California Clay Movement

[4] Writing about the clay movement in 1963, a reviewer in Time said "Peter Voulkos' rough, ragged monuments are powerful weapons against the slick coffee-table pottery that often passes for modern art, and already a generation of fierce West Coast individualists has joined him at the barricades.

Moving to the University of California in Berkeley he and sculptors such as Sidney Gordon and Harold Paris developed an influential school of sculpture.

His pupils included Kenneth Price, Billy Al Bengston, Robert Arneson, Nancy Selvin and Stan Bitters.

[8] A reviewer said of him that "He practically invented his own art form by beating and buckling tons of clay into awesome mountainous landscapes, but his human sculptures are also very moving.

There he met the artists Dave Cohen, Sheldon Kaganof and Dion Myers, who introduced the ideas of the California Clay Movement to Britain.