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Product Description
This new biography, written by Louana Lackey, is a history and celebration of Autio's life, work, career, and techniques. Rudy Autio is considered one of the most important and influential ceramic artists working in the United States in the last fifty years. With works in the permanent collections of museums around the world, he has left an indelible mark on the world with his art.
In addition to the physical displays of Autio's art, his influence can be found in many other areas. In 1951, he co-founded the Archie Bray Foundation in Helena, Montana with fellow artist and friend, Peter Voulkos. In 1957, Autio founded the Ceramics Department at the University of Montana in Missoula and began a nearly 30-year long teaching career at the school. In addition to his teaching, he has given lectures and conducted more than 100 workshops in the United States and other countries. This exciting new book, the first to be written on Autio, is a history and celebration of his life and work, and is supported by a stunning gallery of more than 150 color images.
Rudy Autio is considered one of the most important and influential ceramic artists working in the United States in the last fifty years. With works in the permanent collections of museums around the world including the American Craft Museum, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Brooklyn Museum, the Carnegie Museum, the Metropolitan Museum, the Portland Art Museum, the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution, the St. Louis Art Museum, the Applied Arts Museum in Helsinki, the National Museum in Stockholm, and the Aichi and Shigaraki ceramic museums in Japan, Rudy Autio has left an indelible mark on the world with his art.
In addition to the physical displays of Autio's art, his influence can be found in many other areas. In 1951, he co-founded the Archie Bray Foundation in Helena, Montana with fellow artist and friend, Peter Voulkos. In 1957, Autio founded the Ceramics Department at the University of Montana in Missoula and began a nearly 30-year long teaching career at the school. In addition to his teaching, he has given lectures and conducted more than 100 workshops in the United States and other countries.
This exciting new book, the first to be written on Autio, is a history and celebration of his life and work, and is supported by a stunning gallery of more than 150 color images. By documenting Rudy Autio's life and work, this book explores the role ceramic artists play in contemporary American culture, how one becomes a ceramic artist, how ceramic artists make their work, how technology has changed their medium, and most importantly, why these artists do this work at all.

Customer Reviews:

2 out of 5 stars

Rudy Autio's Exuberant Visions April 25, 2008
Rudy Autio
Demure, gracious and reflective, one of Montana's most venerated artists contemplates the conclusion of his influential, inspiring life's work

By Brian D'Ambrosio

Clay artist, painter and optical innovator Rudy Autio remains at the vanguard of a remarkable generation of artists whose work in ceramics and cross-media installation changed the very nature of what is considered art in Montana.

Indeed, Autio's art is inseparable from certain facts of his life. The vast vessels, behemothic bowls and avant-garde ceramics that make his career so remarkably multisensory are restorative - and that's a major part of their significance. But they are also simultaneously abstract and timeless. Today they speak less of his identity as an 80-year-old artistic icon born and raised in a tight-knit Finnish Lutheran community in Butte than of a pensive man seeking serenity, reconciling thorny questions about mortality's vigor and viability as he skirmishes with his third remission from Leukemia.

"You know, I still like to work," says Autio. "I'd just go crazy if I didn't or couldn't. I'm very happy that I can still work some even though Leukemia doesn't promise me a long life."

Autio's mellow, soft spoken voice, like his art, has the perfect pitch and courage. Indeed, his ceramic artwork, when either viewed individually or juxtaposed in its totality, possesses a taciturn sagacity. There is an additional savoir faire, one of abidingness, created from a perennial pledge to drawing and to the clay vessel. We see irrepressible brilliance in Autio's work, we adore it, and we respect it. We are mesmerized by the urgent awareness of implicit expert pervasive in this influential artist's creations.

It's been fifty since years since Autio sold his first piece of art; in 2006, his large ceramic sculpture, titled "Backstage," sold for $23,000 at a Missoula Art Museum fundraiser, making it the most ever paid for a single item at a MAM auction. The hefty sum recently doled out by an art connoisseur to own one of his artistic offerings is as perplexing and strange to him as when he'd sold his first piece of crafted clay while residing at the Archie Bray Foundation in 1951.

"I asked for $125 and the guy talked me down to $75. It was a fairly good piece, but I was taken aback that somebody would pay for it. That was five decades ago. When you're that young, you'll practically give it away, that's because you're so enthusiastic that you can make more."

The same evening that his chiseled out ceramic "Backstage" mold fetched such an impressive price, Autio was greeted with a wildly emphatic standing ovation - a booming and decisive display of both unabashed appreciation and perpetual affinity.

"Often I'm surprised by the publicity," says Autio, who speaks in unpretentious terms that seem thoughtfully deflated in an effort to underestimate his role as an artistic icon.

"I guess it's a matter of longevity than anything else. I'm no judge of my work. I don't know if I'm very talented. From the beginning, I've never made a lot of separation between the arts. I always wanted to be a sculptor, pure and simple."

Autio might be the poorest or most modest evaluator of his own skills and status, and that's fine, because his deeply developed dedication and ornamental and optic aptitude - specifically when they're related to ceramics - has certainly impressed upon the tastes and comprehensions of those that count most in art appreciation realms. Recently, he received notice that he's been named 2007 Master of the Medium in Ceramics by the James Renwick Alliance in Washington, D.C.

The James Renwick Alliance is a group dedicated to promoting American craft arts and it's the support organization for the Renwick Gallery, which is part of the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Every odd-numbered year, the organization presents Master of the Medium awards in five categories.

After some jabbing, Autio does acknowledge that recognition from the Renwick Alliance is "a nice bestowal. I feel good about it."

Don't let his modesty mislead: Despite Autio's demureness, there are few higher honors for living American ceramicists than the Renwick's commendation.

However, it's not just Autio's typically reserved Finnish nature stymieing enthusiasm, or his natural aversion to self-aggrandizement, or his tacit rejection of platitudes and accomplishments, at work here. Autio has other things on his mind. Specifically: his battle against Leukemia.

When Autio was first diagnosed with anemic illness, in February of 2005, he was told he would only live two weeks if he didn't start chemotherapy as soon as possible. Over the past three years, even though Autio's health has teetered precariously, bouncing back and forth between setback and rebound, he has never lost his appetite or love for ceramic expressiveness.

"I'm okay with the fact that I've got Leukemia. I've been lucky to do what I've wanted to in life, and I've liked working as a clay artist. To make a living out of it is surprising for a guy living here."

Born in Butte, Montana., the once bustling capital of the copper industry, in 1926, Autio has lived in his native state throughout most of his career. Raised in an ethnically segregated enclave known as Finntown, he grew up in a house and neighborhood where his parents and most playmates spoke Finnish. Both Finntown and its Italian enclave equivalent Meaderville were razed in the 1950s; today it's a canyon-like Superfund site known as the Berkeley Pit--a defunct open-pit mine that the Anaconda Company abandoned with a pool of deadly chemicals at the bottom.

"It was fun to go uptown in Butte as a kid in the `30s and to see all the characters, the miners drinking, and the street excitement, there was activity at all times, guys selling pasties and tamales and pencils," says Autio, from his Missoula home and studio.

Years later, Autio headed the ceramics department at the University of Montana, which he did for nearly three decades before retiring as Professor Emeritus of the School of Fine Arts. Prior to his appointment at the University of Montana, Autio was a founding resident artist at the much-heralded Archie Bray Ceramics Foundation in Helena, MT.

"The Archie Bray was a wonderful place, and I met some of the best people there. I mean it's a world-class place. Archie himself was unique. He was a modest capitalist who supported the arts, dramas and plays, and he was also a gentle brickmaster. He had a gentle side and a really tough side."

In 1963, Autio received a Tiffany Award in Crafts, followed by the American Ceramic Society Art Award in 1978, and a National Endowment grant in 1980, which enabled him to work and lecture at the Arabia Porcelain Factory and the Applied Arts University in Helsinki, Finland. While there, he was elected honorary member of Ornamo, Finland's Designers organization. In 1981, he was the first recipient of the Governor's Award and named outstanding visual artist in the state of Montana.

Additionally, Autio is a Fellow of the American Crafts Council, Honorary member of the National Council of Education in the Ceramic Arts, and recipient of the honorary Doctorate of Art from the Maryland Institute, College of Art in Baltimore. His litany of accomplishments is impressive. With accomplishment comes accolades, with accolades lionization, which in turn can most often make the object of such affection discontented, but as far as his own honoring goes, "I don't understand it, but you put up with it," laughs Autio.

While Autio's most acclaimed work is figurative ceramic vessels, he has worked in a variety of materials and other media. In addition to commissions in ceramic relief and tile murals, he has worked in bronze, concrete, glass, fabricated metal sculpture, and design of colorful Rya tapestries. Most of these were commissioned for public buildings in the Northwest and one is in Finland.

Even though he's dabbled in the deliciousness of other art mediums, Autio's love for clay is implacable: "I still love it because there are so many ways you can go with it and because it requires great focus and concentration. There's the interesting technical side to firing clay, and the sculptural side, and the painting side. Other arts seem so distant to me right now," he says.

Now that he's enduring his third struggle with Leukemia, Autio isn't entirely enthusiastic about putting in long hours in the studio or having to pound, pummel and pulverize clay, an earthly element notoriously physical to work with. Some days his formerly stout hands feel so feeble that, after only a few hours of work, his mind, body and spirit slump, and his fingers pain him once more.

Autio, who's keenly aware that a lifetime of artful productiveness will certainly cease sometime in the next few months, speaks of his personal achievement and expressive brilliance with an unaffected honesty that could make even the godly feel humble. Speaking with single-minded humbleness, he extols the artistic aptitude of his wife of 65 years, Lela, and of the talents of his contemporaries and predecessors.

The biggest mental hurdle for Autio is that he still has wide-ranging artistic interests, and that his intellectual power and will are vigorous. But the sobering facts of Leukemia's complications shape his mode of reasoning, thus provoking an assuaged emotional response in him.

"You know, when I was first diagnosed with Leukemia doctors told me that I didn't have long. These wonderful doctors have already given me a couple of years more than what was expected, and I appreciate that. Even if I've only got another six months left to my life, see, that's okay as long as I'm busy up until then."

5 out of 5 stars

Perfect March 4, 2008
This book is perfect for people who love Rudy Audio. It is worth the price.

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