Artwork by Viola Frey Gods & Monsters Artwork by Viola Frey
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GODS & MONSTERS ARTWORK BY VIOLA FREY GODS & MONSTERS ARTWORK BY VIOLA FREY American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center Washington, DC Curated by Squeak Carnwath GODS & MONSTERS: The Early Work of Viola Frey By Mark Van Proyen Beginnings are delicate and hard to know, simply because there is always an earlier origin that pre-exists and bears upon any moment of presumed origination. As is the case with every artist’s career, this observation is borne out by the story of Viola Frey (1933–2004) as a painter and ceramic sculptor. Frey herself would say that she began her professional artistic career when she dug out the base- ment in her Divisadero home in San Francisco to house an art studio—four years after her return to California, and before that, four more years split between New Orleans and New York. But that beginning had its own complex pre-history reaching further back in time, and Frey’s pre-history is echoed and reflected in much of the work that she created up until her death in 2004, even after she suffered a series of debilitating strokes. Viola Frey, Ming Blue and White, 1981. Oil and acrylic on paper, 30 x 22 1/2 in. ALF no. VF-0327WP. Artists’ Legacy Foundation, Oakland, CA. Photograph by M. Lee Fatherree. 2 3 Frey was born in 1933 and grew up on a family-run grape farm in Lodi, an apartment at 495 Francisco Street, which was very close to the mediagenic heart of California. Following high school, she attended Stockton College, and the Beatnik subculture that had gained international attention after the controversial then went on to the California College of Arts and Crafts (CCAC) from reading of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl at the Six Gallery in late 1955. 1953 to 1955, studying painting with Richard Diebenkorn and ceramics with Charles Fiske and Vernon “Corky” Coykendall. After completing From 1961 to 1970, she worked in the billing department of Macy’s Department Store, her BFA and at Coykendall’s behest, she entered the Graduate School at and in 1964 Frey secured a part-time position at CCAC while also having some success Tulane University to study art, but left just before finishing to join Tulane exhibiting and occasionally selling her work. In 1963, she and Fiske rented a house ceramics instructor Katherine Choy, to make experimental sculpture at 1336 Divisadero, and in 1965, Frey purchased the house across the street (1335 at Choy’s newly founded Clay Art Center at Port Chester, New York.1 Divisadero), where she and Fiske lived until 1975. It was here that Frey converted the Since the center was a commutable train journey to Manhattan and she basement to construct her first professional studio space, which was outfitted with a needed employment to continue her artistic pursuits, Frey took a job in small kiln, allowing her to fire pottery and hand-built clay objects up to about 24 inches the business department of the Museum of Modern Art. in any dimension. Having this dedicated space allowed her to work free of the distrac- tions that came along with using the communal studio at CCAC. Here, we may want to remember a few things: first of which, Frey had ample exposure to legions of “organization men” clad in almost identical During the time that Frey and Fiske lived in the Divisadero neighborhood, they witnessed power suits, no doubt influencing her repeated use of the men-in-suits its rapid decline into a downward spiral of urban blight. Using money that Frey inher- motif in later works. Second, her job at the museum also afforded first- ited after her father passed away, she bought a house in Oakland in 1974, where she hand familiarity with the masterworks in that museum’s collection—in and Fiske would live the rest of their lives.4 In the back yard of the Oakland home, Frey particular, Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’ Avignon (1907), and Girl Before immediately set to work building a dedicated ceramic studio that, when finally finished Viola Frey in Port Chester, New York, c. 1958–1959. a Mirror (1932)—echoes of which can be seen in many of Frey’s later Viola Frey Archives, Artists’ Legacy Foundation. in 1977, would become the place where she would embark upon the initial creation of figures executed in both two and three dimensions. The fact that Frey her impressive series of life-sized polychrome figures—the most well-known being the was there during the period of Peter Selz’s landmark 1959 exhibition, New Images of almost life-size grandmothers (fig. 2). Man, is particularly relevant.2 In this exhibition were paintings by her former CCAC painting instructors Richard Diebenkorn and Nathan Oliveira, hung alongside other Having Charles Fiske as a housemate was helpful in developing Frey’s early career. works by Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Francis Bacon, and others—all of which Curator Anita Ellis wrote, “Dealers soon noticed that to please Charles was to please were redolent with indications of psychological trauma and heavy existential emotion. Viola. Fiske became Viola’s de facto gatekeeper.” Fiske was a gay man almost two decades older than Frey, described as an “intellectual” and a “borderline genius mad- Frey cited several reasons for leaving New York and returning to California: the sudden man.” In addition, the move to Oakland made sense as both he and Frey were teaching untimely death of her friend Katherine Choy; the harsh New England winters; and the at CCAC (she part-time until 1970 and full time after that until her retirement in 1999; rise of figuration in the California Bay Area.3 Even in her school years, Frey showed an he intermittently from 1965 to 1998). It is easy to imagine that, for the purposes of early interest in the figure, and she felt that San Francisco offered a more hospitable and social convenience, their cohabitation might have seemed to outside observers as being sympathetic environment for figurative art than did the East Coast. So, in 1961, she took something akin to a conventional marriage. 4 5 After gaining notoriety from her first retrospective organized by the Creative Arts League and initially exhibited at the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento, and traveling to Oakland Museum in 1981, Frey again relocated her art studio to a large warehouse at 1089 Third Street in West Oakland, which afforded her the space to produce and store fig- urative ceramic sculpture that were much larger than life sized. This later body of sumptuously glazed and ebulliently colored work forms the basis of the international reputation that Frey’s work still enjoys, following in the wake of her highly successful survey exhibition at the Whitney Museum in 1984. But it is the work that foreshadowed those later figures that is of interest here. Figure 1. Viola Frey, Dancing Monster Head, 1977. Ceramic and glazes, 25 1/2 x 25 1/2 x 3 1/2 in. ALF no. VF-0107P. Artists’ Legacy Many factors come to bear when we examine the sculpture that Frey Foundation, Oakland, CA. created at the Divisadero studio during the decade beginning in 1965, and in the half-decade immediately after her departure from it. For convenience sake, we might point to several specific bodies of work, but in so doing, we need to recognize that in many cases, some of these are better understood as hybrid combinations of multiple tendencies. The Figure 3. Viola Frey, Untitled (Wall Hanging of Female Figure), earliest of these are several stoneware variations on the theme of plates 1965. Ceramic and glazes, 15 3/4 x 10 1/2 x 3 1/2 in. ALF and vessels, showing a penchant for subtle, minimally applied glazes no. VF-0063P. Artists’ Legacy Foundation, Oakland, CA. Photograph by M. Lee Fatherree. that accentuate and reveal the earthen color and texture of clay—a very different approach to treating ceramic surfaces than the manner which was used in the post-1977 figures. An early work, Untitled (Wall Hanging of Female Figure) (fig. 3), provides us with some additional clues, as it is among the earliest of Frey’s ceramic figurative works. It was designed to hang on a wall in the manner of a crucifix but is morphologically related to pre-Christian sources, those being Goddess figurines from the second, third and fourth millennia BCE, which we may now associate with Cycladic idols, or the Venus of Willendorf. During the 1970s, the archeological discover- ies of Marija Gimbutas gained the attention of popular media, illuminating her hypoth- Figure 2. Viola Frey, Untitled (Grandmother Series), 1978. Ceramic and glazes, 70 x 22 1/2 esis of a widespread matriarchal culture existing in southeastern Europe thousands of x 23 in. ALF no. VF-3109CS. Collection of di years prior to the age of recorded history.5 This idea exerted a significant influence on Rosa Center for Contemporary Art, Napa, CA. Photograph by M. Lee Fatherree. many female American artists working in the 1970s (Nancy Spero, Judy Chicago, and 6 7 Ana Mendieta to name a few), and seems to have either directly or indirectly influ- enced Frey—possibly by way of the bookwormish Fiske. Another kindred work from the Divisadero period is a rather frightening variation of a portrait bust titled A Visually Haunted Image (fig. 4), which shows a disfigured face that seems to have been violently removed from the front of a head and placed on a striped vessel fragment in the manner of some macabre trophy. Yet another work evoking Neolithic idolatry is titled Untitled (Desert Figure Model) (fig.