Ken Price: Slow and Steady Wins the Race, Works on Paper 1962-2010

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Ken Price Slow and Steady Wins the Race, Works on Paper 1962–2010

THE D R AWI N G CENTER

The Drawing Center June 19 – August 18, 2013 Albright-Knox Art Gallery September 27, 2013 – January 12, 2014 Harwood Museum of Art February 22 – May 4, 2014

Ken Price Slow and Steady Wins the Race, Works on Paper 1962–2010

Curated by Douglas Dreishpoon

D R AW I N G PA P E R S 10 5

Essay by Douglas Dreishpoon

Director’s Acknowledgments

My career in the art world began in 1995 at UrbanGlass, a non-profit glass-working studio and school in Brooklyn, NY. During my six years there, working under the curator and art critic John Perreault, I developed an interest in craft materials and began writing extensively on glass and ceramics, exploring how these seeming “lowly” and often much-maligned mediums could offer new perspectives and insight into the ideas then dominating the art world, which, in the 1990s, seemed to me to be re-embracing materiality over conceptual work.

So when Doug Dreishpoon proposed that The Drawing Center and the Albright-Knox Art Gallery collaborate on a Ken Price drawing show, I was thrilled, given my own affinity for Price’s work. Price’s drawings, as compared to his well-known ceramic sculptures, are virtually unknown to the extended art world and general public alike. The more than fifty-years worth of drawings that Price made in parallel to his sculptures gives us a unique opportunity to explore the shifts in Price’s thinking about the nature of objects. What is more, the fortuitous timing of our mounting the exhibition in New York at the same time as the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s presentation of the comprehensive touring retrospective of Price’s work, curated by Stephanie Barron of LACMA and designed by Frank Gehry, assures that our focused drawings survey will contribute significantly to the scholarship on and appreciation of Price’s complete œuvre.

I want to personally thank Doug Dreishpoon for his absolute dedication to this project. Doug’s long-term friendship with the Price family and his deep knowledge and respect for Ken’s work has made this exhibition both heartfelt and revelatory.

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Several galleries in New York and Los Angeles provided invaluable assistance in locating specific works, expediting their inclusion in the exhibition and publication. Together we would like to thank Jeffrey Peabody at the Matthew Marks Gallery; Franklin Parrasch at the Franklin Parrasch Gallery; Peter Goulds and Kimberly Davis at L.A. Louver Gallery; and Tracy Lew at the James Corcoran Gallery.

Mark Pascale, Curator in the Department of Prints and Drawings at the Art Institute of Chicago; Marla Prather, Senior Consultant for Modern and Contemporary Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; Jina Brenneman, Curator of Collections and Exhibitions at the Harwood Museum of Art; and Cornelia Butler, The Robert Lehman Foundation Chief Curator of Drawings at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, all lent their support to the project.

Irving Blum, one of the prime movers behind the Ferus Gallery and a longtime advocate for Price’s work, is responsible for making available for the exhibition Price’s ten-foot-long scroll drawing, which is based on the artist’s six-month tour of Japan in 1962. We are also grateful to the individuals who made loans of Price’s work: Brooke Alexander, Suzanne Booth, Gus Foster, John and Phyllis Kleinberg, Sara Szold, Beth Rudin DeWoody, and several lenders who wish to remain anonymous. We would also like to thank several artists whose work appears in this volume: the estate of Alberto Giacometti, the estate of Craig Kauffman, the estate of Edward Kienholz, Ed Moses, and Claes Oldenburg.

At The Drawing Center, for embracing this idea and making the exhibition and publication possible, I want to thank my fantastic staff: Anna Martin, Registrar; Nova Benway, Curatorial Assistant; Nicole Goldberg, Development Director; Peter Ahlberg and Joanna Ahlberg, AHL&CO; and Jonathan T.D. Neil, Executive Editor.

At the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, I would like to thank former Director Louis Grachos and Deputy Director Karen Lee Spaulding; former Curatorial Assistants Ilana Chlebowski and Corey Mansfield; former Head of Research Resources Susana Tejada, and Technical Services Librarian John Burnett; Head of Publications Pamela Hatley

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and Assistant Editor Pamela Martin; Information Coordinator Kelly Carpenter; Senior Registrars Laura Fleischmann and Carolyn Padwa; Art Preparator Eileen Saracino; and Head of Operations Bryan Gawronski; along with Kenneth Walker, Joshua Reusch, Brian Campbell, Robert Santoro, and Andrew Mayer.

This catalogue and exhibition are dedicated to Ken Price, who passed away on February 24, 2012. —Brett Littman Executive Director, The Drawing Center

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Curator’s Foreword

This exhibition’s subtitle, Slow and Steady Wins the Race, came in a flash of associations that began with the stalwart turtle that appears in some of Ken Price’s earliest works as one of many turtles in the foreground of an ink drawing that humorously records Price’s visit, in 1962, to the Stone Garden of the Turtle Valley in Japan; as the base support for a ceramic cup elevated on a bed of sand [fig. 1]; as the central image in a graphite drawing, where it glides effortlessly through light-stippled water; and as a small rendering of a “floating” turtle cup inserted at the bottom of a magazine reproduction of a nude woman, who stands waist-deep in water with her arms crossed, staring downward as though slightly embarrassed by the sudden appearance of the buoyant little vessel. Propelled by defiant grace, Price’s turtles remind me of the tortoise in Aesop’s Fable who, through sheer perseverance, ends up outwitting the wily hare and winning the race. Like the steadfast tortoise, Price ran life’s race at his own pace and in his own quiet way. Right out of the gate, his unassuming little mounds, eggs, and cups drew the attention of West Coast peers, as well as a few open-minded curators and critics, including Walter Hopps and John Coplans, who, in the early 1960s, wrote about and exhibited the work. But still, the work remained under the art world’s radar until the 1990s, due in large part to his choice of clay as a primary medium, and to the quality-of-life decision he made during the 1970s to live and work in out-of-the-way places like Taos, New Mexico, far from the smog-laden City of Dreams—Los Angeles—his hometown.

“Slow and Steady” connotes an off-the-grid, laid-back lifestyle balanced by discipline and production. That Price drew prolifically over the course of fifty years is not at all surprising; drawing has always been a way for sculptors to dream on paper. What is remark-

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Fig . 1

Ken Price, Blind Sea Turtle Cup, 1968

able, though, is the degree to which his notion of drawing continued to evolve. Drawing always enabled him to visualize, without a lot of fuss, any idea that entered his mind. Some of these ideas, transcribed on paper, were clearly sculptural, constructive guides to getting an object made. Others implied more narrative dimensions: fantasy tableaux pumped up with retinal-searing colors, sometimes populated with a figure or two, and frequently leavened with salacious humor. A lifetime survey of Price’s works on paper reveals a steady stream of fantastic images signifying alternate worlds where unexpected things happen.

There have been enlightening conversations over the past six years with artists who knew Price from the Ferus Gallery days. To talk with Ed Moses and Larry Bell, two of his closest friends from that wild time, is to realize that Price was something special, not only because of his work and work ethic, but simply because of his demeanor. “Ken Price was the miracle,” Moses told me straight up in April 2010, when we met at the painter’s home in Venice, California. And to Bell, who literally followed Price to Taos, “He personified the kind of focus that was just on the work and didn’t have anything to do with intellect or politics. It was a total sensate experience being around the guy,” the sculptor recalled, “and never having to talk about art. I probably learned more about how a sculpture should sit from the way his cups unequivocally occupied a little place. Like nothing I’ve ever seen.”

Talking informally, on two other occasions, sculptor Tony Berlant and photographer Gus Foster confirmed Price’s elevated status among his peers. You learn a lot about someone from their trustworthy friends.

My first encounter with Price’s unconventional sculpture was in New York during the mid-1980s, in a solo exhibition at the Willard Gallery on East 72nd Street. His finely sliced and brightly painted amorphic mounds, so outrageous and yet so right, left a lasting impression on me. Years later, our mutual friend Alexandra Benjamin introduced us during one of my many trips to New Mexico to interview visual artists, musicians, poets, gallerists, and writers for what eventually became the Taos Oral History Project. In the summer of 2000, Benjamin and I visited Price and his wife Happy at their spacious apartment off the town plaza above what had been the local cinema. The afternoon we spent lounging on their deck, basking in

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the waning rays of a Taos sun, remains a memorable moment, as does the videotaped conversation we did five years later, in 2005, on the patio of Price’s new home and studio complex in Arroyo Hondo, just outside of Taos. We talked about a lot of things—art, surfing, music, family—during that ninety-minute session sponsored by the Mandelman-Ribak Foundation. I learned a great many things that day that reaffirmed how fickle the art world can be, and what it takes, year after year, come hell or high water, to reach the finish line with one’s integrity intact.

Price was blessed with a close-knit family who enabled his boundless creativity, even after radical chemotherapy severely compromised the quality of his life. For decades, Jackson Price, working closely by his father’s side in the studio as a trusted set of eyes and hands, supervised the painting and sanding of hundreds of sculptures.

No one knows more about Ken Price’s sculptural techniques than Jackson—now the keeper of those recipes and his father’s legacy.

Ken’s step-daughter Romy Colonius will continue to function as the studio’s administrator and archivist, monitoring the whereabouts of works and overseeing their proper documentation. And then there’s Happy, the calm center and master gardener inside the Price compound. Happy always persisted quietly behind the scenes to ensure the artist’s productivity. So much of what she did passed unnoticed by most people, but the many, small things she attended to on a daily basis, like making sure there was homegrown food on the family’s banquet table and managing all practical and financial matters, kept the Price enterprise humming.

I spent many days at the Arroyo Hondo studio in April and December of 2010, sorting through file drawers and dusty shelf racks, pulling out all kinds of drawings, making notes about some of these, and putting them aside for the show. That was the easy part of the curatorial process. What followed, once the exhibition’s checklist was settled and all of the material had to be consolidated, packed, and safely shipped to New York, was more complicated. I thank you, Happy, Jackson, and Romy, for staying in the project’s fold in spite of life’s unforeseeable intrusions, and for ultimately helping to make it all happen.

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On my own home front, my wife Lisa Rafalson and beautiful daughters Maia and Mina are, as always, the touchstone to my life outside of the museum. They remind me, on a daily basis, what it means to be truly human. —Douglas Dreishpoon May 2012

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“Drawing is a way of seeing what you’re thinking about” Douglas Dreishpoon

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Earning his master’s degree in record time from the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University, a twenty-four-year-old Ken Price made the 3,000-mile journey back to his hometown—Los Angeles, the City of Dreams. During the year he spent sequestered in the tiny town of Alfred, throwing, building, and glazing ceramic objects, the Los Angeles art scene changed very little. Price, however, changed a lot. And so did his work, which close friends, a few sympathetic dealers, museum curators, and magazine editors, saw with fresh eyes.

Price’s return to Los Angeles in the summer of 1959 corresponded with a rapid succession of auspicious breaks that put him on the West Coast map as a sculptor of note. His opening salvo was a oneperson show at the Ferus Gallery in the spring of 1960, which was followed by another a year later. Then, in August 1963, John Coplans at Artforum reproduced one of his mysterious mounds on the magazine’s cover for an issue devoted to “California Sculpture Today.”

And the following year, Walter Hopps selected seven of his sculptures for the New American Sculpture exhibition at the Pasadena Art Museum.1 The accelerated transition from a potter to a sculptor of note, though, did not include the many works on paper that naturally primed Price’s creative process. These remained, for the most part, under the art world’s radar.2 The act of drawing began as private activity, something Price pursued behind the scenes without expectation, and there it thrived, in that quiet space, for a long time.

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Walter Hopps and Irving Blum gave Price his first one-person shows at the Ferus Gallery in 1960 and 1961, before Hopps decamped for the Pasadena Art Museum, where he organized New American Sculpture. In that timely exhibition, which included work by Lee Bontecou, John Chamberlain, Edward Higgins, and H. C. Westermann, Price was represented by polychrome ceramic mounds and eggs executed between 1961 and 1962; see Walter Hopps, New American Sculpture (Pasadena Art Museum, 1964): n.p., checklist numbers 19–24.

It is possible that a few works on paper were included in Price’s first one-person show at the Ferus Gallery. Before that time, in 1955 and 1956, he had shown some drawings in San Francisco at the 6 Gallery. In 1966, John Coplans selected two gouaches for the Five Los Angeles Sculptors exhibition; see John Coplans, Five Los Angeles Sculptors and Sculptors Drawings / Los Angeles / New York (Art Gallery, University of California, Irvine, 1966), 29, p and q. Drawings may have been exhibited at the Felicity Samuel Gallery in London in 1974; and in 1992, about 250 sketchbook drawings were pinned salon-style to the walls of the James Corcoran Gallery in Santa Monica, CA.

“Drawing is a way of seeing what you’re thinking about,” the sculptor told me in 2003 when I asked what the medium meant to him.3 He obviously took the discipline seriously, as both a catalyst for sculpture and an independent endeavor with unique challenges and subject matter. On another occasion I asked him, “If you had a drawing philosophy, what would it be?” His response, presented like a Zen koan, is classic Price. “My drawing philosophy,” he said, “would be to keep the process from being philosophical.”4 To spend any amount of time with Price was to realize, in fairly short order, that he really did not like to explain any aspect of his work, that he inherently distrusted academic exegesis, and that he preferred to leave the possible significance of what he did open to others’ interpretation. “I am not an expert on the significance of my work,” he admitted to a group gathered at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas. “My interpretation of it could be wrong.”5 The one thing he never questioned, though, was the intuitive pulse of his creative process: “Most of [the work] comes from intuition, imagination, and things I’ve discovered during the making process. The work is not meant to be rational, theoretical, philosophical, or morally instructive. It’s not social or political issues, and is not meant as a critique of former art. Its purpose is strictly for pleasure. Its meaning is open to personal interpretation. I don’t think you need any instruction about how to appreciate it.”6 “i always wanted to be an artist” Drawing was probably the first art-related thing the young Price did, even before he began to surf, play music, and make sculpture. “As far back as I can remember,” he told his Chinati audience, “I always wanted to be an artist. Even when I was a kid, I would make drawings and little books, and cartoons, and build forts, and all kinds of stuff.”7 Many of Price’s childhood drawings were saved by his father, who kept them in the garage of their Pacific Palisades home, along 3 4 5 6 7

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Author’s questions to Ken Price, January, 2003.

Author’s questions to Ken Price, February, 2010.

“Ken Price: A Talk with Slides,” Chinati Foundation Newsletter, v. 10 (October 2005), 23.

Email to the author, August 7, 2003.

“Ken Price: A Talk with Slides,” 22–23.

with some of his own creative projects and inventions. But when the elder Price died unexpectedly in 1962, while the artist was touring Japan, everything in the garage, including all of his juvenilia, was cleared out and disposed of.

Still, certain images remained with the artist as vivid memories: “a little house up a path with two yellow windows and a red door in front of a cloudy sky,” and “a scene of warfare depicting airplanes bombing and strafing.”8 Other youthful recollections persisted, too.

Price used to laugh about being busted on a fifth-grade trip to the library for drawing bubble dancers on a piece of paper hidden inside a large book, and about how his parents had to bail him out by convincing the principal that they had given him books with nudes so that he could learn to draw the figure.9 A story like this warms the heart. It also portends the future; cartoons, little books, and bubble dancers signal the beginning of a lifelong interest in narrative images, humorous lines, and unabashedly erotic subject matter.

Price was eighteen in 1953, when he took his first ceramics course at Santa Monica City College. As he recalled it, he wanted to learn how to put his little drawings on ceramic pots to emulate the objects he saw reproduced in Arts & Architecture magazine.10 Apparently, the prospect of decorating pots appealed to the beach-bound teenager, whose grades suffered in high school because he spent more time surfing than studying. Drawing and ceramics became symbiotic activities in a cobbled-together curriculum. Between 1953 and 1957, he took ceramics courses at SMCC, Los Angeles City College, and Otis Art Institute, where he studied with Peter Voulkos. At the same time he took drawing courses (life drawing, watercolor, cartooning, and animation) at the University of Southern California, Chouinard Art Institute, and Otis.

The life drawing class taught by Herb Jepson at Otis was memorable.11 8 9

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Author’s questions to Ken Price, February 2010.

Author’s questions to Ken Price, February 2010; see also Oral history interview with Kenneth Price, 1980 May 30 - June 2 [Transcript], Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution: 94.

Author’s questions to Ken Price, January 2003.

Author’s questions to Ken Price, February 2010. Jepson later established the Jepson Art Institute and enlisted the master draughtsman Rico Lebrun, first as faculty and then as director; see Peter Plagens, Sunshine Muse: Art on the West Coast 1945–1970 (New York: Praeger, 1974), 62.

“That was essentially a course in learning how to see,” Price told Hunter Drohojowska-Philp.12 Jepson had his students prepare heavy-stock oatmeal paper with gesso, which produced a textured surface. He then had them draw spontaneously, with black ink and a quill pen, while looking only at the model. The main objective was to hone one’s execution by endowing every line with supple character. Price adopted this technique for drawing on ceramics as well as paper. “I wasn’t a real snappy life drawer,” he later admitted.13 But his aptitude for drawing was obviously recognized early on, because at Otis he was granted a scholarship for figure drawing (later rescinded); his lifelong friend Robert Irwin asked him, on one occasion, to teach his drawing course at Chouinard; and, in 1956, a few of his drawings were folded into a group show at the 6 Gallery in San Francisco.14 By the time he graduated from Alfred, with hard-earned technical proficiency, the diffident potter had a clear sense of what he wanted to do, which lessons were worth keeping, and which lessons were better off discarded. Alfred had offered him a year of grace, a secluded place where he could think without distractions, test out ideas far from his West Coast peers, and prepare, mentally and artistically, for whatever came next. While drawing wasn’t Price’s primary focus at the school, he thought about it through kindred practitioners like the Japanese ceramicist Kitaoji Rosanjin. Price singled out Rosanjin, a controversial figure in the mid-century ceramics world, as a primary influence in the swan-song lecture he gave at the end of the semester. It turns out that Rosanjin had a special connection with Alfred, having visited the campus in 1954, the same year an exhibition of his work opened in New York at The Museum of Modern Art. Price praised Rosanjin for his maverick personality and for pushing the envelope of what was considered acceptable technique.

He also quoted Rosanjin about the relevance of drawing: “What I should like to tell you next is that it is necessary for a potter first to approach pottery through drawing. Then he must make pottery with 12

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Hunter Drohojowska-Philp, “A Life in Clay,” artnet Magazine (October 22, 2008).

Available at http://www.artnet.com/magazineus/features/drohojowska-philp/ drohojowska-philp10-22-08.asp.

Oral history interview with Kenneth Price, 1980 May 30 - June 2 [Transcript], Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution: 9.

Ibid., 88. Billy Al Bengston and Price traveled together to San Francisco in 1955–56.

clay. Thus, we can judge how good a potter he is if we have a look at his drawings of pottery.”15 Other shared beliefs united Price’s personal influences—Voulkos, John Mason, Joan Miró, and Artigas; an emphasis on “the process of working”; an acceptance of “unknown elements”; and the use of “technique as a means to express feelings, rather than as an end in itself.”16 Perhaps it was inevitable that the would-be sculptor gravitated to asymmetry as a creative principle and made it the subject of his graduate project report. “I chose asymmetry,”he wrote, “as I feel it allows for a freer exploration of form and the subtleties that result from various methods of forming. The possibility of including humor and other elements is also broader without the restriction of symmetry.”17 Price’s awareness of asymmetry, no doubt sparked during his ten-month stint with Voulkos at Otis, evolved as an alternative mindset, fueled by improvisational impulses and the willingness to make mistakes, an experimental approach surely at odds with the wheel-centric mentality proselytized at Alfred. a maker of cups Drawing, akin to dreaming on paper, is a way to germinate ideas without having to worry about how they might actually get made.

When Price drew, not much was riding on the process or the result.

He could afford to take chances while drawing; if an image did not succeed, the sheet ended up in the trash. Drawing was a way for him to have some fun, to relax and stretch out, and, at times, to fantasize.

It was not, though, something he could put aside and then easily resume. The process required a different set of skills than modeling clay, and it sometimes took a few days for him to regain the hand-eye coordination necessary to make what he considered “decent marks.”

Over the years, he drew in multiple formats: consistently on small sheets, but also in portable spiral-bound sketchbooks that traveled 15

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Kenneth Price, “Graduate Lecture,” May 1959, Transcript, Alfred University Archives: 5.

Ibid., 1.

Kenneth Price, “Investigation of Asymmetrical Form,” Graduate Project Report, 1959, Transcript, Alfred University Archives: 1.

with him. Some of his earliest drawings—of cups, specimens, eggs, mounds, and bumps—are rendered with pencils, crayons, colored pencils, and, on occasion, pastel, oil pastel, gouache, and collage. In many of these, acrylic is also deployed, with brushes, in ways that emulate watercolor. Beginning in the early 1960s, acrylic became an essential part of Price’s graphic arsenal, and he also used it to enliven the surfaces of his little sculptures. The quality of his paper varies considerably, particularly during lean times, when he drew on whatever sheets were available. Some of the studies from the 1960s are executed on fugitive pages of office-supply ledger and typing paper [Figs. 2, 3]. That said, archival paper was always preferred, and he stocked up on it whenever he could afford to.

One of the first objects he tackled in clay, the cup, was also one of the first subjects that Price thoroughly explored through drawing. Literally hundreds of ceramic cups issued from his hands, along with an impressive number of drawings. An aspiring artist working with clay could cut his teeth on cups without feeling intimidated by the medium or compelled to make grand statements with it. The cup flies in the face of fine art, defying pretensions at the same time it provides the catalyst for something noteworthy. The cup is the ceramic equivalent to the jazz standard, a “pre-ordained structure” (the artist’s phrase) that he pursued until the form lost its functional allure and biomorphic abstraction became his primary subject. The cup was a protean starting point for formal investigations and flights of imagination that naturally led to other series.

Price gravitated instinctually to the cup because, he said, “it was intimate, private, unimportant, and a way of working on my own…I don’t think working with cups was a planned approach…

It was more about how it felt to make them.”18 In the testosteronefueled Voulkos studio, being a maker of cups probably seemed like a quaint notion, even though others in the studio (Billy Al Bengston and Ron Nagle) made them too. But Price stuck with the form. Its diminutive size seemed just right for what he wanted to do, and it challenged him in all the right ways. When he drew 18

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Ken Price, “Interview with Douglas Dreishpoon,” Ken Price: Early Cups and Related Works on Paper (New York: Franklin Parrasch Gallery, 2006), 7.

FIG . 2

Ken Price, Study for Mound, 1960

FIG . 3

Ken Price, Study for Egg, 1961–62

cups, he was able to do things he could not do in clay, and the results are remarkably subtle, full of whimsy and implied movement. Some drawings, like Frog Cups, Acrobatic Frog Cups, and Broken Nose Cups [plS. 7, 11, 13], depict variations of the same idea.

Floating Turtle Cup [pl. 10] is also a small, colored-pencil drawing on a magazine reproduction. Pyramid Back Turtle Cup [pl. 8] is a preliminary take on the floating sandbox sculpture Blind Sea Turtle Cup (1968). And Coral Cup [pl. 16], a complicated and convoluted image, has no obvious ceramic equivalent. Sometimes a drawing, such as Slate Cup [pl. 25], came after the object; other times, the drawing preceded it.

The drawings celebrate the poetry of small things. “The two most powerful sizes,” Price wrote, “are very small and very large. Small scale has both the connection of intimacy, and the fantasy of heroic proportions, since pieces slightly under hand-size are so easy to visualize as being monumental.”19 This is certainly true of some of the “Geometric Cups” from the 1970s, whose designs emulate architecture [pl. 24]. Price’s friend, the architect Frank Gehry, recognized the dimensional warp of the artist’s ceramic work early on, and, more recently, Gehry made digital scans of one of the interiors of Price’s biomorphic sculptures, which ended up looking like some strange hybrid dwelling, primordial and futuristic.20 The critic Peter Schjeldahl also saw beyond the cup’s literal dimensions. “When I inventory the casual ecstasy I feel in the presence of Prices,” he writes, “ceramic dynamics figure only indirectly. A more immediate element is architecture: Formal relations, tiny in the actual work, turn vast in my mind’s eye. Or nature, which may be defined as architecture squared with chaos.”21 Schjeldahl was also one of the first critics to observe, “A vessel has an inside and an outside. From that fact, among others, Price has made poetry.”22 In Price’s hands, the cup became an unlikely carrier of meaning. If there is a Modernist conceit to the work, it 19 20

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Ibid.

Frank Gehry met others in the Ferus group through his friend Ed Moses; see Kristine McKenna, The Ferus Gallery: A Place to Begin (Göttingen: Steidl, 2009), 236.

Peter Schjeldahl, “Ken Price’s L.A. Edge,” Art Issues (Summer 1997), 18.

Peter Schjeldahl, “Ken Price: Career Survey,” The Village Voice (May 17, 1994).

resides in its “interiority”—the life force (élan vital) that emanates from inside some of the first eggs and mounds, and even from inside some of the later biomorphic pieces, where what you see is not necessarily what it is.23 “When I first saw your work [in the early 1960s],” Vija Celmins recalled during a conservation with her longtime friend, “I saw the inside and the outside. Even now there is a hole every now and then to let you peer into the darkness. Even when there is no in to peek into, one feels a space inside.”24 The cup’s bottom, its deepest pocket, isn’t always visible. When I asked Price if an inside/outside dichotomy created by mysterious voids suggesting metaphorical portals to other realms originated here, he responded, “Yes, that could be right. The void is mysterious and female. The cup has an open top but an internal space below that can be closed and hidden. So this could be the source of the mystery, but I hope it’s not that simple.”25 sexy abstraction “We thought it was just a big farce,” Edward Kienholz told Lawrence Weschler, concerning the circumstances surrounding Wallace Berman’s sudden arrest at the Ferus Gallery, just two weeks after his one-person show opened there in 1957. “The cops are so stupid that they couldn’t even find the pornography, if indeed it was pornography and that’s what they were looking for. And damned if [Berman] didn’t get sentenced. . . . It was just a big gigantic fiasco. So Wally went to San Francisco and vowed that he would not come back and live in the city of fallen angels. Which he didn’t for maybe ten years.”26 Well before pornography hit the streets of Hollywood and the back rooms of ranch houses in the San Fernando Valley, Berman was apprehended by the L.A. Vice Squad for a prescient installa-

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Still one of the best discussions of Vitalism in early twentieth-century sculpture is the second chapter of Jack Burnham, Beyond Modern Sculpture (New York: George Braziller, 1968).

“Ken Price in Conversation with Vija Celmins,” Ken Price (Göttingen: Steidl, 2007), 13.

Ken Price, “Interview with Douglas Dreishpoon,” 10.

Lawrence Weschler, “Interview with Edward Kienholz,” August 12, 1976, Transcript, Oral History Program, University of California, Los Angeles, 1977, 148–49.

tion rife with religious and sexual iconography.27 To read Herbert Marcuse, who by the mid-1950s had his finger on the pulse of a cultural sea change, is to realize that any form of sexual liberation poses a threat to the prevailing sociopolitical order, and that, under such circumstances, free-thinking artists are greatly at risk.28 Perhaps the provocative combination of crosses and erotica got the ethereal Berman into trouble. Like oil and water, religion and sex do not mix, and the news of his run-in with the police, his subsequent trial, sentencing and flight, ripped through the L.A. art world like wildfire.

Berman’s traumatic encounter with the law was the first of several incidents—Connor Everts in 1964, Kienholz in 1966, and Price in 1969—in which artists were publicly harassed by police and politicians for creating purportedly obscene artwork.29 What probably began as a right-wing political tactic to target libertarian artists and anarchists during the McCarthy era persisted into the 1960s as a crusade to censor images with implicitly erotic subject matter. Any enlightened artist knows that erotic art is as old as the Hollywood Hills, an archetypal, pan-cultural expression that will rankle the status quo. So the choices were clear: one could opt, as Berman ultimately did, to bolt the scene, vowing never to exhibit again in an American gallery; one could avoid potential trouble altogether by Berman’s apprehension by the L.A. Vice Squad is recounted in Rebecca Solnit, “Ferus: The End of the Beginning,” in Secret Exhibition: Six California Artists of the Cold War Era (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1990), 18–23; and Kristine McKenna, The Ferus Gallery, 31. Berman’s $150 bail was paid by his good friend Dean Stockwell.

28 See Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955).

29 On June 20, 1964, the L.A. County District Attorney’s office brought charges of obscenity against Conner Everts for artwork he exhibited at the Zora Gallery on La Cienega Boulevard. The mostly black-and-white works on paper, executed in graphite and lithography and collectively titled “Studies in Desperation,” included an abstract image resembling a womb or vagina. The fallout was reported in the Los Angles Times.

Everts denied any prurient intentions and cited, as an influence, John F. Kennedy’s assassination and the collective sense of horror stemming from that event; see “Studies in Desperation,” Cardwell Jimmerson Contemporary Art, Interleaf, Fall 2007.

Kienholz’s survey exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in the spring of 1966 and the controversy that transpired around the copulating couple in his Back Seat Dodge ’38 is colorfully recounted by the artist; see Lawrence Weschler, “Interview with Kienholz,” August 14, 1976, 376–93. One of Price’s “Tijuana Bible” linocuts, confiscated by the L.A. Vice Squad from an erotic art exhibition mounted at the David Stuart Gallery in 1969, was eventually returned to the artist.

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Fig . 4

Arshile Gorky, The Liver is the Cock’s Comb, 1944

not making erotic art; one could pursue erotic art in private; or, one could develop clever ways to express erotic impulses abstractly.

You do not have to be a sensual Surrealist to appreciate how erotic abstract art can be. One of the sexiest paintings ever made, Arshile Gorky’s The Liver Is the Cock’s Comb (1944), is inherently abstract and chock-full of erotic innuendo, a biomorphic playground of lusty forms and pulsating colors [Fig. 4]. It may be no coincidence that, in the aftermath of Berman’s trial, Craig Kauffman and Ed Moses, fellow members of the Ferus stable, dreamed up some pretty sexy abstract paintings. Kauffman’s Tell Tale Heart and Moses’s Untitled-C, both from 1958, are delightfully erotic, conceived with lush trails of paint, breast-like curves, tumescent sacks, and vulva-like lines [Figs. 5, 6].

Gorky’s Armenian landsman, John Altoon, likewise a beloved member of the Ferus coterie and a prolific draughtsman, made animated works on paper that glorify Eros, more often than not with a sly sense of humor [Fig. 7]. “We loved women,” Moses said. “We’re all peepers. We all wanted to see things that are taboo and to make art out of it.”30 Price never shied away from drawing overtly erotic images or from making abstract sculpture with robust sensuality: “I think that my work is fairly erotic, all of it. But never intentionally, except in the erotic drawings.”31 Price’s erotica consists of hundreds of graphic images in various formats and media, including an extensive series of early linocuts, some bound as small pamphlets called “Tijuana Bibles.” Ironically, during the Summer of Love, an image from one of the Tijuana Bibles, then part of an erotic art exhibition at the David Stuart Gallery, was confiscated by the LAPD Vice Squad, along with other choice drawings by Picasso and Altoon.32 For many reasons, most of them personal, Price always preferred to keep his erotica under wraps.33 “I pretty much make [erotic drawings] Ed Moses in conversation with the author, April 25, 2010 (digital recording).

Price apparently kept trying to get a receipt from the authorities, who eventually returned the work to him. Oral history interview with Kenneth Price, 1980 May 30 – June 2 [Transcript], Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution: 23.

32 The exhibition at the David Stuart Gallery was aptly titled Erotic Art ’69. Author’s questions to Price, February 2010.

33 Price was adamant that the erotic drawings should be excluded from the present exhibition, so that, sometime in the future, they can be exhibited and published on their own.

30

31

29

FIG . 5

Craig Kauff man, Tell Tale Heart, 1958

FIG . 6

Ed Moses, Untitled-C, 1958

Fig . 7

John Altoon, ABS 114, 1964

for my own amusement,” he told Joan Simon in a 1980 Art in America interview, “In my erotic drawings, I’m trying to celebrate a part of life that I really enjoy. They’re private drawings and I don’t care whether or not they’re accepted. They represent a great freedom to me.”34 Eros seeps from representational drawings into more abstract “mounds” and “eggs,” where bud-like capsules occupy cavelike cavities and finger-like tentacles emerge from orifice-like cracks. Eros also graces the “Specimens,” with their budding and biomorphic bodies, voluptuous folds, and burrowed surfaces. Abstraction masks racy content; it infuses the work with joyful emotion, and, at times, an edgy demeanor. The many specimens that Price modeled in clay, and meticulously rendered on paper, embody a strange combination of characters, at once alluring and repulsive, intimate and expansive, rough and smooth, amorphic and geometric [plS. 3, 4, 5, 6]. They are an odd species indeed, something you might discover in the landscape or along some deserted highway, washed up on a sandy beach, or attached, like a barnacle, to the dark underside of an ocean pier. Many share the same metaphorical space as Alberto Giacometti’s Disagreeable Object (1931), an enigmatic sculpture carved from wood, whose spiky, phallic-like form resembles a tribal talisman [Fig. 8]. Like their Surrealist ancestors, whose ranks include Joan Miró’s terra-cotta personages and Jean Arp’s biomorphic concretions, Price’s “Specimens” exist in the rarified world of fetish [Fig. 9]. drawing for printmaking For three months during the fall and winter of 1968–69, Price collaborated with printmakers at the Tamarind Studios to produce a series of ten lithographs. The Tamarind Lithography Workshops, a teaching facility founded in Los Angeles in 1960, was the brainchild of June Wayne, who set out to revive the art of lithography through collaborative projects. By the time

34

33

Joan Simon, “An Interview with Ken Price,” Art in America (January 1980), 102–3.

Fig . 8

Alberto Giacometti, Disagreeable Object (Objet désagréable), 1931

FIG . 9

Ken Price, Woman Raising Skirt, 1965

Price began his fellowship, the Studios were on a roll.35 The art of printmaking appealed to Price because it gave drawing another context. At Tamarind, he transposed Frog Cup, Sea Turtle Cup, and Japanese Tree Frog Cup to plates and printed these in multiple colors against decorative backgrounds on various paper stocks. The final sheets obviously intrigued him, because shortly thereafter he began another print project with Tamarind’s chief competitor, Gemini GEL. A single cup was the subject of the “Figurine Cup” series published

by Gemini in March 1970. The suite was accompanied by a modest brochure with a cover image of Price examining a trial print while smoking a large cigar, a short essay by Barbara Rose, and a reproduction of each print. As it turns out, the “cup” was actually a six-hundred-pound sculpture as tall as a person. And the “figurine” was the filmmaker, choreographer, and dancer Toni Basil, Price’s friend, who had agreed to interact (unclothed) with the sculpture and to be photographed in the process.36 The photographs were then used to create six-color lithographs. Price’s cups had already coexisted with lizards, snails, frogs, and turtles, but the appearance of a nude dancer partnering with the cup as though it were a phallic shrine was something different, and it produced some pretty wild images [Fig. 10].

To design the suite, Price rotated the cup at different angles to vary the illusionistic space in each image. He also deployed a keyhole-like pictorial device to create the impression of looking through an aperture into another space behind the cup [pl. 15]. Notably, in one print, a six-color photo-offset process with one color hand-screened, the As the founding director of the Tamarind Lithography Workshop, June Wayne was zealous in her mission to promote the art of lithography, develop collaborations between master printers and artists, and stimulate new markets. By 1969, when William Lieberman organized Tamarind: Homage to Lithography at The Museum of Modern Art, the Workshop’s artist-fellow alumni included Josef Albers, John Altoon, Bruce Conner, Richard Diebenkorn, Sam Francis, Leon Golub, Alfred Jensen, Rico Lebrun, Ed Moses, John McLaughlin, Lee Mullican, Louise Nevelson, Ed Ruscha, Miriam Schapiro, and H. C. Westermann; see William S. Lieberman, Tamarind: Homage to Lithography (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1969), 13.

36 Oral history interview with Kenneth Price, 1980 May 30 - June 2 [Transcript], Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution: 93–94. Basil’s varied career is discussed by Michael Duncan in Duncan and Kristine McKenna, Semina Culture: Wallace Berman & His Circle (Santa Monica: Santa Monica Museum of Art, 2005), 80–81.

35

36

Fig . 10

Ken Price, Figurine Cup V, 1970

Fig . 11

Ken Price, Figurine Cup III, 1970

dancer and the cup appear at the end of a folding table in an interior setting with a blue sofa and leopard-skin rug [Fig. 11]. Such fantasy creations conceived in imaginary interiors—a novel idea—soon bore copious fruit.

Basil and the cup reappear in several works in Price’s “Interiors” series. Published by Gemini in 1971, the suite of six hand-printed color silk screens, made from hand-cut stencils and photo half-tone screens, register another level of sophistication. Lizard and turtle cups now occupy living room-like spaces, along with other objects such as side, folding, and coffee tables, sofas, spindle and Victorian high-back chairs, and a tall French dresser [Fig. 12]. When the furniture that displays the cups functions as simulated sculpture, one can imagine Price’s “Interiors” as the two-dimensional analog to Claes Oldenburg’s L.A.-inspired Bedroom Ensemble (1963), or as the conceptual catalyst for an even more ambitious installation of cups, bowls, plates, and vases—the potter’s response to Oldenburg’s selfmade “Store” or, on a more somber note, to one of Ed Kienholz’s haunting assemblages [Figs. 13, 14]. the curious curio store I got turned on [to ceramics from Tonalà and Oaxaca] and thought I would make a tribute to Mexican pottery in the form of a curio store. It was kind of a fantasy. It was supposed to be a small store with some billboards outside, and a storefront window, and inside would be this bombardment of images and color. I figured it would take me about a year, maybe two, to make it. It took about six years, and ultimately I really couldn’t pull it off because I hadn’t really thought it all the way through.37

Price arrived in Taos, New Mexico, in 1971, with a head full of ideas and a lot of time on his hands. Happy’s Curios, named for the artist’s wife, may turn out to be one of the most quixotic enterprises in the history of postwar American art, on par with Jay DeFeo’s The Rose and James Turrell’s Roden Crater—obsessive projects without end. Mexican pottery had been on his aesthetic radar since the 1950s when, during his many south-of-the-border surfing trips, he frequented curio stores in Tijuana. And the interest was rekindled 37

39

“Ken Price: Talk with Slides,” Chinati Foundation Newsletter, 28.

Fig . 12

Ken Price, Lizard Cup, 1971

Fig . 13

Claes Oldenburg, Bedroom Ensemble, 1963

Fig . 14

Edward Kienholz, Roxys, 1961–62

in New Mexico when he discovered the Sleeping Boy Curio Store.38 The pottery produced by Mexican artisans, sometimes whole families working together in modest conditions with makeshift tools, inspired the transplanted Angeleno to manufacture his own.39 Still one asks, what drove Price to pack his studio full of drawings, weavings, posters, billboards, and hundreds of decorated plates, bowls, cups, and vases [Fig. 15]? Was it the challenge to think big? Was it a subconscious response to the expansive terrain of Taos?

For hundreds of years, Taos has been an unlikely outpost for independent souls who, for one reason or another, ended up in this staggeringly gorgeous and yet unforgiving place nestled among the Sangre de Cristo Mountains and bordered to the west by the Rio Grande Gorge. If Taos isn’t for everyone, Dave Hickey has it right when he writes, Taos is one of the most beautiful and chastening places in the world. It has an encouraging history of harboring fugitives, killing priests, and assassinating governors. In the twentieth century, it probably produced more serious art and literature than any other non-metropolitan area in the United States, and, throughout this century, Taos’s virtues have remained more amenable to producers of art than to its consumers. It has resisted gentrification because, for all its beauty, Taos is not a cozy place. There is not much that architecture or landscaping can do to mitigate the daunting hegemony of the sky, the sweep of the flat, the looming scale of the distant mountains, and the perpetual inference of Lawrence’s ghosts. Day in and day out, year-round, Taos is hardly even a human place.40

The Taos that Price landed in turned out to be the perfect place to tackle a project of Sisyphean dimensions. His friend Dennis Hopper, the main reason he had visited New Mexico in the first place, was already ensconced at the Mabel Dodge Luhan House, where he had recently completed post-production on The Last Movie.41 Hopper 38

39 40

41

43

Price in a videotaped interview with Douglas Dreishpoon at the artist’s home and studio in Arroyo Hondo, New Mexico, August 24, 2005, Transcript: 3. Courtesy Mandelman-Ribak Foundation.

Ken Price, “Ken Price: Personal Influences,” Ceramics Monthly (September 1994): 31.

Dave Hickey, “Ghosts,” in Hopper at the Harwood, L.A. to Taos: 40 Years of Friendship (Taos, N.M.: The Harwood Museum of Art, 2009), 4.

The Price family explored other places to live—Hawaii, Northern California, and Oregon—before they eventually settled in Taos; see De Angelus, “Interview with Price,” May 30, 1980: 57–58.

Fig . 15

Gus Foster, Ken Price studio, Taos, 1977

had discovered Taos four years earlier, in 1967, while scouting locations for Easy Rider, and after the movie’s release, he returned there to live and work. The scene at the Luhan House, played out as a poignant sequence in The Last Movie, could be described as a threering countercultural circus, as an ongoing entourage of notable and not-so-notable characters descended on the infamous Mud Palace.42 Hopper’s relationship with Taos and local Taoseños during the 1970s was complicated, at times contentious and violent, exacerbated by an escalating paranoia fueled by drugs and libations. Still, in spite of the sometimes frenetic circumstances, the scene thrived on creative energy, particularly amongst the tiny tribe of Los Angeles artists that followed the renegade actor to this frontier town.43 The Price family was always welcome at the Hopper compound, and in 1973, the actor let the sculptor use its gatehouse as a studio and a kiln that had been built by Southern Methodist University art students. If at times the Prices joined the party, most of the time they preferred the peace and quiet of their own home and the various studios they later occupied.44 Price’s Taos years were manically productive, as he labored to bring the Curio Store to fruition.

The Store brought Price back to pottery as a dream proposition that gradually took on nightmarish proportions. From the start, the Store was envisioned as a unified entity, with multiple elements displayed in custom-made cabinets and shrines. As one unit neared completion, another was begun, and as the project grew, so did the number of practical details. The installation’s individual parts were never intended to be broken up, but eventually that is what happened when it was finally exhibited at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). Each section posed a different set of stylistic challenges.

For a detailed account of Hopper’s sojourn in Taos and his creative and countercultural activities at the Mud Palace, see Lois Palken Rudnick, “Hopper Comes to Taos,” Utopian Vistas: The Mabel Dodge Luhan House and the American Counterculture (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996), 236–84.

43 Hopper’s move to Taos shortly after the release of Easy Rider inspired others—Price, Larry Bell, and Ron Cooper—to move there from Los Angeles during the 1970s.

44 The Prices first lived in Cañon, at the house that Fred Thayer built. They subsequently occupied a studio north of El Prado, before moving, again, to Cruz Alta, and, eventually, buying a house, together with Jim Meeker, in Talpa; see Ken Price videotaped interview with Douglas Dreishpoon, August 24, 2005: 5.

42

45

Fig . 16

Ken Price photographed by Happy Price, Taos, 1974

Fig . 17

Gus Foster, Ken Price studio, Taos, 1977

In some of the “Tile” units, the surface treatment is completely abstract, all geometric patterns, dense dot matrices, and expressionistic bleeds. Other units, particularly the “Town Units,” are populated by tall, sombrero-wearing figures gliding through sky-blue waters in lean flotillas and relaxing amidst architectural settings and hilly landscapes with small houses and cacti.

Drawing was the prime mover for most of the Store’s imagistic content. (A photograph taken by Happy Price in 1974 shows the artist drawing on the surface of one of the many vases destined for the Store [Fig. 16].) Whether for a weaving, poster, cup, bowl, or plate, most ideas were first worked up on paper so that each design could be transferred with some degree of accuracy to its respective object.

The photographer Gus Foster documented Price’s studio during this time, and, in several shots, drawings appear tacked to the studio’s walls, as framed elements in a shrine, and as individual sheets in notebooks [Figs. 17, 18]. On the one hand, Price drew as a kind of dress rehearsal, to figure out how to decorate certain pots and what the patterns, bands, and scenes on these might look like. As working drawings, these sheets are dense with variations and technical information about sizes, shapes, and colors [plS. 30, 31]. On the other hand, with designs for posters and weavings, the sketch becomes an exquisite painting on paper, demonstrating Price’s command of color and his inherent ability to think, at that time, like an Alber’s inspired painter [pl. 23]. The ability to work in a state of relaxed concentration was essential, as Price had learned from Mexican artisans, whose “minds,” he wrote, “were riding on the tips of their brushes.”45 The “Town Units” resemble Mexican border towns, and some scenes are inhabited by a figure or two. Most of the sheets for this section are sketched out in graphite and then worked up with acrylic and acrylic washes [plS. 26, 27]. These are quirky and humorous works, with intentionally disorienting perspectives, dark portals suggesting doorways, and rows of vertical stripes signifying the protective fences that eventually enclose the sculptural ensemble. You can tell that Price had fun making them, the most narrative images of the lot.

And if a particular scene ended up being, in the artist’s words, too 45

48

Price, “Personal Influences,” 32.

FiG . 18

Gus Foster, Ken Price studio, Taos, 1977

Fig . 19

Ken Price, Installation drawing for Happy’s Curios at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1978

“cute” or too “decorative,” he simply threw it out or gave it a “nasty edge” by inserting an erotic couple.

Happy’s Curios was initially conceived with an erotic component, but when the Store was finally exhibited at LACMA in 1978, that entire section was eliminated. A selection of working drawings, however, was not [Fig. 19]. The Curio Store was intended as a cacophonous whirlwind of images and color, but to accommodate its contents in a white-cube setting required partitions and walls that effectively isolated each of the units, as well as the drawings installed on a wall in proximity to a rug and other related units.

Death Shrine 3 occupied its own room toward the back of the exhibition. The “Death Shrines” were some of the last works completed for the Store. One color sketch from 1975 introduces Day of the Dead skulls, Shinto-like ribbon, and the many plates, vessels, tequila cups, and candles that both humor and celebrate the end of one’s earthly existence [pl. 29]. Another photograph of Price (long-haired, bearded, and holding a string of painted ceramic skulls), taken by his wife a year later, is unsettling [Fig. 20]. When death entered the Store, it was time to pack it up and call it quits. smokes and heat At the same time that Price was mass-producing pottery with a purpose, he was also deconstructing the cup, violating the vessel by fragmenting its form in severe ways. These are some of the most eccentric cups he ever made, and the related drawings likewise suggest an extremely destabilized condition [pl. 25]. Stranger things happen in some of the acrylic and pastel drawings from the late 1970s and early 1980s, when UFOs appear in the sky and a house on the hill morphs as though seen through a fish-eye lens.

Ojo Sarco feels like Giorgio de Chirico on acid, or a William Blake watercolor minus the winged angels [pl. 34]. Concurrent with these eye-searing scenes, Price began to envision another kind of sculpture: geometric configurations with figurative and architectural inflections, punctured by a single portal recalling the doorways of the “Town Units,” and glazed with primary colors. A watercolor on sketchbook paper from 1980, of red and blue forms piggy-backed,

51

Fig . 20

Ken Price photographed by Happy Price, Taos, 1976

Fig . 21

Ken Price, Untitled, 1980

signals the transition from decentered cups to monolithic objects with pristine white edges [Fig. 21].

By 1982 as his family settled in New Bedford, Massachusetts, Price was in need of some rest. In spite of everything he had accomplished during the previous ten years, the Curio Store had taken its toll. He was burned out, physically exhausted and financially depleted. The family had visited this coastal town earlier, and after staying one summer at a friend’s house on the water, they decided to move there.

For the next seven years, Price occupied a studio in a nearby fishing village. From New Bedford he was able to connect with friends and business contacts in New York, an easy train ride from Boston. It was around this time, just before the family relocated, that John Martin, then owner and publisher of Arabesque Books, contacted Price to see if he would be interested in collaborating with the poet Harvey Mudd.

Poets had always been part of Price’s extended circle of friends, and now the prospect of illustrating a poet’s text probably appealed to him, even though in the end the main impetus for taking on Mudd’s The Plain of Smokes (1981) and Heat Wave (1995), a portfolio of silkscreens with poems by Charles Bukowski, was monetary.46 One of the more intriguing things about the drawings Price made for The Plain of Smokes and Heat Wave is the way he navigates between the inside and the outside, between an interior domestic setting and an exterior cityscape. The interiors that complement both texts expand on what Price had done earlier at Gemini. Interior spaces, such as a living room, kitchen, or bedroom, are intimate realms, minimal sets with only a few objects. Exterior spaces tend to be public crossroads, animated and action-filled: cars gliding on the freeway, city streets ablaze with billboards and neon signs [plS. 38, 39, 41]. What transpires on the inside can be more personal, and potentially existential, like scenes of sex and death [pl. 32]. The metaphorical distance

46

54

John Martin initiated and promoted both collaborations. The first edition of The Plain of Smokes was published in April 1981 in Santa Barbara by Arabesque Books. The first edition of Heat Wave was published in June 1995 in Santa Rosa by Black Sparrow Graphic Arts. Charles Bukowski had already died, and the poems selected by Martin and Price for Heat Wave had never been published; see author’s questions to Price, February 2010.

between what is inside and what is outside is extreme in some of the works on paper, at times as vast as an ocean.

The sense of expectation that emanates from abstract sculptures conceived with cracks, cuts, crevices, and black holes carries over to the works on paper, where light-filled interiors harbor an array of objects.

A simple wooden box constructed to house a mound or a cup effectively encloses and isolates the form. Similarly, a drawn interior functions like a stage set for sculptural objects, and for figures that sometimes perform in them.47 In one interior from 1990, a seductive, rainbow-colored hulk, posed in a dramatically lit room, beckons to the viewer [pl. 35]. In other apartment-like settings, decorated bowls and cups stake out the foreground, floor, or a tabletop, while in the background, outside tall picture windows, the city looms [plS. 36, 37].

By this time, a Price interior had the coordinated color scheme and cool décor of a stylish L.A. apartment, with airbrushed exteriors darkened to simulate smog-laden skies. into the great wide open When the surfaces of Price’s sculptures, primed with more than fourteen layers of acrylic paint, no longer required decorative scenes, his drawings took off in other directions. Prolific stints of drawing are not uncommon from the 1990s on, stimulated, in part, by increased opportunities to exhibit the works on their own. It is around this time, too, that the drawings begin to incorporate aspects of the natural environment: volcanoes, oceans, mountains, and gorges. The change takes place gradually, and by 1993, in a series of circular images depicting industrial sites with black and blue waters flooding the foreground, nature asserts itself as a palpable presence [pl. 40].

Price’s rekindled interest in natural phenomena coincides with his

47

55

The “Interiors” began as exteriors, in 1989, after Price moved from New Bedford back to Los Angeles, where he shared a studio building with Billy Al Bengston at 110 Milford Street in Venice. From the second-story window, at the kitchen table, he drew the views outside. Having been away from the city for so long, the buildings and neighborhood looked different to him, and his reaction, as recorded in these first works, was one of familiarity and change. The L.A. interiors from 1994 were actually executed in Taos, in a small studio above the Harwood Museum of Art; see author’s questions to Price, February 2010.

spending more time in Taos and, in 2002, constructing a new house and studio on a mesa surrounded by mountains about ten miles outside of town. By this time, the former surfer was dreaming aqueous liquids, such as water and molten lava, into some of the most surreal configurations imaginable. “Glass off,” surfer’s lingo for a calm ocean, is also the title of a work on paper from 2000, whose moody sky, distant horizon, and shimmering surface signal the transition from cozy interiors to expansive seas and barren landscapes—fantastic terrains where abstraction breeds in unexpected ways [Fig. 22].

“One of the main visual attractions of living in the Taos area,” Price told Celmins, “is the spectacular sky shows that occur seasonally and sometimes on a daily basis. For whatever reason the sky here is connected to the land; it’s not like anything I’ve seen anywhere else.

The sunsets aren’t pretty and sweet, they are spectacular and amazing.”48 Dramatic skies appear in many works on paper after 2000.

By diluting acrylic to the consistency of watercolor and brushing the medium onto paper, Price bled light-filled heavens into being.

Because the drying process is impossible to control, a successful sky is a combination of serendipity and skill. Out of necessity, most images begin with the sky, before graphite is used to sketch in other sections, which are then finished with black ink and acrylic. Acrylic and ink have a distinct advantage over watercolor: once dry, both are stable enough to be painted and drawn over. Images drawn on top of a sky can be filled in with thin veils of acrylic applied directly to the paper.

In many drawings from 2000 to 2010, primary passages are laid over turbulent skies, most notably in an extended series of erupting volcanoes begun in 2002. The volcano evolved naturally out of Price’s fertile imagination, no doubt primed by the mountains and volcanoes he saw in Mexican folk art, and by his later trips to Hawaii with his family. A jet-black formation with a peaked top, the volcano signifies a formidable force of nature, dramatized by blood-red lava that spews from its dark interior and flows into rivers and pools.

The “Volcano” series epitomizes the figure–ground relationship that distinguishes so many of Price’s later works, where lightning-struck 48

56

“Ken Price in Conversation with Vija Celmins,” Ken Price, 9.

Fig . 22

Ken Price, Glass Off, 2000

FIG . 23

Ken Price, Untitled, 1978

bodies of water, lava lakes, and even desert floors become the seedbeds for amorphic puzzles whose sculptural inflections are hard to miss. An early indication of this development can be seen in a drawing from 1978 that shows an ample-breasted, white-haired girl surrounded by stylized swirls of blue water [Fig. 23]. Figure–ground techniques reentered Price’s graphic repertoire as he was reexploring biomorphic abstraction, and the muscle memory of modeling clay into bulbous concretions naturally seeped into his drawing process, where it took on a life of its own.

Some of the volcano drawings appear whimsical, particularly when a miniature volcanologist gestates at the edge of a bubbling lava pool, or when images bear titles like “Little Eruption” and “Deep Heat.” [pl. 50]. But other scenes—the cavernous interior of a hermit’s cave, a bus veering off a treacherous mountain road, a bottomless black pit, solitary dwellings dwarfed by daunting landscapes and monstrous trees—have more ominous undertones [plS. 44, 61, 62, 64, 65]. When Price described the later drawings as having a “cartoon style,” he was referring to the way that forms are exaggerated and colors are keyed up for dramatic and sometimes comic effect. His notion of cartoon style, informed by an earlier interest in comic-book narratives and by his sculptural consciousness, explains why certain features in an image appear to be inflated with helium. But even cartoons can be serious business, and the levity of a Price drawing is sometimes dampened by darker impulses that linger beneath its surface. “It seems like art comes from pleasure and pain,” he told Celmins. “It might be that pain led someone to become an artist in the first place.

Or they might have had painful experiences that are sublimated or expressed in their work. We all have some anxiety and anguish, but regardless of that, I think we still approach art through pleasure.”49 Pleasure may appear layered into the iridescent skin of Price’s biomorphic sculptures, but with the drawings, where narrative is rarely explicit, pleasure is only one of many conditions. The works on paper represent confounding worlds, even more so when shadowed by humor. “Humor tends to make the meaning of whatever it’s attached to ambiguous,” Price said in 2003 when he was at the top 49

59

Ibid., 11.

of his game.50 As sly as it is subjective, humor intervenes to temper adversity and grim circumstances. Before he died on February 24, 2012, at the venerable age of 77, having been through medical hell and four years of compromised mobility, Price could afford to humor that which remained unknown, knowing full well that even humor was no panacea when it comes to growing old and feeling mortal. Humor may have been a convenient way to deflect troublesome quandaries, but then again, I can still hear him say, “I hope it’s not that simple.”

50

60

Author’s questions to Price, January 2003.

Plates

63

PL. 1

K.P.’s Journey to the East, 1962

PL. 2

S.F. Specimen, 1964

PL. 3

Specimen, 1964

PL. 4

Specimen, 1964

PL. 5

3 Objects, 1965

PL. 6

Object with Notes, 1966

PL. 7

Frog Cups, 1967

PL. 8

Pyramid Back Turtle Cup, 1967

PL. 9

Reflecting Bump, 1967

PL. 10

Floating Turtle Cup, 1968

PL. 11

Acrobatic Frog Cups, 1968

PL. 12

Specimen on Pillow Base, 1968

PL. 13

Broken Nose Cups, 1969

PL. 14

Sea Turtle Cup, 1969

PL. 15

Study for Chinese Figurine Cup, 1969

PL. 16

Coral Cup, 1970

PL. 17

Gila Monster, 1970

PL. 18

Object on Base, 1971

PL. 19

Chinese Rock Cup, 1971

PL. 20

Study for Billboard, 1972

PL. 21

Mexican Arts (Design for Rug), 1973

PL. 22

Mexican Arts, 1973

PL. 23

Happy’s Curios, 1973

PL. 24

Semi-Geometric Cup, 1974

PL. 25

Slate Cup, 1974

PL. 26

Study for Round Plate, 1974

PL. 27

Study for Oval Plate, 1974

PL. 28

Happy’s Curios/Taos, 1975

PL. 29

Study for Death Shrine, 1975

PL. 30

Study for Vases, 1975

PL. 31

Study for Vases with Cup Lids, 1975

PL. 32

The Dead Boy in Bathtub (Study for The Plain of Smokes, 1981), 1979

PL. 33

Detective’s Room (Study for The Plain of Smokes, 1981), 1979

PL. 34

Ojo Sarco, 1981

PL. 35

Untitled (purple interior with sculpture), 1990

PL. 36

L.A. Bowl Downtown, 1991

PL. 37

Installation Piece, 1991

PL. 38

Untitled, 1992

PL. 39

Untitled, 1992

PL. 40

Dangerously Clean Water, 1993

PL. 41

W. L.A. with Billboards, 1994

PL. 42

LA Riot (Car on T.V.), 1994

PL. 43

Talisman to Avert Crashing, 1997

PL. 44

Talisman to Avert Falling, 1997

PL. 45

Iniki 2, 1998

PL. 46

Taos Talking Picture, 2000

PL. 47

Small is Beautiful, 2002

PL. 48

Wild About Sculpture, 2003

PL. 49

Narrow Passage, 2004

PL. 50

Deep Heat, 2004

PL. 51

Liquid Rock, 2004

PL. 52

Hawaiian Lava Lake, 2004

PL. 53

The Pacific Ocean, 2004

PL. 54

Storm Light, 2004

PL. 55

Craters, 2004

PL. 56

Call of the Desert, 2005

PL. 57

Desert Architecture, 2005

PL. 58

Last Days of the Primitive Hut, 2006

PL. 59

Two Hermits, 2006

PL. 60

Living in Mud, 2007

PL. 61

The Hermit’s Cave, 2008

PL. 62

The Bottomless Pit, 2008

PL. 63

Large Sculpture With Rocks, 2009

PL. 64

Cabin of Dreams, 2009

PL. 65

The Place, 2010

LIST OF WORKS

PL. 5

3 Objects, 1965 PL. 1

Graphite on paper

K.P.’s Journey to the East, 1962

10 7/8 x 8 1/2 inches (28 x 21.6 cm)

Ink on paper

Estate of Ken Price, Courtesy Matthew Marks

123 x 9 inches (312 x 23 cm)

Gallery

Estate of Ken Price, Courtesy Matthew Marks

Photo by Ron Amstutz

Gallery Photo by Ron Amstutz

PL. 6

Object with Notes, 1966 PL. 2

Acrylic, colored pencil, and graphite on paper

S.F. Specimen, 1964

10 1/2 x 13 3/4 inches (26.7 x 34.9 cm)

Graphite and colored pencil on paper

Private Collection

10 7/8 x 8 1/2 inches (28 x 21.6 cm)

Photo by Tom Loonan

Estate of Ken Price, Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery

PL. 7

Photo by Ron Amstutz

Frog Cups, 1967 Acrylic, graphite, and colored pencil on paper

PL. 3

mounted on board

Specimen, 1964

14 x 10 3/4 inches (36 x 28 cm)

Graphite and colored pencil with adhesive

Estate of Ken Price, Courtesy Matthew Marks

tape on cream wove paper tipped to two-ply

Gallery

mat board

Photo by Ron Amstutz

7 1/2 x 9 1/4 inches (19.1 x 23.5 cm) Courtesy Art Institute of Chicago, Margaret

PL. 8

Fisher Endowment 2007.14

Pyramid Back Turtle Cup, 1967

Photo by Bill Orcutt

Ink and acrylic on paper 7 1/2 x 8 inches (19.1 x 20.3 cm)

PL. 4

Estate of Ken Price, Courtesy Matthew Marks

Specimen, 1964

Gallery

Gouache, colored pencil, and graphite on

Photo by Ron Amstutz

paper 10 1/2 by 8 1/2 inches (26.7 x 21.6 cm)

PL. 9

Estate of Ken Price, Courtesy Matthew Marks

Reflecting Bump, 1967

Gallery

Acrylic, ink, and colored pencil on paper

Photo by Ron Amstutz

14 3/4 x 13 1/2 inches (37.5 x 34.3 cm) Private Collection, Courtesy Franklin Parrasch Gallery, New York Photo by Katharine Overgaard

150

PL. 10

PL. 15

Floating Turtle Cup, 1968

Chinese Figurine Cup, 1969

Colored pencil and collage on board

Acrylic and graphite on lithograph proof

14 x 11 inches (35.6 x 27.9 cm)

22 x 18 inches (55.9 x 45.7 cm)

Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery

Collection of Jackson Price

Photo by Bill Orcutt

Photo by Ron Amstutz

PL. 11

PL. 16

Acrobatic Frog Cups, 1968

Coral Cup, 1970

Colored pencil on paper

Acrylic and graphite on paper

14 x 14 1/2 inches (35.6 x 36.8 cm)

14 x 11 inches (35.6 x 27.9 cm)

Estate of Ken Price, Courtesy Matthew Marks

Collection of Jackson Price

Gallery

Photo by Ron Amstutz

Photo by Ron Amstutz PL. 17 PL. 12

Gila Monster, 1970

Specimen on Pillow Base, 1968

Gouache on paper

Colored pencil and craypas on paper

7 x 7 1/4 inches (17.8 x 18.4 cm)

15 3/4 x 18 3/4 inches (40 x 47.6 cm)

Collection of Phyllis and John Kleinberg

Courtesy James Corcoran Gallery,

Photo courtesy Scott White Contemporary

Los Angeles

Art

Photo by Susan Einstein PL. 18 PL. 13

Object on Base, 1971

Broken Nose Cups, 1969

Acrylic and colored pencil on board

Graphite on two sheets of white and cream

22 x 18 inches (56 x 46 cm)

wove papers laid down on mat board

Estate of Ken Price, Courtesy Matthew Marks

14 x 11 inches (35.6 x 27.9 cm)

Gallery

Courtesy Art Institute of Chicago,

Photo by Ron Amstutz

Margaret Fisher Endowment 2007.16 Photo by Bill Orcutt

PL. 19

Chinese Rock Cup, 1971 PL. 14

Gouache, colored pencil and graphite on board

Sea Turtle Cup, 1969

20 x 30 inches (51 x 76 cm)

Graphite on paper

Estate of Ken Price, Courtesy Matthew Marks

13 3/4 x 10 3/4 inches (34.9 x 27.3 cm)

Gallery

Courtesy James Corcoran Gallery,

Photo by Ron Amstutz

Los Angeles Photo by Susan Einstein

151

PL. 20

PL. 25

Study for Billboard, 1972

Slate Cup, 1974

Acrylic on Board

Acrylic, graphite, ink, and colored pencil

18 x 20 inches (7.1 x 7.9 cm)

on paper

Estate of Ken Price, Courtesy Matthew Marks

9 x 12 inches (22.9 x 30.5 cm)

Gallery

Private Collection, Courtesy Franklin

Photo by Ron Amstutz

Parrasch Gallery, New York Photo by Katharine Overgaard

PL. 21

Mexican Arts (Design for Rug), 1973

PL. 26

Acrylic and gouache on paper

Study for Round Plate, 1974

41 x 31 inches (104.1 x 78.7 cm)

Acrylic, graphite, and colored pencil on paper

Collection of Sydney McDonnell

14 x 11 inches (35.6 x 27.9 cm)

Photo by Ron Amstutz

Estate of Ken Price, Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery

PL. 22

Photo by Ron Amstutz

Mexican Arts, 1973 Acrylic and gouache on paper

PL. 27

41 x 31 inches (104.1 x 78.7 cm)

Study for Oval Plate, 1974

Collection of Jackson Price

Acrylic, graphite, and colored pencil on paper

Photo by Ron Amstutz

14 x 11 inches (35.6 x 27.9 cm) Collection of Jackson Price

PL. 23

Photo by Ron Amstutz

Happy’s Curios, 1973 Acrylic on paper

PL. 28

33 x 28 inches (83.8 x 71.1 cm)

Happy’s Curios/Taos, 1975

Courtesy James Corcoran Gallery

Acrylic and gouache on paper

Photo by Susan Einstein

17 1/2 x 13 1/2 inches (44.5 x 34.3 cm) Collection of Beth Rudin DeWoody

PL. 24

Photo by Gary Mamay

Semi-Geometric Cup, 1974 Acrylic and graphite on board

PL. 29

11 x 9 inches (27.9 x 22.9 cm)

Study for Death Shrine, 1975

Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery

Acrylic and graphite on paper

Photo by Bill Orcutt

11 x 8 1/2 inches (27.9 x 21.6 cm) Collection of the Harwood Museum of Art, Taos, New Mexico Gift of Ken and Happy Price Photo by Cris Pulos

152

PL. 30

PL. 34

Study for Vases, 1975

Ojo Sarco, 1981

Acrylic and graphite on paper

Acrylic and pastel on paper

11 x 14 inches (27.9 x 35.6 cm)

18 x 22 inches (45.7 x 55.9 cm)

Estate of Ken Price, Courtesy Matthew Marks

Courtesy James Corcoran Gallery,

Gallery

Los Angeles

Photo by Ron Amstutz

Photo by Susan Einstein

PL. 31

PL. 35

Study for Vases with Cup Lids, 1975

Untitled (purple interior with sculpture), 1990

Acrylic and graphite on paper

Acrylic on paper

11 x 14 inches (27.9 x 35.6 cm)

22 1/2 x 30 inches (57.2 x 76.2 cm)

Estate of Ken Price, Courtesy Matthew Marks

Courtesy James Corcoran Gallery,

Gallery

Los Angeles

Photo by Ron Amstutz

Photo by Susan Einstein

PL. 32

PL. 36

The Dead Boy in Bathtub (Study for The Plain

L.A. Bowl Downtown, 1991

of Smokes, 1981), 1979

Ink and gouache on paper

Acrylic, graphite, and colored pencil on board

15 1/4 x 20 inches (38.7 x 50.8 cm)

22 x 18 inches (55.9 x 45.7 cm)

Collection of Sara Szold

Estate of Ken Price, Courtesy Matthew Marks

Photo by Bill Orcutt

Gallery Photo by Ron Amstutz

PL. 37

Installation Piece, 1991 PL. 33

Ink and gouache on paper

Detective’s Room (Study for The Plain of Smokes,

19 7/8 x 15 7/8 inches (50.5 x 40.3 cm)

1981), 1979

Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery

Acrylic and graphite on board

Photo by Bill Orcutt

8 1/2 x 10 7/8 (21.6 x 27.6 cm) Private Collection, Courtesy James Corcoran Gallery, Los Angeles Photo by Susan Einstein

153

PL. 38

PL. 43

Untitled, 1992

Talisman to Avert Crashing, 1997

Ink, synthetic polymer paint, and colored

Ink and gouache on paper

pencil on paper

9 x 6 inches (22.9 x 15.2 cm)

20 1/4 x 25 3/4 inches (51.4 x 65.4 cm)

Courtesy Brooke Alexander

The Judith Rothschild Contemporary

Photo by Owen Houhoulis

Drawings Collection Gift, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY

PL. 44

Digital image Š The Museum of Modern Art/

Talisman to Avert Falling, 1997

Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY

Acrylic and ink on paper 15 3/8 x 10 1/2 inches (40 x 27 cm)

PL. 39

Estate of Ken Price, Courtesy Matthew Marks

Untitled, 1992

Gallery

Acrylic and ink on paper

Photo by Ron Amstutz

20 1/4 x 26 inches (51.4 x 66 cm) Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery

PL. 45

Photo by Bill Orcutt

Iniki 2, 1998 Acrylic and ink on paper

PL. 40

6 3/4 x 6 1/4 inches (17.1 x 15.9 cm)

Dangerously Clean Water, 1993

Collection of Cindy Millican and Glenn Frey

Ink and acrylic on paper

Photo by Brian Forrest

10 3/8 x 8 1/2 (26 x 22 cm) Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery

PL. 46

Photo by Bill Orcutt

Taos Talking Picture, 2000 Acrylic and ink

PL. 41

17 11/16 x 12 5/8 inches (44.9 x 30.6 cm)

W. L.A. with Billboards, 1994

Collection of Gus Foster

Ink and acrylic on paper 10 x 13 inches (25.4 x 33 cm)

PL. 47

Private Collection, Courtesy Matthew Marks

Small is Beautiful, 2002

Gallery

Acrylic and ink on paper

Photo by Bill Orcutt

10 1/8 x 12 7/8 inches (25.4 x 32.4 cm) Estate of Ken Price, Courtesy Matthew Marks

PL. 42

Gallery

LA Riot (Car on T.V.), 1994

Photo by Ron Amstutz

Acrylic on paper 13 3/4 x 10 1/2 inches (34.9 x 26.7 cm) Collection of Romy Colonius Photo by Ron Amstutz

154

PL. 48

PL. 53

Wild About Sculpture, 2003

The Pacific Ocean, 2004

Acrylic and ink on paper

Acrylic and ink on paper

7 1/2 x 5 3/4 inches (19.1 x 14.6 cm)

11 x 8 1/2 inches (27.9 x 21.6 cm)

Collection of Jackie and Irving Blum

Estate of Ken Price, Courtesy Matthew Marks

Photo by Douglas M. Parker Studio

Gallery Photo by Ron Amstutz

PL. 49

Narrow Passage, 2004

PL. 54

Acrylic and ink on paper

Storm Light, 2004

12 x 10 inches (30.5 x 25.4 cm)

Acrylic and ink on paper

Collection of Beth Rudin DeWoody

8 1/4 x 7 3/4 inches (21 x 19.7 cm)

Photo by Cathy Carver

Collection of Jeffrey Peabody Photo by Dennis Cowley

PL. 50

Deep Heat, 2004

PL. 55

Acrylic and ink on paper

Craters, 2004

11 x 8 5/8 inches (27.9 x 21.9 cm)

Acrylic and ink on paper

Collection Albright-Knox Art Gallery,

11 x 8 1/2 inches (27.9 x 21.6 cm)

Dr. and Mrs. Clayton Peimer Fund, 2005

Collection of Suzanne Deal Booth and

Photo by Tom Loonan

David G. Booth Photo courtesy L.A. Louver, Venice, CA

PL. 51

Liquid Rock, 2004

PL. 56

Acrylic and ink on paper

Call of the Desert, 2005

17 3/4 x 13 7/8 inches (45.1 x 35.2 cm)

Acrylic and ink on paper

Estate of Ken Price, Courtesy Matthew Marks

11 x 8 1/2 inches (27.9 x 21.6 cm)

Gallery

Private Collection, Courtesy Matthew Marks

Photo by Ron Amstutz

Gallery Photo by Adam Reich

PL. 52

Hawaiian Lava Lake, 2004

PL. 57

Acrylic, ink, and graphite on paper

Desert Architecture, 2005

9 x 6 inches (22.9 x 15.2 cm)

Acrylic and ink on paper

Estate of Ken Price, Courtesy Matthew Marks

10 1/2 x 8 3/8 inches (26.4 x 21.3 cm)

Gallery

Estate of Ken Price, Courtesy Matthew Marks

Photo by Ron Amstutz

Gallery Photo by Ron Amstutz

155

PL. 58

PL. 63

Last Days of the Primitive Hut, 2006

Large Sculpture With Rocks, 2009

Acrylic, ink, and colored pencil on paper

Acrylic and ink on paper

9 x 6 inches (22.9 x 15.2 cm)

11 x 8 1/2 inches (27.9 x 21.6 cm)

Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery

Private Collection, Courtesy Matthew Marks

Photo by Bill Orcutt

Gallery Photo by Ron Amstutz

PL. 59

Two Hermits, 2006

PL. 64

Acrylic, ink, and colored pencil on paper

Cabin of Dreams, 2009

11 x 8 1/2 inches (27.9 x 21.6 cm)

Acrylic and ink on paper

Estate of Ken Price, Courtesy Matthew Marks

11 x 8 1/2 inches (27.9 x 21.6 cm)

Gallery

Estate of Ken Price, Courtesy Matthew Marks

Photo by Ron Amstutz

Gallery Photo by Ron Amstutz

PL. 60

Living in Mud, 2007

PL. 65

Acrylic and ink on paper

The Place, 2010

10 7/8 x 8 1/2 inches (27.6 x 21.6 cm)

Acrylic and ink on paper

Estate of Ken Price, Courtesy Matthew Marks

15 x 12 inches (38.1 x 30.5 cm)

Gallery

Private Collection, Courtesy Matthew Marks

Photo by Ron Amstutz

Gallery Photo by Ron Amstutz

PL. 61

The Hermit’s Cave, 2008

All images © Estate of Ken Price, Courtesy

Acrylic and ink on paper

Matthew Marks Gallery

10 7/8 x 9 1/4 inches (27.6 x 23.5 cm) Estate of Ken Price, Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery Photo by Ron Amstutz PL. 62

The Bottomless Pit, 2008 Acrylic and ink on paper 11 x 8 1/2 inches (27.9 x 21.6 cm) Estate of Ken Price, Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery Photo by Ron Amstutz

156

L I S T O F E S S AY I L L U S T R AT I O N S

FIG. 5

Craig Kauffman FIG. 1

Tell-Tale Heart, 1958

Ken Price

Oil on linen

Blind Sea Turtle Cup, 1968

68 1/2 x 49 inches (174 x 124.5 cm)

Ceramic sculpture in teakwood tray with sand

Collection of Vivian Kauffman Rowan,

in glass vitrine on wood pedestal

Pasadena, CA

Ceramic: 2 7/8 x 3 7/8 x 5 5/8 inches (7.2 x 9.8

Photo courtesy Getty Research Institute &

x 14.2 cm); overall: 63 1/2 x 29 1/2 x 32 inches

Frank Lloyd, Trustee of the Estate of Craig

(161.3 x 74.9 x 81.3 cm)

Kauffman

Fractional and promised gift of Charles

Photo by John Kiffe

Cowles, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY

FIG. 6

Digital image © The Museum of Modern Art/

Ed Moses

Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY

Untitled-C, 1958 Oil and enamel on sized paper

FIG. 2

45 3/4 x 33 inches (116.2 x 83.8 cm)

Ken Price

Collection of Jim and Jeanne Newman,

Study for Mound, 1960

San Francisco, CA

Graphite on paper

Photo by Brian Forrest © Ed Moses

8 x 6 inches (20.3 x 15.2 cm) Estate of Ken Price

FIG. 7

John Altoon FIG. 3

ABS 114, 1964

Ken Price

Mixed media on poster board

Study for Egg, 1961–62

60 x 40 inches (152.4 x 101.6 cm)

Graphite on paper

Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY,

6 x 6 inches (15.2 x 15.2 cm)

Anonymous Gift in Memory of Nicholas

Estate of Ken Price

Wilder, 2001

FIG. 4

Arshile Gorky The Liver is the Cock’s Comb, 1944 Oil on canvas 73 1/4 x 98 inches (186.1 x 248.9 cm) Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY, Gift of Seymour H. Knox, Jr., 1956

157

FIG. 8

FIG. 12

Alberto Giacometti

Ken Price

Disagreeable Object (Objet désagréable), 1931

Lizard Cup, 1971

Wood

Color lithograph

6 1/8 x 19 5/16 x 4 5/16 inches

30 x 40 inches (76.2 x 101.6 cm)

(15.6 x 49.1 x 11 cm) Private collection, promised gift to

FIG. 13

The Museum of Modern Art, New York,

Claes Oldenburg

in honor of Kirk Varnedoe

Bedroom Ensemble, 1963

Photo © The Museum of Modern Art/

Mixed media

Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY

204 x 252 inches (518.2 x 640.1 cm)

Art © Alberto Giacometti Estate/Licensed

National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa

by VAGA and ARS, New York, NY

Photo by Rudolf Nagel, Courtesy the artist

© 2012 Succession Giacometti / Artists Rights

and Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt

Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris

am Main

FIG. 9

FIG. 14

Ken Price

Edward Kienholz

Woman Raising Skirt, 1965

Roxys, 1961–62

Ink and acrylic on paper

Mixed media

11 x 8 1/2 inches (25 x 20 cm)

Dimensions variable

Estate of Ken Price, Courtesy Matthew Marks

Photo by Cathy Carver © Kienholz Estate,

Gallery

Courtesy David Zwirner, New York/Courtesy

Photo by Bill Orcutt

L.A. Louver, Venice, CA

FIG. 10

FIG. 15

Ken Price

Gus Foster

Figurine Cup V, 1970

Ken Price Studio, Taos, 1977

Color lithograph 18 x 22 inches (45.7 x 55.9 cm)

FIG. 16

Ken Price photographed by Happy Price, FIG. 11

Taos, 1974

Ken Price Figurine Cup III, 1970

FIG. 17

Color lithograph

Gus Foster

15 x 18 1/2 inches (38.1 x 47 cm)

Ken Price Studio, Taos, 1977

158

FIG. 18

Gus Foster Ken Price Studio, Taos, 1977 FIG. 19

Ken Price Installation drawing for Happy’s Curios, 1978 Graphite on paper FIG. 20

Ken Price photographed by Happy Price, Taos, 1976 FIG. 21

Ken Price Untitled, 1980 Acrylic on paper 8 x 10 inches (20.3 x 25.4 cm) Courtesy Franklin Parrasch Gallery FIG. 22

Ken Price Glass Off, 2000 Acrylic, ink, graphite, and color pencil 16 1/4 x 10 3/4 inches (41.3 x 27.3 cm) Collection of Tony Berlant FIG. 23

Ken Price Untitled, 1978 Acrylic, graphite, and ink on paper 5 3/8 x 7 1/4 inches (13.7 x 18.4 cm) Collection of Romy Colonius

159

CONTRIBUTORS

Since 2008 Douglas Dreishpoon has been chief curator at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, where he has organized Guillermo Kuitca: Everything, Paintings and Works on Paper, 1980–2008 (2009) and The Long Curve: 150 Years of Visionary Collecting at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery (2011). His 2005 videotaped interview with Ken Price, one of 43 interviews he conducted between 2000 and 2010 with Taos-based visual artists, musicians, poets, and writers, is part of the Taos Oral History Project. Selected interviews from the Project are featured in Remarkable Women of Taos (2012) and Agnes Martin: The New York–Taos Connection (1947–1957) (2013), two documentaries he co-produced with the Mandelman-Ribak Foundation. An essay on Marisol’s works on paper, “The Voice behind the Silence,” will appear in the publication for her retrospective at the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art in 2014. And his forthcoming book, Sculptors, Critics, Possibilities: American Sculpture 1945–1965, will be published by the University of California Press.

BOARD OF DIRECTORS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Co-Chairs

Ken Price: Slow and Steady Wins the Race, Works on

Frances Beatty Adler

Paper 1962–2010 is made possible in part by an

Eric Rudin

award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Jane Dresner Sadaka Treasurer Stacey Goergen

Major support for the exhibition and accompanying catalogue is provided by the Matthew Marks

Secretary

Gallery, Dedalus Foundation, James Corcoran,

Dita Amory

Tracy Lew, and Beth Rudin DeWoody. Additional funding is provided by Franklin Parrasch, Suzanne

Brad Cloepfil Anita F. Contini Steven Holl Rhiannon Kubicka David Lang Merrill Mahan Iris Z. Marden Nancy Poses Pat Steir Barbara Toll Isabel Stainow Wilcox Candace Worth Emeritus Melva Bucksbaum Frances Dittmer Bruce W. Ferguson Michael Lynne George Negroponte Elizabeth Rohatyn Jeanne C. Thayer Executive Director Brett Littman

Deal Booth and David G. Booth, and Sara Szold.

E D WA R D H A L L A M T U C K P U B L I C AT I O N P R O G R A M

This is number 105 of the Drawing Papers, a series of publications documenting The Drawing Center’s exhibitions and public programs and providing a forum for the study of drawing.

Jonathan T.D. Neil Executive Editor Joanna Ahlberg Managing Editor Designed by Peter J. Ahlberg / AHL&CO This book is set in Adobe Garamond Pro and Berthold Akzidenz Grotesk.

It was printed by Shapco Printing, Inc in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

L I B R A R Y O F C O N G R E S S C O N T R O L N U M B E R : 2 013 9 3 9 8 0 0 I S B N 9 7 8 - 0 - 9 4 2 3 24 -7 3 - 0 Š 2 013 T he D rawing C enter

T H E D R AW I N G PA P E R S S E R I E S A L S O I N C L U D E S

Drawing Papers 104 Giosetta Fioroni: L’Argento Drawing Papers 103 Igancio Uriarte: Line of Work Drawing Papers 102 Alexandre Singh: The Pledge Drawing Papers 101 José Antonio Suárez Londoño: The Yearbooks Drawing Papers 100 Guillermo Kuitca: Diarios Drawing Papers 99 Sean Scully: Change and Horizontals Drawing Papers 98 Drawing and its Double: Selections from the Istituto Nazionale per la Grafica Drawing Papers 97 Dr. Lakra Drawing Papers 96 Drawn from Photography Drawing Papers 95 Day Job Drawing Papers 94 Paul Rudolph: Lower Manhattan Expressway Drawing Papers 93 Claudia Wieser: Poems of the Right Angle Drawing Papers 92 Gerhard Richter: “Lines which do not exist” Drawing Papers 91 Dorothea Tanning: Early Designs for the Stage Drawing Papers 90 Leon Golub: Live & Die Like a Lion?

Drawing Papers 89 Selections Spring 2010: Sea Marks Drawing Papers 88 Iannis Xenakis: Composer, Architect, Visionary Drawing Papers 87 Ree Morton: At the Still Point of the Turning World Drawing Papers 86 Unica Zurn: Dark Spring Drawing Papers 85 Sun Xun: Shock of Time Drawing Papers 84 Selections Spring 2009: Apparently Invisible Drawing Papers 83 M/M: Just Like an Ant Walking on the Edge of the Visible Drawing Papers 82 Matt Mullican: A Drawing Translates the Way of Thinking Drawing Papers 81 Greta Magnusson Grossman: Furniture and Lighting Drawing Papers 80 Kathleen Henderson: What if I Could Draw a Bird that Could Change the World?

Drawing Papers 79 Rirkrit Tiravanija: Demonstration Drawings

T O O R D E R , A N D F O R A C O M P L E T E C ATA L O G U E O F PA S T E D I T I O N S , V I S I T D R AW I N G C E N T E R . O R G

THE D R AWI N G CENTER

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