Photograph by Lee Nordness
Peter Voulkos’s work stands in relation to American craft much as Picasso’s does to French painting: a disruption after which nothing could be quite the same. He was born to a Greek immigrant family in Montana, served in the Second World War, and then went to college on the GI Bill. It was there that he first encountered ceramics. He later said, “Now me and a ball of clay, we’ll get together and it’s perfect. I almost feel I could take a pile of rough sand and make a pot out of it.”¹ This facility was evident early on, as he developed a repertoire of functional vessel forms and began attracting attention for his work. It was not until 1956, though, that he achieved his breakthrough, abandoning functionality, embracing accident and gesture, and inventing wholly new ways of constructing with clay.
By the time of Objects: USA, Voulkos was the acknowledged leader of a whole generation of avant-garde ceramists on the West Coast. The curators included a significantly earlier work—the 1959 polychromatic sculpture Cross—alongside other more recent pieces. It came to serve as a kind of emblem for the wide-ranging show, projecting the core idea that craft was now becoming something wholly unconventional and unprecedented.
¹ Abby Wasserman, Peter Voulkos: Information, Resistance, Confrontation, (Oakland, CA: Oakland Museum, 1995), 22.
Untitled glazed vessel in stoneware. Designed and made by Peter Voulkos, USA, 1959.
20" H x 7.5" D
50.8cm H x 19.1cm D
SC859
Courtesy of Friedman Benda
Untitled plate in ceramics. Designed and made by Peter Voulkos, 1962.
5" H x 16.5" D
12.7cm H x 41.9cm D
SC856
Collection of Robert A. Ellison Jr.