The colourful sculpture of Ken Price

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As a major retrospective of Ken Price’s work heads for New York, Janet Stiles Tyson ponders on the artist’s undeserved obscurity.

Ken Price, who died in early 2012, was an important but relatively unknown American artist who made smallish, vividly hued sculptural objects from clay. The cult-like following he earned during his lifetime, however, will probably expand dramatically as a result of a 2012 retrospective of his work and its accompanying catalogue, which is reviewed here.

Born in Los Angeles in 1935, Price participated in a group of Southern California artists who emerged in the late 1950s and early 1960s. With hedonistic cool and playful funk they opposed New York’s hegemonic and relentlessly earnest theorizing. Yet, where his friends Ed Ruscha,   Robert Irwin  and Ed Kienholz  rose to international prominence and others, including Billy Al Bengston and Ed Moses, are  regularly included in round-ups of the usual suspects, Price has rarely been cited.

The reason generally provided for Price’s relative lack of recognition is his low-key personality and his devotion to making things that elude classification. Although he exhibited, as did his peers, at the legendary Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles, Price seems to have been more interested in studio work than self-promotion. His work included the kind that involves making things that are, themselves, easy to identify and therefore easy to promote. But the subtle brilliance of his works, along with his integrity and personal modesty, earned Price what could fairly be called the love of a cadre of collectors – many of them other artists – as well as curators and critics, among them architect Frank Gehry and critic Dave Hickey.

And like the exhibition, which originated with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, travelled to the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas and is due at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York on 18 June, the catalogue is a labour of love. Perhaps even more so because, long after the installations are taken down, it will continue to testify not only to Price but to the lucid functionality and beauty that constitute a well-produced book.

The team who brought exhibition and book to fruition was led by LACMA senior curator of modern art Stephanie Barron, whose introductory essay interweaves a biography of Price and description of the development of his oeuvre, with an illuminating account of both Los Angeles’ emerging art scene and the revolution in clay-based production led by Peter Voulkos.

Barron’s writing is joined by a brief tribute by Gehry, a wistful essay by Hickey, and by New York art historian Phyllis Tuchman’s keenly focused survey of Price’s oeuvre, which concludes by identifying his final body of work as a touchstone in the history of American art. That last sort of lofty claim has become a commonplace in today’s hyperbolic culture, but its sense of truthfulness vis-à-vis Price is reinforced by the gorgeous colour photographs reproduced here. The modesty and directness of Price’s own words further support the status of the artist as an unheralded master: these are presented in a series of interviews conducted and thematically compiled by Malin Wilson-Powell, an independent art writer and curator in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

LACMA curatorial assistant Lauren Bergman produced the chronology of Price’s life and career, and catalogued works in the exhibition. Lists of exhibition lenders and photographic sources; a tight selection of critical writings on Price from the 1960s and ‘70s; short bios on catalogue contributors; judiciously edited bibliography and index; and an exhibition itinerary and colophon round out the book’s textual references.

In the end, though, the catalogue’s status as a stand-alone, virtual experience of Price’s art is based on the quality of Fredrik Nilsen’s photographs. In their lighting and framing, and accuracy of colour printing, they provide a unique experience of Price’s oeuvre. Their resonance is amplified by the way in which they have been used throughout the book’s layout, which was designed by Lorraine Wild: overviews of colourful objects, surrounded by white space, are interspersed with intense close-ups and multiple views of selected works, which provide an approximation of in-person viewing.

Between its subject and its treatment thereof, there is nothing to fault in this title. It should serve as an example of an exhibition catalogue, properly accomplished.

Ken Price Sculpture: A Retrospective  by Stephanie Barron with Lauren Bergman is published by Prestel Publishing for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2012). 280 pp., 332 colour and 49 mono illus. ISBN: 978-3-7913-52555-8