Peter voulkos biography
Peter Voulkos
American artist (1924 - 2002)
Peter Voulkos (born Panagiotis Harry Voulkos; 29 January 1924 – 16 February 2002) was an American artist of Greek descent. He is known for his abstract expressionist ceramic sculptures, which crossed the traditional divide between ceramic crafts and fine art. He established the ceramics department at the Los Angeles County Art Institute and at UC Berkeley.
Biography
Early life
Peter Voulkos was born the third of five children to Greek immigrant parents, Aristovoulos I. Voulkopoulos, anglicized and shortened to Harry (Aris) John Voulkos and Effrosyni (Efrosine) Peter Voulalas.
After high school, he worked as a molder's apprentice at a ship's foundry in Portland. In 1943, Peter Voulkos was drafted into the United States Army during the Second World War, serving as an airplane gunner in the Pacific.
Ceramics' specialization
Voulkos studied painting and printmaking at Montana State College, in Bozeman (now Montana State University), where he was introduced to ceramics (Frances Senska, who established the ceramics arts program, was his teacher). Ceramics quickly became a passion. His 25 pounds of clay allowed by semester by the school was not enough, so he managed to spot a source of quality clay from the tires of the trucks that would stop by the restaurant where he worked part-time.
He earned his MFA in ceramics from California College of the Arts and Crafts, in Oakland. Afterwards, he returned to Bozeman, and began his career in a pottery business with classmate Rudy Autio, producing functional dinnerware.
In 1951 Voulkos and Autio became the first resident artists at the Archie Bray Foundation for the Ceramic Arts, in Helena, Montana. It is from his time as Resident Director (1951-1954) that the lineage of his mature work, later in full bloom during
Peter Voulkos (1924-2002)
Untitled, 1955-56
glazed ceramic
31 1/2" x 19 1/2" x 19 1/2", signed
“I brush color on to violate the form, and it comes out a complete new thing, which involves a painting concept on a three-dimensional surface, a new idea. These things are exploding, jumping off. I wanted to pick up on that energy. That’s different from decorating the surface, which enhances form….I wanted to change the form, get more excitement going.” *
Born in Bozeman, Montana in 1924, Peter Voulkos was one of five children in his close-knit family. His parents were Greek immigrants, and during the Depression, Voulkos held several jobs in order to help the family survive. In 1942, Voulkos finished high school and made his way to Oregon, where he found work making floor molds for engine castings and casting iron fittings for American Liberty ships. In 1943, he was drafted into the US Army Air Corps and spent most of the war in the Pacific theater. With funding from the GI Bill, Voulkos enrolled in courses at Montana State College (now University) in his hometown of Bozeman after the war. In 1951, he received his bachelor’s degree and used the remainder of his GI Bill funding to earn a Master of Fine Arts degree from the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, which he completed in 1952. That same year, Voulkos participated in his first gallery exhibition, and in 1953, he traveled to New York, where he frequented the Club and the Cedar Tavern, meeting artists such as Franz Kline, Jack Tworkov, Philip Guston, and Robert Rauschenberg. That same year, Voulkos’s sculpture was included in two important New York exhibitions—Good Design at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and Designer Craftsmen, USA 1953 at the Brooklyn Museum, where he was awarded the juried exhibition’s top prize. In 1954, he began teaching at the
Peter Voulkos began working in ceramics during his senior year at Montana State College in 1949. In 1952, he completed his MFA at the California College of Arts and Crafts and went on to teach at the Otis Art Institute for five years. Afterwards, Voulkos transferred to the University of California, Berkley to establish the Ceramics Department where he worked until his retirement in 1985. Peter Voulkos has often been dubbed the father of the American Clay Revolution, otherwise known as the Craft-to-Art movement. In 1954, Voulkos’s hefty clay sculptures smashed the boundaries and constraints of utilitarian ceramics with three categories of work: “ice buckets,” “plates,” and “stacks.”
While teaching at the Otis Art Institute (then the Los Angeles County Art Institute), Voulkos’s clay constructions began to embody the gestural spontaneity and visual momentum of Abstract Expressionism along with the Zen-like acceptance of imperfections that characterizes the Japanese tradition of pottery. Working with a personal structural vocabulary limited to thrown shapes including cylinders, bowls, spheres, plates, clay slabs, and whatever forms his hand or mallet could tear, press, or paddle, he fabricated a unique visceral and sculptural syntax with infinite compositional variations. To quote the artist, “I get down to the very basic forms that I really love, but they are still giving me information.”
Voulkos’s one-person shows include those at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; the Museum of Modern Art, NY; the Pasadena Museum of Modern Art, CA; and the Art Institute of Chicago, IL. His work is represented in collections throughout the United States, Europe, and Japan. He died on February 16, 2002.
Biography sourced from the Frank Lloyd Gallery:
Born in 1924 to Greek immigrant parents in the town of Bozeman, Montana, Peter Voulkos is considered one of America’s most significant sculptors of the 20th century. Voulkos got his start in art in the late 1940s, when he was studying at Montana State College, Bozeman on the G.I. Bill, after being drafted and serving as an airplane armorer-gunner in the Pacific in World War II. In classes with Frances Senska, he discovered ceramics, the medium that would characterize his career. After graduating from Montana State College, Bozeman in 1951, Voulkos moved west and earned his MFA from the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, California.
Returning to Montana after graduation, Voulkos attracted attention “as a prodigious natural potter and a producer of elegantly thrown functional earthenware,” according to Roberta Smith for the New York Times. He also produced dinnerware to sell through high-quality stores, and was noted for his wax-resist method of decoration. Voulkos gained a reputation as a master of ceramics techniques, winning twenty-nine prizes and awards from 1949 through 1955. However, a summer spent teaching at the experimental Black Mountain College (he was invited to teach at BMC by Karen Karnes) near Asheville, North Carolina in 1953 resulted in a dramatic shift in Voulkos’s artistic priorities, as well as his aesthetic. It was at Black Mountain College that Voulkos met Robert Rauschenberg, John Cage, Merce Cunningham and Charles Olson. He then visited New York City (as a guest of pianist David Tudor and Mary Catherine Richards) and encountered Philip Guston, Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline—Abstract Expressionist painters who influenced the new direction Voulkos would go on to pursue.
In 1954, Voulkos was invited to teach at the Los Angeles County Art Institute (now Otis), and he established a new ceramics department and graduate program tha