Hole+in+One

Date: 1978
 * [[image:http://ids.si.edu/ids/deliveryService?id=http://americanart.si.edu/images/2005/2005.5.73_2a.jpg&max=460 width="259" height="338" link="@http://americanart.si.edu/collections/search/artwork/?id=74726"]] || Title: **Hole in One**

Artist: **Peter Voulkos** Born: Bozeman, Montana 1924 Died: Bowling Green, Ohio 2002

Medium: ceramic Dimensions: 43 1/2 x 16 1/2 in. (110.5 x 41.9 cm) diam. Smithsonian American Art Museum Bequest of Edith S. and Arthur J. Levin © 1978, Voulkos Family Trust

Accession: 2005.5.73 || Voulkos was studying painting on the G.I. Bill when he tried ceramics and "took to clay like a duck to water." He thought that clay was a living thing and insisted that "you gotta respond to that." Voulkos gave workshops on the Berkeley campus—lubricated with whiskey for the graduate students and jug wine for the undergrads—improvising and feeding off the crowd like a jazz musician. The burnt, punctured, and torn surfaces of //Hole in One// capture the bravura performance that Voulkos gave in the studio and that helped make ceramics a respectable art for "real men." He fired his works for several days in an anagama kiln, an ancient design that left unpredictable burns and breaks in the pottery. A work like //Hole in One// reflects the macho heroics of postwar American artists and, at the same time, evokes monuments and tomb figures crafted by Asian potters thousands of years ago.
 * Gallery Label: **

Exhibition Label, Smithsonian American Art Museum, 2006

Born in Montana to Greek parents, Peter Voulkos worked his way through high school and then hitchhiked to Portland, Oregon. There he worked as an apprentice in an iron foundry until he was drafted into the U.S. Army Air Force. After the war, Voulkos studied painting and printing on the GI Bill. He earned his M.F.A. in ceramics at the California College of Arts and Crafts and returned to Montana to work. On a trip to New York in 1953, the artist met abstract expressionist painters Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline. From this moment, Voulkos wanted his work to have the scale and power that their works had achieved. He pushed the limits of clay sculpture but turned to bronze so that he could create even larger works with forms that projected out into space. He found inspiration in Zen philosophy, Spanish guitar, the Egyptian pyramids, and in cocaine, which landed him in a rehabilitation center. Despite his run-ins with drugs and alcohol, Voulkos was widely respected in the postwar period for his expressive ceramic and cast metal sculptures.
 * Luce Artist Biography: **

MacNaughton, Mary Davis. //Clay’s Tectonic Shift: 1956 – 1968 John Mason, Ken Price, Peter Voulkos// (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum; Claremont, CA: Scripps College, Ruth Chandler Williamson Gallery, 2012).

MacNaughton, Mary Davis. //Revolution in Clay: The Marer Collection of Contemporary Ceramics// (Claremont, CA: Ruth Chandler Williamson Gallery, Scripps College; Seattle, WA: Univ. of Washington Press, 1994).


 * Resources: **

Artist Biography SAAM Collections Page Peter Voulkous Website
 * Links: **