Exhibiting Talent : Two Shows Will Celebrate Jerry Rothman’s Contributions to the Art World

AGUNA BEACH —  Jerry Rothman climbed atop his bird-like sculpture and rocked it. The demonstration may have looked like performance art, but it was more of a chemistry lesson.

“If this were made of regular clay, firing would have made it shrink and crack on its steel armature,” he said proudly. “This didn’t.”

Rothman developed so-called ferro-ceramic some 24 years ago. The mix of clay and inorganic particles isn’t exactly romantic or revolutionary-sounding in this high-tech era. But it’s part of a legacy that’s secured his niche among California’s most influential modern ceramic artists.

“He developed a no-shrink clay and a way of firing clay and metal together that was unheard of at the time and able to support cantilevered structures that could not previously have been made,” said Bolton Colburn, director of Laguna Art Museum. “He is one of the artistic giants in Orange County.”

Two upcoming exhibits will showcase Rothman’s contributions:

“The Art and Influence of Jerry Rothman: Past and Current Work / Past and Current Students” opens Aug. 23 at the Tustin Renaissance Gallery. It was organized in honor of Rothman’s recent retirement from Cal State Fullerton, where he inspired devoted followers as professor of ceramics for 26 years. (He’ll continue to teach part time for five years).

“Function and Narrative: Fifty Years of Southern California Ceramics,” opening Friday at the Long Beach Museum of Art, will put his work in historical context.

Rothman, 63, was among a small seminal group studying under Peter Voulkos in the late ‘50s at Los Angeles’ Otis Art Institute that broke with tradition by making ceramic pieces that didn’t have to pour tea, hold flowers or decorate the living room; they were sculptural, expressive and conveyed meaning.

His star didn’t rise like those of some of his classmates--which may be attributed in part to his lifelong tendency to keep fresh by changing styles. But his work has consistently been included in important group shows and is collected by museums around the world, including LAM, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

“He’s an artist which LAMCA collects in depth because of his importance to the California movement in clay,” said assistant curator of decorative arts Jo Lauria. His position as a teacher, she added, has “been very influential, and God knows ceramics needs that now because fewer and fewer institutions are devoted to ceramics.”

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Best known for baroque vessels and figurative sculptures, the Brooklyn native and son of a furniture maker established himself in the same field before entering L.A. City College to study industrial design in the mid-’50s. In a required ceramics course, he met now-famed contemporary artists Billy Al Bengston and Kenneth Price, who turned him on to Voulkos, spearhead of the evolving revolution.

“Bengston and Price said, ‘You’re wasting your time here; you ought to go see this guy Voulkos,’ ” Rothman said at his Laguna Beach home recently. “So I went to see Voulkos, and he said, ‘Well, you ought to come to school here, and maybe I’ll let you in my shop in a year or so.’ After about my first semester, old Pete said, ‘Well, maybe you ought to come into my regular classes.’ And that was that.”

Clay had grabbed his imagination instantly, said Rothman, who designed and built his 10,000-square-foot home and studio on nearly two eucalyptus-shaded acres. “It was the immediacy of the material; it didn’t have any resistance; you didn’t have to cut it like wood or stone, and it’s as plastic as paint.”

He was invigorated by the innovations of the Otis clay movement.

“I’m sure we were doing things that had been done, but we didn’t know that. We felt we were just breaking ground, trying new things, new ways of handling the material and approaching technology and mainly form.”

The idea was to combat the existing “tyranny.”

“Things being made at the time had to be quote unquote functional,” he said, “but 99% of the stuff had no utilitarian value at all; it was decorative. Its basic function was visual. But people were afraid to admit that. It was very convenient to hide behind technique, tradition, established values. And if it was sculpture, then it had to be a certain established tradition of sculpture.”

Before graduating from Otis, Rothman took a well-paying job designing ceramic consumer products in Japan for two years with the large Sango firm. That nurtured rather than stifled his creativity, he said.

“The agreement was I’d spend 50% of the time on my own work. They thought that unless you’re a good artist, you couldn’t be a good designer, and I found that one thing fed the other.”

Rothman returned home to earn his master’s degree in 1961 but kept working for Sango and for Max Factor, where he designed packaging for makeup products. He later set up a pottery shop, producing large planters and such, and designed patio stoneware for a company called Interpace, where he worked for about four years.

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All that put a crimp in his artistic career, he said.

“I was typecast. My peers thought that was nasty; you couldn’t possibly be an artist and be a designer, and that did give me lots of trouble for many years. But that was fine. While all these guys were becoming big names, I was putting money in the bank. So that was OK with me; it gave me the kind of freedom to do whatever I wanted to do” artistically.

LACMA’s Lauria said some of Rothman’s early classmates, such as Price, may also have attained greater fame because their work has a wider context. “I don’t think Jerry’s work has anything to do with postmodernism; it has more to do with innovation of the vessel aesthetic,” she said.

Throughout the years, Rothman has hopscotched from functional vessels to figurative sculpture and back. His work often expressed social commentary on such issues as environmental decay and governmental oppression, although a lyrical series played on the Greek myth of seduction involving Leda and her swan.

Recently, he’s taken a humorous turn, and a distinct sense of whimsy and fantasy imbue the figurative pieces he’ll exhibit at the Tustin Renaissance Gallery.

“I’m growing older, I guess; I’m getting mellower and just having a good time,” said Rothman, who nonetheless conceded that his predilection for variety caused a problem.

“People have a great deal of trouble recognizing my work from one step to the next. But you work on something, and you get really good at it, and everything comes out slick, perfect, and you’re just knocking them out. That gets boring.”

The steady CSUF job freed him from the tyranny of the marketplace, he said, and meant plenty of time for the sort of exploration that allowed him to produce ferro-ceramic and the widely used Fullerton sculpture body, another crack-resistant clay.

“If you take on that kind of job, your obligation is to try to develop new ideas and new things and new techniques that apply to your field. I’ve done a lot of that, and I found it fascinating. It’s made my life very interesting.”

* “Function and Narrative: Fifty Years of Southern California Ceramics,” Friday through Oct. 19 at the Long Beach Museum of Art, 2300 E. Ocean Blvd. Wednesday-Sunday, 10 a.m.-5 p.m. with extended hours Fri. until 8 p.m. $1-$2. (562) 439-2119. “The Art and Influence of Jerry Rothman: Past and Current Work/Past and Current Students,” Aug. 23 through Sept. 27 at Tustin Renaissance Gallery, 300 El Camino Real, Tustin. Tuesday-Saturday, 11 a.m.-5 p.m. No admission. (714) 838-6140.