- 237
PETER VOULKOS | Vessel
Estimate
20,000 - 30,000 USD
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Description
- Peter Voulkos
- Vessel
- signed and dated Voulkos/55
- glazed stoneware
- 28 3/4 in. (73 cm) high
- 1955
Provenance
Acquired directly from the artist by Ernest Freed, Los Angeles
Thence by descent
Acquired from the above by the present owner
Thence by descent
Acquired from the above by the present owner
Literature
Voulkos: The Breakthrough Years, exh. cat., Museum of Arts and Design, London, 2016, pp. 16-17, 22 (for related examples) and 35 (for a related ink drawing)
Condition
Overall in very good condition. The work is Janus faced, with one side executed in a warm white slip and the reverse in a rich chocolate brown slip. Please refer to the online catalog for additional images of both sides. The seam between the central and uppermost segment as well around one "horn" has likely been professionally and sensitively restored. This is seamless and difficult to detect under ultraviolet light. Overall this is a superb example of Voulkos' early design at a critical turning point in his career.
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING CONDITION OF A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD "AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF SALE PRINTED IN THE CATALOGUE.
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING CONDITION OF A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD "AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF SALE PRINTED IN THE CATALOGUE.
Catalogue Note
Sotheby's would like to thank Glenn Adamson for his assistance with the cataloguing of this lot.
Peter Voulkos has a well-deserved reputation as an Abstract Expressionist sculptor. He brought unprecedented scale and gestural intensity to the medium of ceramics, animated not only by the example of artists like Franz Kline and Willem de Kooning, but also his own personal experiments in action painting.
Voulkos’s creative breakthrough did not start with Abstract Expressionism, though. His first and most significant influence was the School of Paris. We should remember that, even by the mid-1950s, it was by no means clear that New York had permanently “stolen the idea of modern art” (in the famous phrase of historian Serge Guilbaut). Nor was it evident to most observers that abstraction, rather than figurative art, would dictate the course of American art for some years to come. For Voulkos, as for most of his generation, France was still the place to look for ideas and inspiration.
The shadows of Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse – both of whom were still working when Voulkos began his restless departure from functional pottery – loomed particularly large for him. He is supposed to have had Picasso prints pinned to his studio wall, and experimented with Matisse’s late cut-out paper technique, inventively translating it into a stencil for the application of pigmented clay slips.
The present vessel is an outstanding example of this charged moment in Voulkos’s career. Made a year prior to his annus mirabilis of 1956 (the year of Rocking Pot, Rasgeado, and other masterpieces), it is a remarkably direct translation into ceramics of modernist spatial play and deft mark-making. The piece consists of six separately wheel-thrown elements, joined together into a vertical arrangement. The doubling of the neck has correlates in functional pottery of the time – in the work of Toshiko Takaezu, for example – but here, the multiplication reads as absurdist, a parody of utilitarian form. The horn-like placement of necks amplifies the sense that this is an object of totemic, as well as figural, character.
The main event of the piece is the series of faces that Voulkos has scrawled on each of the three principle globular forms, evocative of children’s drawings (a topic of interest and admiration for Picasso). On the front, each of these bulges is embellished a face with a bare minimum of marks – two dots, two lines – and is edged with a quickly brushed contour, echoing the thick band of unglazed clay at the work’s base. The back of the work features the same motifs, executed with sgraffito into a brown-red slip; the conception is that of a triple Janus head.
On both sides, the rotation of the middle face at a thirty-degree angle is particularly significant. This departure from the uprightness of the overall composition anticipates moves that Voulkos would soon make in the construction of his works, in which thrown elements were introduced diagonally or horizontally into multi-part stacks. Through this simple shift of vector, he opened up the dynamics of ceramic composition. Voulkos disrupted the traditional emphasis of the discipline on formal symmetry and rhythmic profile, introducing the possibility of multiaxial shapes, released into the open space of sculpture. The little cock of the head in this piece, lending it a quizzical, questioning air, can be seen as an important first step in that direction. Voulkos had not quite made his momentous breakthrough in 1955. But he was tilting, inexorably, toward greatness.
GLENN ADAMSON
Glenn Adamson is the Senior Scholar at the Yale Center for British Art and most recently the co-curator of Voulkos: The Breakthrough Years at the Museum of Art and Design (2015). His recent publications include Fewer Better Things: The Hidden Wisdom of Objects (2018); The Invention of Craft (2013); Postmodernism: Style and Subversion (2011); The Craft Reader (2010); and Thinking Through Craft (2007).
Peter Voulkos has a well-deserved reputation as an Abstract Expressionist sculptor. He brought unprecedented scale and gestural intensity to the medium of ceramics, animated not only by the example of artists like Franz Kline and Willem de Kooning, but also his own personal experiments in action painting.
Voulkos’s creative breakthrough did not start with Abstract Expressionism, though. His first and most significant influence was the School of Paris. We should remember that, even by the mid-1950s, it was by no means clear that New York had permanently “stolen the idea of modern art” (in the famous phrase of historian Serge Guilbaut). Nor was it evident to most observers that abstraction, rather than figurative art, would dictate the course of American art for some years to come. For Voulkos, as for most of his generation, France was still the place to look for ideas and inspiration.
The shadows of Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse – both of whom were still working when Voulkos began his restless departure from functional pottery – loomed particularly large for him. He is supposed to have had Picasso prints pinned to his studio wall, and experimented with Matisse’s late cut-out paper technique, inventively translating it into a stencil for the application of pigmented clay slips.
The present vessel is an outstanding example of this charged moment in Voulkos’s career. Made a year prior to his annus mirabilis of 1956 (the year of Rocking Pot, Rasgeado, and other masterpieces), it is a remarkably direct translation into ceramics of modernist spatial play and deft mark-making. The piece consists of six separately wheel-thrown elements, joined together into a vertical arrangement. The doubling of the neck has correlates in functional pottery of the time – in the work of Toshiko Takaezu, for example – but here, the multiplication reads as absurdist, a parody of utilitarian form. The horn-like placement of necks amplifies the sense that this is an object of totemic, as well as figural, character.
The main event of the piece is the series of faces that Voulkos has scrawled on each of the three principle globular forms, evocative of children’s drawings (a topic of interest and admiration for Picasso). On the front, each of these bulges is embellished a face with a bare minimum of marks – two dots, two lines – and is edged with a quickly brushed contour, echoing the thick band of unglazed clay at the work’s base. The back of the work features the same motifs, executed with sgraffito into a brown-red slip; the conception is that of a triple Janus head.
On both sides, the rotation of the middle face at a thirty-degree angle is particularly significant. This departure from the uprightness of the overall composition anticipates moves that Voulkos would soon make in the construction of his works, in which thrown elements were introduced diagonally or horizontally into multi-part stacks. Through this simple shift of vector, he opened up the dynamics of ceramic composition. Voulkos disrupted the traditional emphasis of the discipline on formal symmetry and rhythmic profile, introducing the possibility of multiaxial shapes, released into the open space of sculpture. The little cock of the head in this piece, lending it a quizzical, questioning air, can be seen as an important first step in that direction. Voulkos had not quite made his momentous breakthrough in 1955. But he was tilting, inexorably, toward greatness.
GLENN ADAMSON
Glenn Adamson is the Senior Scholar at the Yale Center for British Art and most recently the co-curator of Voulkos: The Breakthrough Years at the Museum of Art and Design (2015). His recent publications include Fewer Better Things: The Hidden Wisdom of Objects (2018); The Invention of Craft (2013); Postmodernism: Style and Subversion (2011); The Craft Reader (2010); and Thinking Through Craft (2007).