Esoteric Survey

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 y...

The Glen Lukens house by Raphael Soriano (1940) is up for sale. Listed at nearly $2 million, it has been fully restored by Barry Milofsky of M2A Architects. It's on a huge beautifully-landscaped lot in the historic West Adams neighborhood of Los Angeles. It's an important house beyond the architecture. T here is no way to overstate the importance of Glen Lukens (1887-1967) in the world of California ceramics.  It was commissioned when Lukens was teaching ceramics and metalwork at USC. Soriano had graduated from USC in 1934 and later returned as a lecturer in the architecture program, where Lukens was teaching metalwork.  Lukens lived in the house from 1940 to 1959. In addition to his innovative glaze work, while at USC he led the ceramics department where Laura Andreson, Susan Peterson, Carlton Ball, Harrison McIntosh, Beatrice Wood, Doyle Lane and Vivika and Otto Heino were all a part of.  Frank Gehry also took a Lukens ceramics class at U...

The Museum of California Design will present Frank Gehry with the Museum’s Henry Award for his outstanding contributions to American design -- will include the installation, Frank Gehry: Forty Years of Product Design 1972-2012, the first-ever survey exhibition of Gehry-designed furniture, lighting, jewelry and objects. The event will be hosted at JF Chen. More information and tickets can be found at MOCAD . A related article can be found here .