Mingei International Museum
Transformed by Fire
San Diego, CA
Oct. 22, 2009 – July 3, 2010

Blum & Poe
J. B. Blunk
Los Angeles, CA
Mar. 12 – May 15, 2010


A pair of radiant retrospective exhibitions on view this spring in Southern California offer a rare in-depth look at the careers of two masters, and remind us of the Golden State’s place at the vanguard of the modern craft movement.

“Transformed by Fire” at the Mingei International Museum in San Diego (through July 3) celebrates the life’s work of June Schwarcz, an icon of the enamel art field. The late wood sculptor J. B. Blunk (1926-2002) is the subject of a one-man show through May 15 at Blum & Poe in Los Angeles. Both Marin County artists (Schwarcz, now 92, still lives and works in Sausalito, while the house and studio Blunk built in Inverness are now home to an artist’s residency program), each had a passionate virtuosity with material, though their respective approaches were almost inverse: one was expansive within a small format, the other reductive on a monumental scale.

“Inventive” is a word invariably used to describe Schwarcz, and it’s an understatement. An alchemist given to endless experimentation and technical innovation, she has summoned a wondrous variety of forms, textures, surface effects and colors within her complex enameled vessels. Some 90 examples from 1964 to 2008 from the collection of Forrest L. Merrill are on glorious display in the Mingei show, which has been guest-curated by Jacquelin Pilar, with an installation design by Ted Cohen. (While at the museum, enjoy the concurrent installation of crocheted-wire sea creatures by San Diego’s own Arline Fisch, a pioneer of avant-garde jewelry.)

Blunk removed matter to reveal essential form, working intuitively with chain saws and hand tools to carve massive hunks of cypress and redwood into imposing abstract sculptures and furniture, sometimes combined with stone. Fifteen of these potent pieces, most from the 1970s, command one of the airy, pristine galleries at Blum & Poe’s enormous new home, a former industrial building in Culver City. Though the artist’s oeuvre has long been quietly revered in craft and woodworking circles, “I felt it really needed to be contextualized as sculpture,” says the exhibit’s organizer, Gerard O’Brien, who has championed Blunk for years at Reform, his mid-20th-century design space in West Hollywood. “To have one of the top contemporary art galleries in Los Angeles, with a very progressive program, decide to show J. B.’s work is extremely exciting.” An accompanying catalog includes texts by Glenn Adamson of the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, and by the L.A. artist Charles Ray.

In her essay for the Mingei exhibit catalog, Pilar includes a telling quote from Schwarcz: “I do not know how you draw the line between fine art and craft, or between the utilitarian and the non-utilitarian. I want to be an artist. I intend to walk where I choose and not care what country I’m in.” The transcendent works of Schwarcz, Blunk and others from that “greatest generation” of studio craft artists were indeed triumphs of personal vision. Still, the free and creative milieu of California in the postwar decades gave them a place to thrive. “I like to think that the courage and independence J. B. has shown is typically California, or at least Western,” Blunk’s close friend Isamu Noguchi once said, suggesting that being a continent away from the East Coast art-world epicenter liberated Blunk from “the categories that are called art.”

On that inspiring note, here’s a heads-up for lovers of California mid-century modern: a stellar lineup of people and places identified with the craft scene (Voulkos, Mason, Price, Sheets, Otis, Scripps, et al.) will be part of “Pacific Standard Time: Art in LA, 1945-1980,” an ambitious yearlong, Getty-funded series of exhibitions planned at various West Coast institutions starting in fall 2011.