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Portrait of the artist,

Robert Arneson (1930-1992) was born in Benicia, California, northeast of San Francisco. As a child, he drew often and well, with encouragement from his father. By the age of l7, he was seriously aspiring to a career as a professional cartoonist, and was contributing weekly sports cartoons to the local newspaper. He studied at Marin College, Kenfield, CA, and received a B.A. in Art Education from California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland. While teaching art in a Bay Area high school, Arneson became a proficient potter and, abandoning all other media for ceramics, enrolled at Mills College, earning an M.F.A. in l958. With extensive experience as an art teacher in California high schools, junior colleges, and his alma mater, Mills, Arneson accepted a position as head of the ceramics department at the University of California at Davis in l962, becoming a full Professor of Art there in 1973.

In the late 1950s, Arneson was influenced by the Expressionist work of Peter Voulkos, which led him to investigate the sculptural possibilities of clay. Demonstrating on the potter's wheel at the California State Fair, Arneson threw a series of bottles instead of the usual bowls and vases. He crowned one with a real pop bottle cap and labeled it no deposit, no return . This became a turning point in his career, and helped to determine the path that American ceramics would take in the following decades. Arneson chose everyday objects as subjects for clay, depicting these objects with humor and surrealism. Returning to the pop bottle theme, he employed commercial slogans in Things Go Better With Coke, adding a real Seven-Up bottle to the six-pack. He also portrayed Diet Coke as six skinny bottles, creating a symbol of American culture as well as a three-dimensional pun, linking the visual image to the verbal. Arneson made of clay an instrument for social commentary. As an initiator of the Funk movement in which clay sculpture amused, offended and shocked with its humor, irreverence, word plays and eroticism, Arneson influenced a generation of young ceramists.

Working in whiteware that enhanced bright colors, Arneson made a large (eight-foot-long) floor sculpture named Alice House after the street where his suburban tract home was located. (The orginial Alice House was made in l966 and duplicated in 1974 for an Arneson retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.) The sixty assembled pieces depicted the house and surrounding landscape, including shrubbery, the garage with its basketball hoop and the family's Volkswagon bus in the driveway. He became obsessed with Alice House images, partly because he had always thought that being an artist meant living in a cold garret in Greenwich Village rather than in a tract house in comfortable, conventional suburbia. In a later work, Arneson changed his focus from the kinds of things society builds to the things society builds with. During this period he made a number of pieces using bricks, such as Brick Multiple, included in the Trompe l'oeil exhibition.

Arneson worked mainly in portraiture in the 1970s, creating humorous, larger-than-life likenesses of himself, his friends and artists whom he admired. Self-portraits made during this period showed exceptional emotional power and strength. In more recent work, he used his satirical wit to speak out forcefully against nuclear armament.

Arneson wrote: I call myself a sculptor. I was trained as a ceramist and still prefer to exploit various techniques of this craft in my work. My forms are figurative with an occasional heavy-handed layer of irreverent content. . . . Should I call myself a pop-funk realist or PFR?