A Likeness of Francis B. (Primary Title)
Robert Arneson, American, 1930 - 1992 (Artist)
'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.
Robert Arneson: New Ceramic Sculpture, Alan Frumkin Gallery, New York, NY, May 1981
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