Continuing through May 9, 2026
Art criticism often begins, like Homeric epics, in the middle of the action. Todays’ stories prime us to grab the viewer’s attention in the first few moments. As is commonly assumed in political discourse, how it is now is how it has always been. The satirical, iconoclastic legacy of Robert Arneson, who so successfully championed ceramics as an art form, is so well accepted today that we forget it was not always so. Ceramics was once regarded as a humble utilitarian craft medium. As for humor in art — especially in the era of tragically serious Abstract Expressionism — wit was regarded as adolescent japery. Critic Hilton Kramer, reversing earlier praise, lambasted Arneson’s work at the Whitney Museum soon after Arneson’s flippant mock-classical “Portrait of George (Moscone)” (1981) was rejected by a San Francisco still in shock over the 1978 dual assassination of the Mayor and Councilman Harvey Milk.
Although Arneson acknowledged his naiveté about the public function of the Moscone project, returning his fee, he still disagreed strongly with the pompous high-mindedness of Kramer and others. After his early career pursuing traditional ceramics, he claimed independence from the subservient craft mentality and increasingly let Arneson be (and become) Arneson. An early scatological toilet piece delighted some viewers but prompted the spouse of the collector who had acquired the work to smash it. His Freudian male and female toilets from the mid-1960s, displayed in “Fatal Laughs: The Art of Robert Arneson” at Stanford’s Cantor Art Center (2015), are hilarious and outrageous at once. Arneson observed that “The things that I’m really interested in as an artist are the things you can’t do — and that’s really to mix humor and fine art … Humor is generally considered low art but I think humor is very serious — it points out the fallacies of our existence.”
The iconoclastic neo-Dada Funk art of Arneson and his fellow École de Davis confrères — Wiley, DeForest, Neri, Hudson and Thiebaud — dominated the art scene of 1970s San Francisco, and their serious humor is by now an essential part of the Bay Area’s visual-arts DNA. If Arneson’s inveterate playfulness sometimes clashed with his subject matter, his 1980s antiwar/antinuclear sculptures are powerful, mordant indictments of the military-industrial complex’s very real and deadly serious weapons of mass destruction. As our current fallacious existence reveals, they are also sadly prescient.
“Cornerstones: Robert Arneson and the Brick” presents almost thirty works, drawn from the artist’s estate and previously unexhibited, that explore the motif of the brick in a variety of media: ceramic, porcelain, watercolor, etching, drawing, and bronze. Installed in an upstairs gallery, the varied pieces, made over a twenty-five-year period (1966-1991), show the artist marrying Pop art’s interest in everyday objects with Surrealist metamorphosis and ambiguity, à la Magritte, and ranging from the elegiac and mock-historical to parodic self-portraiture.
Two small ceramic sculptures of right-angled brick joints closely simulating real bricks serve as trompe-l’oeil bookmarks to the exhibition. “Brick” (1966) is composed of two bricks, seamlessly conjoined, bearing the stamped inscriptions ARNESON and 1966 in the manner that commercial brickworks used to brand their products. “Corner Stone,” (1991) one of the artists’ final works, repeats the right-angled format, but with the bricks, both stamped ARNESON, tipped so that they rest on their medium-length sides. The top edge is glazed to suggest a bevel, with a gold nugget hidden on the inside joint corner.
Several red brick-simulacrum sculptures — “Finger Brick” (1965), “Face Brick” (1981), and “Hand Brick” (1991), a bronze hand affixed to a bronze brick — sprout human appendages and features. The brick as a surrogate for the artist and/or viewer lends the contemplation of decay enough aesthetic distance to make it pleasantly enjoyable, like eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Romantic paintings of fallen Roman ruins or Gothic cathedrals through which peasants amble on a fine day. Arneson also depicts them floating or sinking, respectively, as in a glazed ceramic sculpture, “Floating Bricks” (1974), and a watercolor painting, “Painted Brick” (1976). One etching, “Broken Brick” (1975), shows a stamped brick split between ARNE and SON, with a jagged tear like a stroke of lightning ripping apart the two halves of the artist’s name.
While fighting the cancer that eventually prevailed in 1992, when he was sixty-two, Arneson explored the themes of mortality and memory in such works as “Memorial for Bob” (1972), a small terra cotta/ceramic sculpture set atop a six-step plinth or pedestal. Hollowed out of the brick is a small arched niche bearing a white portrait bust of the often hyperbolic and theatrical artist, here uncharacteristically impassive, smoking a cigarette.
“Sung Edition” (1970), an arrangement of ten porcelain bricks suggestive of a Minimalist installation, comments on the history of ceramics. “Goldbrick” (1969) plays with the language and idea of wealth as condensed, reified labor and its opposite, make-work featherbedding. Even more topical were Arneson’s faux architectural monuments of the 1970s, with their hints of imperial overreach. In our current moment they exert a serious resonance; back then they aimed ironic humor towards gas shortages and stagflation.
An even broader historical perspective is seen in “Model for ‘Fragment of Western Civilization’” (1972), a miniature version of a large multi-part red-brick installation depicting collapsed brick structures that includes a self-portrait. Arneson had originally intended to make a monumental self-portrait composed of bricks, but decided it would be more interesting, and historically and poetically accurate, to “to bring in the [hordes of] conquerors to dispose of the edifice. There’s yin and yang in that — you build an edifice and then you knock it down.” Creative destruction and aesthetic repair became central to Arneson’s creative process once he had escaped the empty-minded perfection of craft pottery.
Finally, “Bio Bob” (1982), a life-sized bronze self-portrait head mounted to a ceramic column, transforms the Greek herm figure — a god’s head placed atop a rectangular pillar to drive away evil — into a visual biography of the artist. Incidents from his private life — of the kind that had caused such controversy in l’affaire Moscone — are written on the base, surrounding a full-frontal nude drawing of the artist, bald and bearded, with limbs outstretched like Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man, as yet untroubled by repressive systems of thought.
