Posts Tagged ‘John Mason’
2012: The Year in Review
Inspired by the Getty’s holiday card – a video narrated by James Cuno outlining the Getty’s accomplishments of 2012 – I decided to take a look at the happenings of the past year here at the gallery.
In January the gallery opened Peter Voulkos in L.A.: Time Capsule, a show that critic Peter Frank hailed as “…the kind of show Pacific Standard Time has been all too short of: an intimate look at the taste and thinking and working methods of an influential figure. Everything in the show, drawn from the artist’s daughter’s collection, was small in scale and dated from the later 1950s…” in the Huffington Post.
Also early in the year, Clay’s Tectonic Shift: John Mason, Ken Price, 
Peter Voulkos, 1956—1968 debuted at Scripps College. I contributed to this major Getty-sponsored exhibition by serving as co-curator and lead essayist for the show, which was singled out by Hunter Drohojowska-Philp on Artnet as “…something of a model for what PST has accomplished, putting into relief the important contributions made by California-based ceramicists during the ‘50s and ‘60s.” By year’s end, Los Angeles Times critic Christopher Knight recognized the show in his “Best of 2012” list of art museum exhibitions, writing that: “Together, ‘Common Ground: Ceramics in Southern California, 1945-1975’ … and ‘Clay’s Tectonic Shift: John Mason, Ken Price and Peter Voulkos, 1956-1968’ … made for the most thorough telling of the tale of a distinctive revolution in postwar art. One laid out the rich panoply of modern ceramic conventions, the other cheerfully smashed them.”
Drawing on Japan’s significant history with ceramics, the gallery presented Sugimoto Sadamitsu’s work in February. Sugimoto-sensei is regarded as the greatest living master of the Iga and Shigaraki styles, and his work was highlighted in a 1989 exhibition that celebrated the 400th anniversary of the death of Sen no Rikyu, the legendary early master of the Tea Ceremony. Sugimoto-sensei’s work represented Shigaraki and Iga masterpieces of the Momoyama period for use in the movie made in that year titled Rikyu, a well-received treatment of the life of this master of the Tea Ceremony. Our show was the first appearance of Sugimoto-sensei’s work in the western United States.
We also brought an unprecedented 
show of paintings from the late 1980s by Craig Kauffman to the L.A. audience in April. Never exhibited together in the artist’s lifetime, these paintings showed Kauffman’s interest in unorthodox application of paint and his love of the physicality of painting, accompanied by his brilliant color sense. Kauffman considered the 1989 works, which became known as the Numbers, to be a continuation of his use of calligraphic line, and an integration of sensuous color with architectural form. It was a memorable show.
This summer we mounted Jennifer Lee’s fourth solo show in Los Angeles. Jennifer Lee’s pottery is carefully colored with oxides incorporated into the stoneware body of the vessels, so that the interiors and exteriors work together. Referring to her unique pigments, Sir David Attenborough noted: “Because she does not use glaze, her subtle colours and misty shades come not from a veil draped over the pot but from within its very substance, as in the face of a cliff.”
The quiet elegance of her pots never fails to make an impact on viewers. Indeed, Leah Ollman of the Los Angeles Times wrote in August that, “For all the calm they invoke, the pieces are charged with the motion of the swirls that encircle them…Their implicit movement suggests the shy whirl of demure dervishes.”
In the fall, the LACMA retrospective of the late Ken Price was a landmark 
exhibit for the artist. In every way, from the innovative design of the exhibition to the superb publication, the tribute to Ken Price signaled the significance of ceramic sculpture in the development of contemporary art in Los Angeles. In a related exhibit, the gallery presented a show of small works, which was described by David Pagel of the Los Angeles Times as a “dazzling solo show at Frank Lloyd Gallery.”
November brought the release of the gallery’s major monograph on Craig Kauffman, entitled Sensual Mechanical. Written by biographer Hunter Drohojowska-Philp, the publication was praised by Christopher Knight in the Los Angeles Times as “…a gorgeously illustrated and highly informative monograph published by Frank Lloyd Gallery, which represents the artist’s estate. Hunter Drohojowska-Philp’s 2011 book ‘Rebels in Paradise: The Los Angeles Art Scene and the 1960s’ sketched the city’s first flush of artistic maturity. Here she chronicles for the first time and in illuminating depth Kauffman’s life and the complete evolution of his luminous art.”
Los Angeles Artists, Everywhere
It’s easy to think that the birth of the Los Angeles art scene is just beginning to be fully appreciated. After all, the Getty-sponsored Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945-1980 has drawn to a close, having given an enormous audience the chance to learn about the range of styles and materials during this period.
However, this view overlooks the ways in which these West Coast artists were appreciated in their own time, and the substantial recognition they gained at a much earlier date. Artists from the Los Angeles area and the West Coast were exhibited throughout the world in shows including Ten from Los Angeles at the Seattle Art Museum Pavilion, 1966, Los Angeles 6 by the Vancouver Art Gallery, 1968, and 11 Los Angeles Artists by the Arts Council of Great Britain in London, 1971.
Not only were these West Coast artists important, they were important together, and could be shown together without making distinctions between media. The image you see here is an exhibition announcement for Kompass, a 1970 show at the Kunsthalle Bern in Bern, Switzerland. The poster announces that the show consists of “American Art of the West Coast,” and lists the artists represented, including Larry Bell, Billy Al Bengston, Bruce Conner, Richard Diebenkorn, Robert Irwin, Craig Kauffman, Ed Kienholz, Frank Lobdell, John Mason, John McCracken, Bruce Nauman, Ken Price, Ed Ruscha, Hassel Smith, Clifford Still, Wayne Thiebaud, Peter Voulkos, Doug Wheeler, and William T. Wiley.
Seeing such a diverse group of names together really illustrates what was happening on the West Coast. The pluralistic approach of these exhibits reflects an understanding of the multiplicity of styles and mediums that thrived in the Los Angeles scene of that period.
Peter Frank Haiku
A little while ago, the gallery’s January show was reviewed in the Huffington Post by Peter Frank. Like the HuffPo folks say, these short reviews are sometimes in the traditional Haiku form of 5x7x5 syllables. But other writers might produce a sonnet, and some might take to free-form verse. It’s amazing how writers like Peter Frank can pack a lot of content into a small space. For anyone who missed it, here’s the text:
“Peter Voulkos in L.A.: Time Capsule” is the kind of show Pacific Standard Time has been all too short of: an intimate look at the taste and thinking and working methods of an influential figure. Everything in the show, drawn from the artist’s daughter’s collection, was small in scale and dated from the later 1950s, the time at which Voulkos adopted and promulgated a painterly approach to ceramics, liberating the craft from functional restraints and allowing it to present itself as sculpture – or even painting. None of Voulkos’ own canvases were included, but several paintings by friends and students spoke tellingly to and with Voulkos’ pots and plates and planks and those of his colleagues, including John Mason, Ed Kienholz, and the late Kenneth Price. Billy Al Bengston’s work from this time in oil, ink, and clay is of special remark here – the Pop painter considers Voulkos his greatest teacher, and these items bespoke that influence. Henry Takemoto was the one name here emerging from obscurity, with rough-and-tumble plates every bit as funky and muscular as Voulkos’. What became of him?”
We also made a video walk-through of the show, and this gives those who missed it a chance to see it up close:
How the Blue Wall Was Built
There have been some truly pivotal moments in L.A. art history. Some of the groundbreaking achievements were in ceramics, it’s often noted. The biggest move, to my mind, was when John Mason and Peter Voulkos rented a studio on the corner of Glendale Blvd. and Baxter Street in 1957. The first things they made were large-scale sculpture. They adapted industrial technology, and had a huge kiln built that could match their ambitions: “I could stand upright in [the kiln] and a number of friends could stand upright in it also,” Mason has recalled.
Mason’s first sculptures, made in that Glendale Blvd. studio, were vertical, closed forms, with a shape that resembled a spear. Then, over the next few years, he made several huge steps forward, moving into uncharted territory with the medium of fired clay. Mason began to make massive rough-hewn walls; he soon broke into a kind of totemic verticality. Eventually, he built huge cross forms and solid, mysterious geometric shapes.
He did this by developing innovative ways of working, including pushing clay onto a huge easel to make wall reliefs, and compacting the material around a wooden armature to make the vertical sculptures. By 1959 he would use just the weight, gravity and plasticity of the raw clay to build a major work, which will be shown in the main exhibit at the Getty, “Crosscurrents”: the Blue Wall.
“It wasn’t until I started to work on the floor that I began to just cut and slam clay down on the floor and then take pieces or parts of slabs and add them to make a more linear organic form. One of the first was the Blue Wall, which was over twenty feet long and eight or nine feet across,” Mason has recalled.
John Mason and Pacific Standard Time
John Mason will be featured in the upcoming Pacific Standard Time series of exhibitions, an initiative of the Getty. Mason emerged in the mid-1950s as one of the leaders of a revolution that transformed clay from a craft to a fine art medium. Since that time, Mason has had a distinguished career as a sculptor. Mason’s work over the past six decades presents one of the most compelling arguments for abstract sculpture. His line of thought and consistency of execution mark the work of a master builder. Mason “knows how to get the most out of a relatively simple three dimensional form,” according to art critic Suzanne Muchnic. Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945 – 1980 is a collaboration of more than sixty cultural institutions across Southern California, coming together for six months beginning in October 2011 to tell the story of the birth of the Los Angeles art scene and how it became a major new force in the art world. Each institution will make its own contribution to this grand-scale story of artistic innovation and social change, told through a multitude of simultaneous exhibitions and programs.
A key figure in the development of significant sculpture in Los Angeles, John Mason will be featured in a number of Pacific Standard Time museum exhibitions. At the main exhibit, Mason’s massive 1959 Blue Wall will be prominent. We are pleased to announce the upcoming schedule, and provide links to the exhibitions:
J Paul Getty Museum: Pacific Standard Time: Crosscurrents in L.A. Painting and Sculpture, 1950-1970
October 1, 2011—February 5, 2012
Laguna Art Museum: Best Kept Secret: UCI and the Development of Contemporary Art in Southern California, 1964-1971
October 30, 2011—January 22, 2012
American Museum of Ceramic Art (AMOCA): Common Ground: Ceramics in Southern California 1945-1975
November 11, 2011—March 31, 2012
Pacific Asia Museum: 46 N. Los Robles: A History of the Pasadena Art Museum
November 18, 2011—April 8, 2012
Scripps College: Clay’s Tectonic Shift: Mason, Price and Voulkos, 1956-1968
January 21, 2011—April 8, 2012
Get Ready
The press is coming…about Pacific Standard Time. For those who are willing and able to devote some time, there are lots of resources. Want to read about the big Getty-sponsored initiative? You’ll have choices, and can read about dozens of exhibits, personalities, legends and history—in print and on line. Start with the Los Angeles Times and the Getty’s own massive site, and just follow the links. Or, take a look at the October issues of several magazines, including Art in America, or Art and Auction, coming out soon. As big print presses roll and little digital pixels emit, the world will have a hard time avoiding Pacific Standard Time. For backgound, look to the excellent article by Jori Finkel in today’s L.A. Times, and be sure to read Hunter Drohojowska Philp’s introduction to the artists and the time period. Or, take a look at the critic’s notebook about the upcoming “Crosscurrents” show at the Getty Museum, written by Christopher Knight.
For those with an eye for classic black and white photos, there’s an archival photo show from the Times. And for further reading and more images, it’s fun to meander around the section titled “People” on the main Pacific Standard Time site. Whatever you do, don’t forget that the artists from the Frank Lloyd Gallery, like Larry Bell, John Mason, Peter Voulkos and Craig Kauffman, are absolutely central to the development of contemporary art in Los Angeles.
From left to right: Vivian Rowan, Larry Bell, Avilda Moses, Ed Moses, the late Patricia Faure and the late Craig Kauffman. Photo taken in 2006 and copyright by Alan Shaffer.
2010 in review
It seems like everyone likes to review the year. I had some help with reviewing this blog. The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:
The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Wow.
Crunchy numbers
Statistics are funny things sometimes. The WordPress people report that about 3 million people visit the Taj Mahal every year. This blog was viewed about 26,000 times in 2010. If it were the Taj Mahal, it would take about 3 days for that many people to see it.
In 2010, there were 22 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 98 posts. There were 65 pictures uploaded.
The busiest day of the year was May 11th with 445 views. The most popular post that day was Craig Kauffman, 1932-2010.
Where did they come from?
The top referring sites in 2010 were franklloyd.com, facebook.com, en.wikipedia.org, mail.live.com, and timesquotidian.com.
Some visitors came searching, mostly for peter voulkos , ken price, craig kauffman, and john mason ceramics.
Attractions in 2010
These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.
Craig Kauffman, 1932-2010 May 2010
10 comments
Richard Neutra: The Perkins House November 2009
1 comment
Artists: On Peter Voulkos January 2009
3 comments
Monte Factor: L.A. Collector April 2009
3 comments
Peter Voulkos: Words from Irving Blum May 2009
1 comment
Greatest Hits
O.K., I know this: my little blog is not even remotely close to the Huffington Post. HuffPo is well known as the most popular news site in the Blogosphere. But site statistics are somewhat addictive for bloggers. There’s a temptation (at least for me) to check and see if anyone’s reading your posts. Those stats reveal a lot about the readers, too. I’m amazed to find out that there are some clear favorites from the past couple of years since this tiny blog started in November, 2008. There’s also a clear winner in these statistics: more people want to read about Peter Voulkos than any other subject—by far.
For those who want to review the Top Ten Posts of my past two years, here are the links:
Richard Neutra: The Perkins House
Frank Gehry Selects
A Group Show of Ceramics including work by John Mason, Ken Price, Peter Voulkos, Frank Gehry, Billy Al Bengston, Elsa Rady, Peter Shire, Glen Lukens, and George Ohr
When Frank Gehry took a ceramics class in college, it marked a turning point. His ceramics teacher at the University of Southern California, Glen Lukens, clearly recognized Gehry’s interest in architecture. Since Lukens was building a house designed by architect Raphael Soriano, he invited the young Gehry to visit the site one day. That’s when Gehry got excited about architecture: “I do know a lightbulb went off when I saw Soriano,” he recalled.
Since that time, Gehry has maintained his interest in ceramics, too. He made ceramic works during his student days at USC, and he has collected work by Glen Lukens, Ken Price and George Ohr. He has been friends with Peter Voulkos, John Mason, Billy Al Bengston and Elsa Rady for decades. He was the architect for the Ohr-O’Keefe Museum in Biloxi, Mississippi, as well, and that museum will hold a collection of pottery by George Ohr.
This exhibition, on view from July 24 through August 21, grew out of a conversation between Frank Lloyd and Frank Gehry. It started as a casual idea, and grew into an exhibition—works chosen by Gehry, by people that he knows and respects. It marks an opportunity to see a variety of approaches to ceramic art, in a selection by a world-class architect. The exhibit also demonstrates, once again, the integration of the ceramic arts into the larger world of Southern California art and architecture.
Library Floor
In February through April, I went to a few lectures given by an old friend, Lawrence Weschler. He’s most well known as an author, and his subjects range from art and culture to politics and poets. What ties all his conversations together is a brilliant mind, one that finds links—and convergences—in images, literature, history and art. His talks were staged at venues around L.A., including the Getty, where Weschler was a scholar in residence at the Getty Research Institute. In his daily life back East, he’s the Director of the New York Institute for the Humanities.
Fortunately, some of the talks were held at Occidental College, just a short hop from my home in Eagle Rock. A small, first rate liberal arts college, Occidental invited Weschler to be an artist in residence, so he enjoyed a kind of dual residency at the Getty and Occidental during the winter of 2010. For me, it was a delight to listen to the talks, and the experience took me back to times in college—when a few professors opened doors and started my curiosity burning. My old classmate Ren (as I know him) recalled those times at U.C. Santa Cruz, too, and referred to our shared college experiences in the updated talk titled “Vermeer in Bosnia”.
But the lecture topic that stayed with me was titled “All Things Solid”—about books, reading and the printed page. Appropriately enough, the lecture was held in the Occidental Library, and Weschler (knowing full well that he was speaking to the Digital Generation on a college campus) shared his love of books. He noted the physicality, the tactility of books—the turning of the page. He extolled a book’s characteristics, in opposition to the internet: a book has permanence and physicality, a book has a spine and is vertebrate, while the internet is amorphous. An author wants you to read things in an order, by chapter, while the internet seems to encourage a kind of wandering from place to place (yes, even here, in this blog).
I think a lot about books, libraries and research these days. I’m one of several essayists working on a project that will be published in January of 2012. Our task is to shed new light on the ceramic sculpture made by John Mason, Ken Price and Peter Voulkos during 1956 to 1968. It’s a subject in need of more attention, and a something that just can’t be found on the internet—as it happened 50 years ago. In doing my research, I’ve found all the best sources to be…books and catalogs. I’m now living with them all, and walking between them, as they are stacked all over my living room floor. In praise of all things solid, and tactile, indeed!
Frank Lloyd's blog 