
drafted into the U.S. Army Air Corps and was stationed in the central Pacific as an
airplane armorer and gunner. After the war, the G.I. Bill offered him a college
education, so he studied painting at Montana State College, now Montana State University,
and took ceramics courses during his junior year, graduating in 1951. Voulkos had a
natural aptitude for clay and soon was winning awards, including top honors at the 1950
National Ceramic Exhibition at the Syracuse Museum of Fine Arts, in New York. Encouraged,
he chose ceramics as a course of study in graduate school at the California College of
Arts and Crafts in Oakland, from which he graduated with a master's degree in 1952.
Around the same time, he married Margaret Cone and had a daughter, Pier. His work also
was gaining attention, and he was invited to teach at the experimental Black Mountain
College in Asheville, N.C., in 1953. Once again, timing was in his favor, as other
artists on hand included John Cage, Merce Cunningham and David Tudor, with whom he later
stayed in New York, where he met Abstract Expressionist painters Franz Kline, Jack
Tworkov, Philip Guston and Robert Rauschenberg. That fall, he returned to Helena, and was
resigned to selling his ceramics to make a living until the fateful call came from
Sheets. I was just a hick from Montana, so coming to L.A was a big thing for me, Voulkos
remembers. When I got that job, it was my big break. I didn't have to do dinner plates
anymore. I got paid for teaching and didn't have to worry about selling. Being able to
teach helped expand my vocabulary. I learned from my students. Ceramics in those days was
quite boring, he says. Scandinavian design. I fell for them for a while, but it was
short-lived. It didn't move fast enough for me. But soon Voulkos gained a supporter,
sculptor David Smith, known for his balanced cubes of steel . Voulkos shared a studio on
Glendale Boulevard with his former student John Mason (his neighbor was architect Richard
Neutra), and in the evenings, he and his students, who were also his friends, would
listen to jazz at the Tiffany Club. "L.A. Conceptual artist John Baldessari recalls that
Voulkos, who at that time was painting in an Abstract Expressionist style as well as
building massive abstract clay sculptures, seemed the very embodiment of the advanced New
York art world. Baldessari, who was studying painting, remembers, "I soon discovered that
he was more of an inspiration and a goad than any of my painting instructors, who were
relatively academic. He psychically gave me permission, because the teachers I had always
seemed delimiting." " Just before Christmas 1958, Voulkos opened a solo show at the
Pasadena Art Museum (now the Norton Simon Museum). Soon after, he was fired from L.A.
County Art Institute and hired by UC Berkeley, where his students included Ron Nagle,
James Melchert and Ann Adair, who later became his second wife and by whom he has a son,
Aris. Voulkos' career continued to escalate with a 1960 show at the Museum of Modern Art
in New York, favorably reviewed by Dore Ashton in the New York Times. Yearning to work on
a larger scale than is possible in clay, he began producing monumental bronze sculptures
for corporate clients, such as an 18-foot-tall sculpture in the lobby of the San
Francisco office of Tishman Realty. Despite this two-decade foray into bronze, Voulkos
remained committed to pushing the boundaries of possibility in ceramics. From 1979 to
1984, he concentrated on firing plates and then the vessel-shaped stacks in an anagama, a
Japanese wood-burning kiln. Inspired by the Haniwa figures and Momoyama period ceramics
of Japan, Voulkos let the ash and soot from the firing process in the kiln decorate the
irregular surface of the clay. There was a certain kind of casualness about some of the
Japanese ceramics that I liked. There can be a big crack in the pot caused by the kiln,
and the piece becomes a national treasure, he says. The 1980s brought about a serious
personal challenge, however. By mid-decade, he was forced to confront his addiction to
cocaine and enter a rehabilitation facility. In 1989, he returned to his ceramic
sculpture with a sense of renewed purpose and a more incisive and controlled sense of
composition. During the '90s, he has regained the confidence in the process. Although
retired from UC Berkeley, Voulkos still thrives as a teacher, spending about four months
of each year on the road doing seminars. 
Bibliography
Levin, Elaine, "Peter Voulkos: A Ceramics Monthly Portfolio," Ceramics Monthly, June,
1978, pp. 60-68, ill.Albright, Thomas, Art in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1945-1980,
University of California Press, Berkeley, 1985, ill.Baker, Kenneth, "Strong New Work by
Voulkos," San Francisco Chronicle, March 2, 1991, p. C5, ill.Baker, Kenneth, "Voulkos
Elevates Ceramics to Art," San Francisco Examiner Chronicle, Datebook, July 30, 1995, pp.
35, 39, ill.Kuspit, Donald, "The Trouble With The Body: Peter Voulkos's 'Stacks',"
American Ceramics, 12/2, 1996, pp. 14-21, ill., cover ill.