William Underhill

WILLIAM UNDERHILL Casting a Legacy

arnoldsche

WILLIAM UNDERHILL Casting a Legacy

With contributions by Edward Lebow and Mary Drach McInnes, and an introduction by Wayne Higby

Photography by Brian Oglesbee

ing the shell as transmitter of information.” Most of that information was in the beautiful lattice of struts forming the surface tessellations.

When Underhill sat down and sketched the variety of possible patterns, he was struck by the almost limitless divisibility of their basic triangular shapes. By dividing, subdividing, and thereby increasing the number of struts, one could make the structure stronger and rounder, expanding it from a cubistic spheroid with well-defined pentagonal and hexagonal facets—like a soccer ball—into a more richly filigreed organic whole. “Long before Bucky’s dome became the symbol of primary power, unity and ‘centeredness’ for the 1960s counterculture,” declared Underhill, “it was my own ideal form.”

The lure was so strong that, over the summer of 1956, he organized a team of architecture students to design a dome—thirty-six feet in diameter—for an aviary at Oakland’s Lake Merritt Park. Through the fall, they developed the plans and specifications and began fabricating the necessary aluminum struts and panels (fig. 8). However, Underhill was gone by the time the dome was finished, in 1957 (fig. 9), drafted into the Army and on his way through basic training to an eventual posting as a draftsman in Heidelberg, Germany. Before he left, he and Linn Baldwin, another student in the archi-

tecture program, were married. A talented artist, she would become an essential partner in helping to advance his early career and anchor their family once children arrived (fig. 10).

As the experience of designing the dome sank in, Underhill realized that he was drawn to its form more as a sculptor than as an architect. Part of that had to do with his sense that being an architect—with all of the teams, plans, specifications, codes, contracts and disputes to manage—was “too much like being a lawyer.” He preferred the gratification and control of things he could make on his own.

Yet architecture’s power stayed with him. On leave in Paris, he was overwhelmed by the Cathedral of Notre Dame. “The first thing is the height and the Bigness of the interior space,” he wrote to a friend.9 “You are compelled to look up and your spirit must do likewise. Then, as you move through the bottom of this miniature universe, along the level surface that it all seems to be poised on, the multiplicity of interiors strikes you.” He saw that “the small spaces of the side aisles, the arcades, the upper gallery, were forming infinite combinations and compositions.” And from high in the murkiness of the vaulted ceiling, he said, as the red, blue and yellow brilliance of stained-glass colors splashed into view, “the piers come cascading down, carrying the whole thing in complete logic and mathematical wisdom. The total effect is a combination of a visible, rational framework, physically and emotionally, and the height of sublime poetic illogicality and inspiration. It is the cosmos in one bundle.”

Walking around the outside, he noticed something else: the profound difference between the cathedral’s inside and its outside. The exterior’s flying buttresses, walls and towers related to the rest of Paris, he observed. The inside was “a world of its own.” This duality seemed relatively small at the time, yet Underhill would tuck it away and eventually apply it to his thinking about cast bronze and iron vessels.

Lost Wax

When he left the Army and returned to Berkeley in 1959 to finish his art studies and degrees at Cal, Underhill joined a class with James Melchert, Stephen De Staebler and other young talents. Many had come to work with Peter Voulkos, who had just been hired to establish a ceramics program in Cal’s Decorative Arts Department. Voulkos didn’t teach in the standard way, Melchert recalled. “He thought of himself as a catalyst in the room.”10 There was little doubting the power of his spark. In the seven years since his and Underhill’s paths had crossed at CCAC, Voulkos had transformed his work and

10__Newlyweds Linn Baldwin and William Underhill, 1957

8 ¼ × 9 ½ inches

12 × 11 × 8 inches

BERKELEY BOWL , 1961

Cast bronze

JIM HOWARD’S LIDDED POT, 1961

Cast bronze

Collection of Lala Howard

Concept sketches, ink on paper, ca. 1988

SQUARE FONT also known as BRIAN’S INEVITABLE POT, 2000

Cast bronze

10 × 9 × 9 inches

TEAPOT, 1976–2000

12 × 10 × 9 inches

SIX-LOBED ZYGOTE

ca. 1985

Sand-cast iron

6 ½ × 11 × 11 inches

Cast bronze and carved wood

Schematic drawing for casting, pencil on paper, ca. 1988

STARRY NIGHT, 2002

Cast bronze

10 ½ × 10 ½ × 10 ½ inches

Collection of the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm Sweden

HIDDEN STAR , 2005

Alfred Ceramic Art Museum at Alfred University, Alfred, New York, William Underhill: Casting a Legacy, retrospective exhibition, February 21 – December 30, 2022

47__William Underhill’s studio drawing table, retrospective exhibition, Alfred Ceramic Art Museum at Alfred University, 2022

Exhibiting a Legacy

Mary Drach McInnes

The Alfred Ceramic Art Museum’s exhibition William Underhill: Casting a Legacy deftly portrays Underhill’s lifetime aesthetic themes and artistic accomplishments. By layering a mixture of materials and forms—bronze vessels, iron pots, terracotta heads, paper maquettes, measured drawings—we get a sense of his movements in and around the studio. From preliminary models to finished works, this retrospective offers us a glimpse into the life of a professional sculptor.

One enters Alfred’s large, airy gallery by way of a series of glass cases that exhibit the artist’s preliminary steps. Hand tools and patina test samples are mixed in and around a multitude of small sculptural forms. Geometric-shaped models are shown in a variety of materials such as paper and plaster. These maquettes are carefully constructed with edges sharply hewn by knife blade and metal file. This array, evoking the display methods of science museums, primes the viewer to the rigorous studio practice that unfolds in the museum’s main room.

As one crosses the threshold into the main exhibition, a choice is offered to us: turn left towards a large drafting table surrounded by drawings or walk straight ahead along rows of finished works. I veered towards the more intimate space of the studio and was rewarded with a new regard for Underhill’s practice. Central to my response was seeing his drawing board. A standing lamp extends out and over the board directing our attention to the artist’s tabletop and drawing files. This is his private domain, and Underhill as thinker emerges here. An open drawer reveals a drawing of a geodesic dome; another is crammed with office implements. The desk (fig. 47) has scattered objects that were found in situ before the artist died this past year at age 88. Many items are what you’d expect to see, such as drafting tools (plastic triangles, bow compass, mechanical pencils, flexible curves), and a few unexpected objects including paper domes and a postcard of a ceramic sculpture. These latter items exhibit the importance of lifelong influences and friendships to Underhill. The three geodesic domes reflect the inspiration on the young artist by Buckminster Fuller, who briefly visited the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland. The postcard of a Stephen De Staebler work is testimony to their longtime friendship that extended back to their Berkeley college days. Two small metal sculptures by Underhill and rolls of tracing paper finish this tableau. The workspace is further manifested by a series of crisp color photographs by Brian Oglesbee—the studio’s brick exterior, its inner storage room, several of the artist himself. These images neatly add to the evocation of Underhill at work.

“I am reminded of the mythic ideal of the philosophers’ stone and the transmutation of base materials into an elixir of life and immortality. William Underhill’s magnum opus was the result of a deeply personal devotion to his alchemical enquiry into meaning. He found that his philosophers’ stone was hand and mind, emotion and spirit engaged without unnecessary interruption toward the goal of understanding the power of art.“

WAYNE HIGBY