By PETER PLAGENS
Significant modern sculpture has been generally assumed to be pretty big, made out of metal or some kind of assemblage, uncolored or at least muted, rough-hewn or "tough," and certainly without utilitarian allusions. Ken Price, who died Feb. 24 in Taos, N.M., at age 77, made relatively small objects out of clay, many of them brightly painted, very smooth and, if not exactly useful around the house, at least wittily referential of that possibility. Price was a ceramist—he studied with the celebrated Peter Voulkos at the Otis Art Institute kilns near downtown Los Angeles, and got a master's degree from Alfred University's renowned two-year ceramics program in just one year—who became a sculptor, who became a great, sui generis artist on the order of Francis Bacon or Sidney Nolan.
Los Angeles County Museum of Art/Matthew Marks/Ken Price/Fredrik Nilsen'Zizi' (2011)
Part of Price's uniqueness—especially in today's logorrheic, theory-besotted art world—was his straightforwardness. At a talk he gave seven years ago at Don Judd's Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas, Price said: "I can't prove my art's any good or that it means what I say it means. And nothing I say can improve the way it looks." The first of his works to be noticed were the circa-1960 football-size "eggs," intensely painted in color schemes of eye-boggling pinks, greens, oranges and yellows, and augmented with openings inside of which lurk dark, glossy, larvae-looking stuff. Then he went to cups—hilariously impractical vessels with bodies of snail forms or Constructivist geometry (imagine a Gerrit Rietveld chair for your morning coffee)—that are like nobody else's, before or since.
Price was born on the west side of Los Angeles on Feb. 16, 1935, and raised in comfortable circumstances. (He was privileged enough to take some trumpet lessons from Chet Baker.) His parents designed and built a home close to the beach, so their boy was ready, willing and able to surf practically every day. The sport was a big deal to him (the announcement for one of his shows at the groundbreaking Ferus Gallery contains a photograph of Price standing straight up on a board in a wave, arms triumphantly outstretched), and surfing trips to Baja California, brought him into contact with one of the major influences on his aesthetic, Mexican curio shops. He spent six years in the 1970s, in fact, on a never-completed (but exhibited in parts) project called "Happy's Curios," named after his wife. It consists of cabinets of hand-made homages to Mexican commercial pottery, Day of the Dead imagery, satiny cloth and flowers.
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art/Ken Price/Fredrik Nilsen
'L. Red' (1963)
A quietly affable fellow, Price could break out of his beloved studio labor (which he thought was the greatest blessing of being an artist) to create the occasional album cover (for his friend Ry Cooder), illustrations for poetry books (by Harvey Mudd and Charles Bukowski) and liquor labels (for a favorite brand of mezcal). He also taught for 10 years (1993-2003) where he first went to college, the University of Southern California, before finally decamping to Taos.
Although it's almost contrary to the joyful, just-look-at-it spirit of Price's art, his art-historical importance must be mentioned. When Price, Voulkos, John Mason, Billy Al Bengston and a few others got together at the Otis kiln, the Los Angeles modern-art world was, if it palpably existed at all, provincial and behind the times. The Otis ethos was "Let's make whatever the hell we feel like making as fast as we can while being so technically proficient it's scary." Coupled with Los Angeles's lack of a brooding avant-garde such as New York's, and with Los Angeles's cars-and-plastic visual environment, it formed the basis of the great Southern California art revolution currently being celebrated in the Getty-sponsored plethora of "Pacific Standard Time" exhibitions. (Mr. Price had three sculptures in the Getty's own lead PST show—now closed—and is one of the featured players, along with Voulkos and Mr. Mason, in Scripps College's current PST exhibition, "Clay's Tectonic Shift.") At the time of his death, Price was working with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art on a 50-year retrospective, a show that will turn up in 2013 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art—where, if it isn't a gobsmacking revelation of the first water, something's wrong with New York.
In more academic terms, the art of Ken Price is a lively link between the austerity of Minimalism (he never wasted a curve or a color) and the inclusiveness of postmodernism (his work can remind you of everything from Constantin Brancusi to American Indians to Japanese woodblocks), proving that in art there are no real ruptures, only intriguingly disguised continuities. But in the end with Price it's the object—not history, not theory, not jockeying for position among cities—that counts. Somebody asked him why there were as many as 70 coats of reworked and pitted acrylic paint on his late, obsessively crafted, bloblike sculptures. "That's so it looks good rather than bad," Price replied. Nothing anyone can say about his work can improve upon that.
Mr. Plagens is a New York-based painter and writer. He writes the bi-weekly gallery-review column for the Journal.
A version of this article appeared Mar. 6, 2012, on page D7 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Words Need Not Apply.
