Goldberg / Glen Lukens

This weekend I bought a crackle glaze ceramic bowl. With a 20" diameter, the scale is impressive. The first thing I thought of was Glen Lukens. The glaze and shallow bowl form seem so related.

The clay looks right.

Upon turning it over, I see it's signed Goldberg. It's a great signature too.  

The obvious next step is to look for a Goldberg who studied under Lukens. 

A lot of well-known ceramicists were taught by Lukens. This includes Doyle Lane, Beatrice Wood, Myrton Purkiss and F. Carlton Ball.  Someone considerably more famous than all of them, but not as a ceramist, also took his ceramics class. That was a 19 year old Frank Gehry.

Source: “Making Better Mud Pies”: A Conversation with Frank Gehry

More about the Luken's Soriano house, which I visited a couple years ago, is here. 

So I obviously knew about the link between Gehry and Lukens, but what I didn't know is...

"Frank Goldberg" changed his name to "Frank Gehry" in 1954, the same year he graduated from the USC School of Architecture. He changed it due to the antisemitism he experienced during his childhood. His name at birth was actually Ephraim Owen Goldberg. He was given the Hebrew name "Ephraim" by his grandfather, but only used it at his bar mitzvah.

Source: “Making Better Mud Pies”: A Conversation with Frank Gehry

And here's a young Frank.

Source: USC School of Architecture

In 2010 the Frank Lloyd gallery mounted a ceramics exhibition called Frank Gehry Selects. This is the Lukens Gehry selected for the exhibition. The group ceramics show also included work by John Mason, Ken Price, Peter Voulkos, Billy Al Bengston, Elsa Rady, Peter Shire, Glen Lukens, George Ohr, and Frank Gehry himself. Frank Llyod has really had some amazing exhibitions. 

From the Frank Lloyd website: When Frank Gehry took a ceramics class in college, it marked a turning point. His ceramics teacher at the University of Southern California, Glen Lukens, clearly recognized Gehry’s interest in architecture. Since Lukens was building a house designed by architect Raphael Soriano, he invited the young Gehry to visit the site one day. That’s when Gehry got excited about architecture: “I do know a lightbulb went off when I saw Soriano,” he recalled.Since that time, Gehry has maintained his interest in ceramics, too. He made ceramic works during his student days at USC, and he has collected work by Glen Lukens, Ken Price and George Ohr. He has been friends with Peter Voulkos, John Mason, Billy Al Bengston and Elsa Rady for decades. He was the architect for the Ohr-O’Keefe Museum in Biloxi, Mississippi, as well, and that museum will hold a collection of pottery by George Ohr. 

More about the exhibition here.

Here is a Gehry piece from the exhibition, with the obvious Lukens influence. I wonder if it was signed Goldberg?

Well, it seemed like a perfect story but here is what Frank Gehry had to say about it. 

Thanks to Reform Gallery for getting the word from Gehry.