Breaking Ground Still Fires Him Up

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 that look like lumpy amphora) as well as giant slashed-and-gouged plates and works on paper--recently went on view at the Frank Lloyd Gallery. This 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 (now the Orange County Museum of Art) 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. ‘Direct onslaught’ is what I call it. 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.”

“I never intended on being revolutionary,” Voulkos says with a sigh. “There was a certain energy around L.A. at that time, and I liked the whole milieu.”

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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, now the Everson Museum of Art, 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 subsequently met Abstract Expressionist painters Franz Kline, Jack Tworkov and Philip Guston, as well as Robert Rauschenberg.

“I became more and more intrigued with the tactile and emotional potentialities of working in clay, which soon took me beyond the limitations of pottery into ceramic sculpture,” he said in an interview in 1981. “I was terribly impressed with Jackson Pollock and with the mythical aspect of breaking through the old traditions of art. . . . It was a tactile period even in painting then, and I felt my work in clay had its parallel in paintings.”

That fall, he returned to Helena, Mont., 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.”

All of the ideas about an active and unpremeditated relationship with the material, which he had developed in New York and at Black Mountain College, came to the fore during those formative five years in L.A.

“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.” Voulkos engaged clay like a dancer with a partner, tearing apart the forms and pressing them together, building and compressing, using the dynamic and very physical techniques of the action painters. It is not surprising that sculptor David Smith, known for his balanced cubes of steel, was an early supporter. 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.

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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.”

Voulkos was passionate about music and was a talented classical guitarist, and he invited Baldessari to a performance of contemporary music. “We sat in the second row and Voulkos nodded toward the two men in front of us and asked, ‘Do you know who they are? Aldous Huxley and Igor Stravinsky.’ ” Baldessari laughs at the memory. “This was a guy who was teaching ceramics. That gives you an idea of his interest in art.”

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 Japanese reciprocated the admiration and organized the only full-scale retrospective of his work in 1995, although it did not travel outside the country.

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 confidence in the process.

“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.”

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Although retired from UC Berkeley, Voulkos still thrives as a teacher, spending about four months of each year on the road doing seminars. He finds the process enlivening. “I pick up a lot of energy, and a lot of times I feel that you get something from teaching that you don’t get from anything else. I need the feedback,” he says.

Voulkos uses such feedback in the studio. The current show’s five “Stacks” were made this past year, each thrown and built from some 500 pounds of wet clay. Plus, he has returned to printmaking and painting, saying, “Clay is just thick paint, and paint is nothing but thin clay.”

“The printmaking helps the clay work, which helps the painting and the printmaking,” Voulkos says. “If you look, you can see a similar source that comes from within. That’s the magic of it. As long as I can keep my hands and my brain going, things are fine.”

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PETER VOULKOS, Frank Lloyd Gallery, 2525 Michigan Ave., B5B, Santa Monica. Dates: Ends Dec. 30. Phone: (310) 264-3866.