Vintage Modernist SF Bay Area California Ceramic Funk Art Pottery TB-9 Movement Glazed Stoneware Sculpture Bust Head Robert Arneson Manner

Funk art is an art movement that was a reaction against the non-objectivity of abstract expressionism. The movement’s name was derived from the jazz musical term "funky", describing the passionate, sensuous, and quirky. During the 1920s, Jazz was thought of as very basic, unsophisticated music, and many people believed Funk was an unrefined style of art, and music, as well. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Funk was a popular art form, mainly in the Bay Area of San Francisco, California. Although discussed as a cohesive movement, Funk artists did not feel as if they belonged to a collective art style or group. This is because Funk consisted of artists who shared the same attitudes and created similar works, but were not necessarily working in the same art schools.

Bay Area
The Funk art movement was a regional art movement, most predominant in Northern California. Some notable cities where the Funk movement was concentrated in consisted of Berkeley, Marin County, Big Sure, and North Beach. Many Funk artists began as Bay Area Figurative Movement painters in the 1950's. The movement originated from the bohemian underground in the Bay Area. During the 1960s, the Bay Area, specifically San Francisco, was a free and spiritual environment due to its beatnik art culture and the youth political activism reacting against the Vietnam War, ongoing at the time. A variety of different cultures existed in the city, including poetry, jazz, and art. The freedom of thinking and culture was one of the main reasons that Funk art, a combination of both painting and sculpture, could develop and prosper in the Bay Area.

The Funk art that occurred throughout Northern California was the exact opposite of the "Fetish Finish" sculptures made in Southern California, and the "primary structures" constructed in New York at the time. Funk art in the Bay Area was unique and not similar to any other movement of the 1960s. Jess, Wally Hedrick, Jay DeFeo, Wallace Berman, and Bruce Conner were notable Funk artists who emerged from the Bay Area. Jess was one of the earliest and most influential Funk artists. In 1967, Peter Selz, the first director of the University of Art Museum in Berkeley, California, organized a Funk Show there. Selz wanted to showcase the strange mindset in California through an array of Funk pieces. The exhibition featured works from Peter Voulkos, and Bruce Conner, and it brought national recognition to the movement for the first time. Before this show, not many people outside of the Bay Area had seen or heard of Funk works, which relieved artists of pressures to become successful.

Robert Carston Arneson, a UC Davis faculty member for four decades; was also at the forefront of a movement that took ceramic art in a new direction.
When Arneson came to campus in 1962, ceramic art forms were mainly "art" versions of traditional pottery shapes — pots, vases, plates and tiles.
But starting in the 1960's, Arneson and several other California artists abandoned the manufacture of functional wares in favor of using everyday objects to make confrontational — and to some, offensive — statements. The new movement was dubbed "Funk Art," and Arneson is considered the "father of the ceramic Funk movement."

Davis School Funk Original Glazed Stoneware Sculpture
California School of Robert Carston Arneson; Roy DeForest, Peter Vandenberge, Tony Natsoulas. Glazed Stoneware Sculpture
Female Bust Sculpture / Head. Sweet Expression
Good condition. Very slight chips on reverse; at the very bottom. Difficult to notice; below glaze. (Not overall coverage of glaze; artist's intent, apparently)
11"WX14"H. (Large, and very heavy for size)
More closely resembles Robert Arneson, (Davis Funk School), with some similarities with Peter VandenBerge, and Roy DeForest. Signed. Signature appears in last photo, appears to start with the letter "A", toward the very right of the sculpture's shoulder, in the back. Undeciphered as of yet.
At least 3-4 different glazes. Eyes a royal blue/gray. Skin is glazed dark orange shino, mouth eyebrows and hair, dark tenmoku like glaze, with metallic oxides.

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