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Ceramic art is on fire! Once shunned by the fine art establishment as mere craft, works in clay are now recognized as fine art and collected by major museums around the world. Collectors are taking note as interest and prices for top quality works are on the rise.

As a younger generation of ceramic artists abounds, a debt is owed to two giants of clay—Peter Voulkos and Robert Arneson. These West Coast artists elevated non-utilitarian ceramics to new levels of personal expression, forever breaking the boundaries between craft and art.

We are proud to announce that our art curator Michelle Bello has selected two outstanding works by these masters as a complement to this year’s SF Design Week’s keynote conversation on ceramic art. Michelle will be in the showroom this Thursday, February 17, from 11am to 3pm, to answer questions about these pieces, along with other exciting new works from various artists.

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Peter Voulkos, Untitled (Charger Series), 1973
Fired stoneware with porcelain push-throughs
19 inches diameter x 3.75 inches depth

Few artists have changed a medium as markedly as Peter Voulkos, a charismatic man with a voracious appetite for experimentation. Voulkos emerged in the early 1950s at a time when ceramic artists were searching out different craft traditions, especially Japanese folk. This interest endured throughout his life and over time he made a series of large plates fired in an anagama, a Japanese wood-fired kiln which operates at high temperatures and produces a richly textured surface. He would then add more texture by roughing up the chargers and creating a vocabulary of physical actions and forms that are now fixed in the language of contemporary clay including pass-throughs, which are knobs of porcelain forcefully pushed by hand through a stoneware piece.

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Peter Voulkos, Untitled (Charger Series)
Sloan Miyasato Fine Art gallery view

In the summer of 1953 Voulkos taught a course at the experimental Black Mountain College. There he met artists who were soon to be legends including Robert Rauschenberg and John Cage. Then he went to New York City where he met Abstract Expressionist painters Philip Guston, Willem de Kooning, and Franz Kline. The spontaneity and scale of the New York School influenced his ceramic works. He began pushing limits and abandoned any semblance of utility, toward progressively larger pieces weighing as much as 150 pounds. He unveiled these rough, gouged, slashed, and expressive clay works in Los Angeles shocking the ceramics world.

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Peter Voulkos

Voulkos’s ceramics have since been exhibited and collected internationally in major institutions including MOMA, Whitney Museum of American Art, Metropolitan Museum, Victoria and Albert Museum, Smithsonian, Stedelijk Amsterdam, SFMOMA, and National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto. A longtime and influential educator, he eventually established the renowned ceramics program at the University of California, Davis. While at Davis, his students were allowed to make a teapot, “but only if it didn’t work.”

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Robert Arneson, Fired Earth, 1973
High fired stoneware
12 x 10.5 x 7 inches

Robert Arneson began his interest in art as a high school student by drawing cartoons and painting with watercolors, interests he would pursue throughout his career. His early teaching position required him to teach ceramics, not a medium he had mastered, which led him to take ceramics classes including one by Edith Heath. He was soon hooked, earning his MFA at Mills College. Although he made very respectable thrown pots, he grew increasingly interested in the Abstract Expressionist movement taking hold in the art world. He was also influenced by the works of Peter Voulkos in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

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Robert Arneson, Fired Earth
Sloan Miyasato Fine Art gallery view

After turning his back on traditional ceramics, he was offered a teaching position in 1962 at the University of California, Davis. His non-functional works focused on the absurdity of everyday objects and life. Often humorous, his figurative sculptures offered visual puns and sarcastic observations. He made colorful self-portraits and portraits of his art friends. Distant and left out from the East Coast Art establishment, Arneson and many of his fellow Californian artists felt free to make the art they wanted. This new art movement was dubbed Funk Art and Arneson is its father. His clay department established its first ceramic sculpture program and the studio buildings of TB9 became a hotbed of expressive ceramics.

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Robert Arneson

Later in his career Arneson applied his dark humor and biting sarcasm to address political issues of the time including nuclear war and the arms race. He was also thrust into the national spotlight in 1981 when he was commissioned to make a commemorative bust of San Francisco’s mayor George Moscone who had been assassinated. His colorful bust with bloody bullet holes caused an uproar in a city still grieving the loss of a popular mayor. It is now in the collections of SFMOMA. His works are also held in the many significant collections including MOMA, NY, Whitney Museum, Metropolitan Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Anderson Collection at Stanford University, Crocker Art Museum, Yale University, Stedelijk Museum, Phillips Collection, Oakland Museum, and National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto.

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