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Palo Alto Online

Big idea

by Laura Reiley

It's like a Napoleon complex, but for sculpture. The maquettes of Robert Arneson are not large, but they speak volumes -- they pose and swagger, asking difficult questions and poking fun at sacred cows. These little pieces are heady, vertiginous and always a little arch.

A maquette is a two- or three-dimensional sketch, a model or illustration for a larger piece. Millin's "Dictionnaire des Beaux-Arts" (1806) describes it, in sculpture, as "a light model in which nothing has been brought to completion, and which offers just the artist's first thought." The Palo Alto Art Center presents an exhibition of many such pieces by one of the late 20th century's great ceramicists, Robert Arneson, who died in 1992. Most of the pieces are on loan from his estate.

Carl Sagan once said that if you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe. So it is with the maquettes of Robert Arneson. On his way to large-scale works in ceramics, Arneson grappled with personal, political and artistic "big ideas," both on paper and in the form of small-scale ceramic pieces.

The Palo Alto Art Center has become, for a brief time, the universe that preceded Arneson's many celebrated and vilified apple pies. The exquisite small show gives one insight into the imaginative process, or as curator Signe Mayfield says, "they form a tangible, intimate journal that chronicles concepts for monumental works, ideas-on-hold, thematic shifts, visual dialogue with imaginative models of the past and signposts of a life."

Having earned a D- in ceramics in junior college, Arneson was somewhat unprepared to teach this aspect of art at Menlo-Atherton High School in the mid 1950s. He learned quick, and soon "clay became his mother tongue," as Mayfield explained.

He moved on to get his master of fine arts at Mills College, working under Anthony Prieto, who advocated a traditional regimen: thrown pots, bottles and cups. But Arneson soon branched out.

The exhibit contains his first known ceramic maquette, dated 1964, which Mayfield wryly described as "the ultimate ceramic" -- a toilet, entitled "Model for 'John'." It's an organic, unglazed red clay piece rising out of a heap of root-like squiggles. From here he went on to a sink with a mirror, then a toaster. Arneson's preoccupation with the everyday continued through the 1960s, as did his irreverent comments about ceramics' second-class status in the art world.

The exhibit groups together similar pieces, partly because of Arneson's chronological shifts in theme and focus, but perhaps just as much because of their visual lushness as small groupings. In the early 1970s, he created a water series with intense blue glazes: "Model for 'Current Event'" shows a self-portrait of the artist, unglazed and rustic-looking, swimming against a current of glossy, churning water; "Model for 'Pool with Splash'" depicts a deep blue, placid pool the moment something has plunged beneath its flat surface.

As Arneson's fame grew, a few adventuresome collectors commissioned portraits. San Francisco mayor Diane Feinstein invited him to submit a proposal to do commemorative work for the new Moscone Convention Center. He was awarded the commission and the resulting piece created a scandal in the world of art as well as in the world of local politics. In response to his detractors, Arneson embarked on a series of ironically self-flagellating pieces, many of them with corresponding sketches and maquettes in a series entitled "Self-Portrait as an Old Dog."

While Arneson's humor is easily conveyed by the 80 or so small ceramic pieces in the show, many reveal a brooding, pained side to the artist as well. A lifelong student of his fellow artists, Arneson poses numerous earnest questions of giants in the art world (he devotes a whole series to the abstract expressionist Jackson Pollock), and examines larger questions about illness and death in many of his later pieces (he was diagnosed with cancer in 1975). One of his last pieces, a bronze self-portrait, depicts a headless man offering his head in one outstretched hand. It is as if, with "Offering," Arneson invites us to examine his head, to be privy to the workings of his mind. And in the "Big Idea" exhibit at the Palo Alto Art Center, this is almost possible.

What: "Big Idea: The Maquettes of Robert Arneson"

Where: Palo Alto Art Center, 1313 Newell Road, Palo Alto

When: Through April 28. The gallery is open 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday; 7-9 p.m. Thursday; 1-5 p.m. on Sunday

Cost: Admission is free.

Call: (650) 329-2366.