ceramic sculptor
1924-2002

Art in America,  April, 2002  by Janet Koplos
Peter Voulkos died of a heart attack on the evening of Feb. 15, after conducting a workshop in Bowling Green, Ohio. Frank Lloyd, his Los Angeles dealer, was among the many who noted that the ceramic sculptor died "with his boots on" and with his friends around him. He was 78, a professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley.

Born in Montana to Greek immigrant parents, Voulkos studied art after World War II service in the Pacific, discovering clay late. As the story goes--and there are many stories told of him--he took a required ceramics class during his senior year at Bozeman State College and found his life's work. After earning an MFA at the California College of Arts and Crafts in 1952, he returned to Montana where he and Rudy Autio became the first resident artists at the Archie Bray Foundation. They were honored last summer at the residency program's 50th anniversary celebration.
Voulkos was a man of legendary proportions. He was celebrated and reviled for his rule-breaking art, his unorthodox teaching and his self-destructive lifestyle. Voulkos began as a ceramist by developing superlative skills at throwing and decorating. But a teaching stint at Black Mountain College and a visit to New York City in the summer of 1953 turned him away from refinement. He began to pursue the spontaneous forming, marking and mangling that would soon be called Abstract-Expressionist ceramics.

 In 1954 he began teaching at the L.A. County Art Institute (now Otis College of Art and Design), where he established the ceramic department. He quickly attracted a coterie of other energetic young men, including John Mason, Ken Price, Billy Al Bengston and Paul Soldner; they engaged in a no-theory, all-action competition that resulted in a burst of new clay forms, not solely expressionist. Dismissed by a conservative administrator in 1959, Voulkos moved to Berkeley, where he again drew around him a cadre of unconventional high achievers, including Robert Arneson, Ron Nagle and Jim Melchert. He remained there for more than 30 years, retiring in 1985.

Voulkos's sculptures in the late '50s were ambitious accumulations of wheel-thrown components reaching 8 feet in height. Some sculptures and the broad plates that served him as canvases were dashed with epoxy paint, a violation of ceramic propriety. After a period in the '60s when he made large sand-textured paintings as well as sculptures of bronze tubes up to 30 feet in height for settings such as the San Francisco Hall of Justice, he returned to clay and explored variations on his expressionist theme for the rest of his life. He developed a vocabulary of actions and forms that are now fixed in the language of contemporary clay, including "passthroughs" (knobs of porcelain pushed through a stoneware piece from the back), stacks (his tiered, chimney-shaped structures of thick clay about 4 feet tall) and ice buckets (short, thick, squarish containers, always cracked).