Peter Voulkos (1924–2002)

Vase, 1958

Glazed stoneware

18 1/8 x 20 3/4 x 7 inches

Acquisition Fund Purchase, 60.09.77

Essay by Peter Spooner
Tweed Museum of Art, University of Minnesota Duluth

             At the time of Peter Voulkos’s death at age 78, he was conducting a ceramics workshop in Ohio, the last of many master classes in which he made new work for an audience.  The theatrical aspect of creating huge wheel-thrown or hand-built clay sculpture was Voulkos’s hallmark.  In the 1950s, his clay “happenings” exposed the quiet studio practice of American functional ceramics to the bold and visceral experiments of abstract expressionist art.[1]  There have always been pockets of experimentation in the American pottery world, admittedly quieter than Voulkos’s.  We can point to George Ohr (1857–1918) in Biloxi, Mississippi; Henry Varnum Poor (1888−1970) in New City, New York; and Gertrud (1908–1971) and Otto (1908–2007)  Natzler in Los Angeles—but they never moved the clay medium very far from its decorative, functional, arts and crafts inspired status quo.  Voulkos had the right combination of physical presence, intense energy, and theatrical bravura—and, of course, timing—to forever change that.

            Voulkos’s early (1952–1954) residency with fellow Montanan Rudy Autio at Archie Bray’s Helena brick factory is also legendary.  The two worked for Bray, and he let them use factory space and kilns to fire their own ceramic work—eventually establishing one of the most significant and influential ceramic residencies in the country.  A summer teaching stint at Black Mountain College with artists Josef Albers, Robert Rauschenberg, and composer John Cage led to contacts with New York school abstract expressionist painters Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, and Franz Kline.  Influenced especially by Kline’s massive black-and-white gestures, Voulkos quickly translated abstract expressionist idioms into ceramic sculptures that also retained something of their functional birthright.

            On an enlarged scale commensurate with his own brawny self, Voulkos pulled, punched, ripped, scraped, poked, and otherwise muscled huge piles of wet stoneware into towering sculptural forms that asserted themselves into the territory of painting and sculpture—and into the center of the art-versus-craft debate.  Wheel throwing became a kind of performance art, as Voulkos entertained workshop participants by pulling larger and larger vessels that he would then violate with his own form of abstract expressionist mark-making:  tearing at and gouging the clay.  His pieces were exhibited to great acclaim in 1960 at the Museum of Modern Art, and a year later at the Seattle World's Fair.  Vase is blocky, clumsy, and visually weighty—anything but bird-like, in the sense of being aerodynamic or streamlined like Brancusi’s famous Bird in Space.[2]  It is the funky, earthy, and hand-wrought, as opposed to the smooth, idealized, and machined.

            Vase was acquired by the Minnesota Museum of American Art through one of its Fiber-Clay-Metal biennials, which the museum organized between 1952 and 1964—when it was known as the Saint Paul Gallery and School of Art.[3]  These exhibitions provided a Minnesota venue for national and regional artists working in fine crafts, while at the same time allowing the gallery a means of further enriching its collection.  During this period, the MMAA acquired works by Peter Voulkos, Robert Arneson, Harvey Littleton, Paul Soldner, Bernard Leach, Shoji Hamada, Frances Senska, Otto and Gertrud Natzler, Otto and Vivika Heino, and many more.  The media-specific exhibitions provided showcases where national and midwestern artists exhibited together, while introducing Minnesota audiences to the era’s rapid cross-fertilization among craft, art, and idea.  Voulkos’s Vase and scores of other works, including pieces in this exhibition by Warren MacKenzie, are lasting markers of a revolutionary period in American visual art and craft.

            Fifty years later, when the Minneapolis Institute of Arts inaugurated its Michael Graves-designed Target wing with Fresh from the Studio:  Craft in Twin Cities Collections 1950–1970, it borrowed heavily from MMAA collections, including Voulkos’s Vase.  Continuing its commitment to collecting important Minnesota art, the MMAA has more recently acquired works by other ceramic artists, including Mark Pharis, Randy Johnston, and Maren Kloppmann.

[1] Ingrid Schaffner, Dirt on Delight: Impulses That Form Clay (Philadelphia: Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, 2009), 106.

[2] Records at the MMAA indicate that this vase has borne the title "Bird Vase" since the 1960s.  However, recent research has shown that Voulkos himself preferred a generic title, and that "bird" was simply used as a way to distinguish it unofficially from other vases in his oeuvre, because it clearly had birdlike qualities.  In the paperwork for Voulkos's 1978 retrospective organized by the American Crafts Council, Voulkos himself crossed out the word "Bird" in two references to this object, clearly preferring the title "Vase" instead. Thus, the MMAA is revising the title here and in its records to reflect the original intent.  Email correspondence from Sam Jornlin, Voulkos & Co. Catalogue Project, July 13, 2011.

[3] Fiber—Clay—Metal: The Saint Paul Gallery Fifth Biennial (St. Paul, Minn.:  Saint Paul Gallery and School of Art, 1959).