Wright Auction

Primitive. Raw. Imposing. These are just a few words that have been used to describe John Mason’s groundbreaking Vertical Sculptures. Sometimes overshadowed by the work of his contemporaries, Peter Voulkos and Ken Price, Mason was one of the vanguard of ceramists responsible for reshaping the ceramics field in the late 1950s and early 1960s. He studied under Voulkos at Otis Institute and, in 1957, the two men moved into a shared studio on Glendale Blvd. which they shared until 1959 and where Mason remained until 1965. It was in those intervening years that Mason—inspired by Voulkos’ teachings and catalyzed by his own prodigious creative impulses—carved his own stylistic path.

Breaking free of established pottery traditions, he explained in a 2017 interview: “It wasn’t about tapping into an existing structure and continuing it. It was like fabricating something fresh.”

Unlike Voulkos and Price, Mason eschewed the potting wheel, opting instead to explore clay as a truly sculptural, hands-on medium. Breaking free of established pottery traditions, he explained in a 2017 interview: “It wasn’t about tapping into an existing structure and continuing it. It was like fabricating something fresh.” Using nothing but his own physical strength, Mason set about pushing, creasing, crushing, and paddling large slabs of clay onto the floor for what would develop into massive wall sculptures. For perhaps his most famous of these, Blue Wall (1959), he built parts of the work around a central axis; the method was akin to a match striking a new creative fire in Mason’s mind.

Untitled (Vertical Sculpture) is a tangible reminder of not only its creator’s genius, but also a watershed moment in the history of ceramic art.

Mason began creating what became his Vertical Sculpture series, monumental totems of clay built around a wooden post. Using this central axis, he worked each sculpture in rotation, slamming pieces of freshly mixed clay onto the armature and then manipulating them with his hands and blunt tools. After applying a muted glaze palette, often in tones of gray, cobalt, white or black, he fired them, burning away the wooden post within. The resulting works are powerful meditations on symmetry, mass, modularity, and rotation, common themes in the artist’s oeuvre that he revisited consistently throughout his career but always in innovative, unexpected ways. Mason exhibited his revolutionary wall installations and Vertical Sculptures in a one-man show at Pasadena Art Museum in 1960, which included the present lot. 

Untitled (Vertical Sculpture) is a tangible reminder of not only its creator’s genius, but also a watershed moment in the history of ceramic art. Mason reflected on those years in a 1997 interview, saying: “There was a feeling that the time had come to do something else. The question was, what it would be, what form it would take and who would do it?” The present work, along with his countless other inventive creations during that era, was the answer.