A Likeness of Francis B. (Primary Title)

Robert Arneson, American, 1930 - 1992 (Artist)

Educational
1981
American
glazed ceramic
United States
Overall: 29 × 26 in. (73.66 × 66.04 cm)
85.357a-b
Not on view

'My work is not about sculpture in the traditional sense, volumes, and planes... I am making drawings and paintings in space" -Robert Arneson

Arneson, a San Francisco Area sculptor, is best known for ribald ceramic self-portraits from the early 1970s and hard-hitting antinuclear works from the 1980s. Arneson used white earthenware clay and brilliant low-fire glazes for these sculptures, which he considered paintings in three dimensions. He also produced sculptural portraits of important 20th-century artists, including Picasso, Pollock, and Duchamp, paeans to modernist heroes done with Arneson’s characteristic blend of humor, irreverence, and the grotesque.

For A Likeness of Francis B., Arneson used the strong oranges and blues favored by British painter Francis Bacon and combined three aspects: frontal likeness, shadowy profile and, on the back, grimacing caricature. The use of serial views, particularly a triptych of faces, also reflects Bacon’s method, as does the macabre distortion of human anatomy, which captures something, too, of Arneson’s own angst and turbulence in the early 1980s.

signed on rear of bust: Arneson 1981
Gift of Sydney and Frances Lewis
Robert Arneson: 1930-1992, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, VA, 1992

Robert Arneson: New Ceramic Sculpture, Alan Frumkin Gallery, New York, NY, May 1981

(Alan Frumkin Gallery, New York) by 1981; Purchased by Mr. and Mrs. Sydney and Frances Lewis, Richmond, Virginia in May of 1981; Gift to Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (VMFA), Richmond, Virginia in December of 1985.
©artist or artist’s estate

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