Peter Voulkos

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 Peter Voulkos and Peter Callas working on a 1998 Stack in Belvidere, NJ.

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 Ceramics quickly became a passion. His 25 pounds of clay allowed by semester by the school was not enough, but he noticed a source of good quality clay from the tires of the trucks that would stop at the restaurant where he worked part-time.

In 1953, Voulkos was invited to teach a summer session ceramics course at Black Mountain College in Asheville, North Carolina. After the summer at Black Mountain, he changed his approach to creating ceramics. The artist eschewed his traditional training and instead of creating smooth, well-thrown glazed vessels he started to work gesturally with raw clay, frequently marring his work with gashes and punctures. In the early 1960s, he set up a bronze foundry off-campus, anticipating the metal cast Wurster Hall, and started exhibiting his work at the New York Museum of Modern Art. Among his students were many ceramic artists who became well known in their own right.

In 1984, Voulkos was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for Fine Arts.

At a New York auction in 2001, a 1986 sculpture by Peter Voulkos was sold $72,625 to a European museum.

Work

Description While his early work was fired in electric and gas kilns, later in his career he primarily fired in the anagama kiln of Peter Callas, who had helped to introduce Japanese wood-firing aesthetics in the United States. Peter Voulkos is also among those who raised ceramics to the non-utilitarian, aesthetic sphere. While setting up the ceramics department at UC Berkeley, his students were authorized to make a teapot, "only if it didn't work". Voulkos started this new trend while in Los Angeles in the 1950s, saying, "there was a certain energy around L.A. at the time". He is most commonly identified as an Abstract Expressionist ceramist. or Black Divide - Butte, 1958, fired clay, Norton Simon Museum Hall of justice, 1971, bronze Mr. Ishi, 1970, bronze Untitled (Stack), 1980, stoneware, exhibited at the Oakland Museum of California

Public collections

Awards 1959: Rodin Museum Prize

Personal life Voulkos is survived by his first wife, Margaret Cone, and their daughter, Pier, a polymer clay artist; his wife, Ann, and their son, Aris; and his brother and two sisters.

In the early 1980s, Peter Voulkos went to rehab to deal with alcohol and cocaine addiction.