move fast enough for me." But soon Voulkos gained a supporter, sculptor David Smith, known for his balanced cubes of steel . Voulkos shared a studio on Glendale Boulevard with his former student John Mason (his neighbor was architect Richard Neutra), and in the evenings, he and his students, who were also his friends, would listen to jazz at the Tiffany Club. “L.A. Conceptual artist John Baldessari recalls that Voulkos, who at that time was painting in an Abstract Expressionist style as well as building massive abstract clay sculptures, seemed the very embodiment of the advanced New York art world. Baldessari, who was studying painting, remembers, “I soon discovered that he was more of an inspiration and a goad than any of my painting instructors, who were relatively academic. He psychically gave me permission, because the teachers I had always seemed delimiting.” ” Just before Christmas 1958, Voulkos opened a solo show at the Pasadena Art Museum (now the Norton Simon Museum). Soon after, he was fired from L.A. County Art Institute and hired by UC Berkeley, where his students included Ron Nagle, James Melchert and Ann Adair, who later became his second wife and by whom he has a son, Aris. Voulkos' career continued to escalate with a 1960 show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, favorably reviewed by Dore Ashton in the New York Times. Yearning to work on a larger scale than is possible in clay, he began producing monumental bronze sculptures for corporate clients, such as an 18-foot-tall sculpture in the lobby of the San Francisco office of Tishman Realty. Despite this two-decade foray into bronze, Voulkos remained committed to pushing the boundaries of possibility in ceramics. From 1979 to 1984, he concentrated on firing plates and then the vessel-shaped "stacks" in an anagama, a Japanese wood-burning kiln. Inspired by the Haniwa figures and Momoyama period ceramics of Japan, Voulkos let the ash and soot fro...
