Oral history interview with Rudy Autio, 1983 Oct. 10 - 1984 Jan. 28

ORAL HISTORY INTERVIEW WITH RUDY AUTIO
IN MISSOULA, MONTANA AND SEATTLE, WASHINGTON
OCTOBER 10 & 12, 1983; JANUARY 28, 1984
LAMAR HARRINGTON, INTERVIEWER

RA: RUDY AUTIO
LH: LAMAR HARRINGTON

LH: I'm speaking to Rudy Autio in his studio in Missoula, Montana, and I wanted to say, Rudy, that this is about my third trip to Missoula. I've always been so favorably impressed with the place; there's almost a kind of a romanticism, as far as I'm concerned, about the landscape. When I opened the curtains this afternoon, the yellow trees were so dazzling I could hardly believe it, when the sun came out this afternoon.

RA: It's been fantastic.

LH: And the campus is so beautiful.

RA: Um hmm.

LH: And Turner Hall, where I'm staying, is, as Don Bunse [printmaker, faculty, University of Montana] called it last night, spare, as far as the furnishings go. But it's one of the most comfortable places I've ever stayed, and I feel so good in it.

RA: (laughs) Ah, good.

LH: I have a six-foot bathtub, can you believe it?

RA: Really!?

LH: Right. Which is kind of unusual today, except for certain specialized bathrooms.

RA: Well, it's pleasantly camp, I think. (laughs)

LH: (laughs) Well, I just think it's wonderful. I'm enjoying this place a lot.

RA: Yeah.

LH: I was thinking as I enjoy it a lot, about how you came to Missoula over 25?years ago, and I just wonder, before we get into the beginning of your life, actually, if you think you made the right decision?

RA: Well, I think so. Of course, I have to stand by that now.

LH: (laughs)

RA: I really have enjoyed Missoula in all the years that I've been here, since I started the ceramics department here in 1957. I've seen so many good students go through the program, and I've remained good friends with them over the years, which is kind of interesting. I still keep in touch with many of them; not all of them, of course, but especially the graduate students have been very nice to know over the years and maintain contact with. A lot of them have done well, and I think they've all done well. It's just that some have become luminaries in the field and others haven't. But it's been a very worthwhile 25years.

LH: I was also thinking about your own work during that time.

RA: Well, having left the Bray's [Bray's and Archie Bray's refer to the Archie Bray Foundation throughout the interview], I became centered on making ceramic objects, sculpture, and vessel-making. Part of that time, I dealt primarily with murals and reliefs for buildings and that kind of thing. So there was a kind of a change in the direction and thrust of my work; that's true.

LH: As far as the university here, your having been here these 25?years, do you feel like you've had a lot of freedom to do what you felt was right for you?

RA: I think so. Of course when I came to Montana, at the huge salary of $5,000 a year, you know, I knew could pocket half of that money and save it. And then also do my work. Compared to the Bray Foundation?-- which was a situation where you worked from sun to sun?-- teaching was a snap. And you had your summers off and you had weekends and things like that, that seemed like an awful lot of time to work. I think that if you compare Montana to some of the larger universities, we really have very heavy teaching loads. But I've never known anything else, so I still think it's all right. You know, I hear of schools where the professors teach two days a week and things like that, and I've never known that kind of an experience. We've always worked every day with heavy teaching schedules. But other than that, the university does provide a kind of an atmosphere where one is allowed to work. Now I don't think that you could find it anywhere else. It's the patron of our time, you know. It has given me the freedom to pursue my ideas the way I felt I wanted to do it. I think that if I'd stayed at Bray's and continued to do ceramic tiles and commissions for buildings, it's very likely the work would have been of a different kind over the years. Commercial art, if you want to call it, to some extent. Where you're forced to make a living, you have to know where the next buck is coming from. And the atmosphere at the university has certainly helped me do the things I've wanted to do, or the things that I have done.

LH: Going back to the very beginning: I was reading that you were born?-- is it Arne?

RA: It's Arne [pronounced Arnie] Rudolf Autio, officially.

LH: A-R-N-E, R-U-D-O-L-F.

RA: That's right.

LH: Autio.

RA: Um hmm.

LH: On October 8, 1926.

RA: Um hmm.

LH: So I can say, "Happy Birthday," can't I?

RA: Yes. As a matter of fact, I just turned 57.

LH: Did you have a party yesterday?

RA: Yes, sort of. There were a lot of people around, and I got a lemon pie, which I very much like, instead of cake. (chuckles) One candle. And, actually on my birthday, Lela [RA's wife--Ed.] and I went to Flathead Lake where I have a cabin, and we sailed the boat a little and drained the water lines, and all that old stuff with winter coming and everything. And, so my birthday was kind of sedate, kind of quiet, but they celebrated my birthday yesterday, which was on the 9th.

LH: Oh, I see, this is the 10th, that's right.

RA: Right.

LH: You were born in Butte, Montana?

RA: Um hmm.

LH: I remember going through Butte once a very long, long time ago, and I thought it seemed like a very different looking place, to me. I was very young at the time.

RA: That's a kind thing to say. That it's different. (laughter)

LH: Well, it looked very foreign to me. It's been many, many years ago. I was a child, and I don't remember it too well, but could you describe Butte?

RA: Well, the Butte that I knew was a very interesting busy, bustling place. It was, when I think back as a child growing up in Butte in the thirties and early forties, no mainly the thirties, it was just like living in Brooklyn. It was an interesting, busy city. And very dense with humanity. You have to think of Butte as a bustling mining camp that has been going now for about a hundred years or longer. It was at its peak in the twenties and thirties, and I remember it in the thirties. Or perhaps even earlier than that Butte was sort of an oasis between Minneapolis and the Coast; it was the the big city! With opera, acting companies, the arts, boxing matches, and Lindbergh, and all of those people, you know. The climate and life of the city of Butte was really pretty outstanding at one time. And I can remember places like Park and Main in Butte just dense with people.

LH: Now where was this?

RA: Park and Main in Butte, Montana.

LH: Oh, Park and Main streets?

RA: That's right in the center of town. And there were streetcars and automobiles and people and cops, and it was small enough [so that--Ed.] a lot of people knew each other?-- and very ethnic in nature. There were communities; there were the Italians and the Yugoslavians and the Finlanders and the Jewish people and the Cornishmen, and all kinds of ethnic groups that maintained their own cultural identities in their own little colonies around the city.

LH: Did they come there precisely to work in the mine?

RA: Yeah, this was the immigrant population that came to Butte in the 1900s, on up to about 1920, you could say. The great influx of immigrants. And so they naturally settled in their own colonies, made their own churches, established their own halls and social communities, had their own restaurants, and stores, and yet all of this really melted together in this wonderful crazy city. And the interesting thing was that all of the company heads?-- the ACM [Anaconda Copper Mining Company] heads-- were living in the same community, practically next door to the miners, who were down the block. So, they didn't live in New York and clip coupons, but they lived right in the city, in their splendid houses, with servants and everything like that. But the miners were just down the block, a few houses down. It was this kind of mix that made Butte interesting. There's a lot of interesting history about Butte.

LH: I've always thought?-- I haven't read much about it, and I guess I thought of a more rural kind of situation. I don't know why I would think that, when thousands of people must have had to work in the mines.

RA: Right. This is a kind of paradox, really, where you have a very urban feel to a community, but it's placed in the rural west. Now, my background is so entirely unrural that you can't believe it. I never went out riding horses, or farming. Sure, to some extent, you did that because it wasn't far; 15 miles and you were out of the city, less than that. But, the city life is what I knew and kind of grew up in?-- tenements, housing tenements, one right next to another, three- or four-story tenements. No yards, no lawns. It was like living in Brooklyn! That's the closest comparison...

LH: This is giving me a whole new understanding of the way you grew up.

RA: Yeah.

LH: I've always thought of you as a rural person.

RA: Is that right?

LH: That's interesting. Now your family was Finnish?

RA: Yeah.

LH: And you said that there was a colony of Finlanders there.

RA: There must have been at least 2,500 to 3,000 Finnish people that lived on East Broadway in Butte. And they had their own Finn halls, and churches, and stores, and everything you wanted. It was almost a self-contained community. I grew up speaking Finnish. Practically all of my playmates spoke Finnish. And it was very easy to learn the language, because it was all around you all the time. Even today, with the very few remnants of that very old immigrant population, they have never quite adjusted to speaking English, for example. They've always lived in this Finnish community-- and been buried there, for that matter. So, they've spoken Finnish all their lives. They still have a tough time dealing with English; isn't that strange?

LH: Are your parents now deceased?

RA: Yeah.

LH: And what did your father do?

RA: He was a miner. And mother worked in the boarding houses as a cook, and we ran a tenement house, a little, you know, rental house. I think we had about twelve apartments that we rented for $20 a month, or something like that.

LH: How about brothers and sisters.

RA: I have one sister. I had a brother who was killed when he was a child. That was, of course, many years ago. But there were three youngsters in the family. My brother was born in Finland. My sister and I were both born in this country.

LH: And what has [your sister] done over the years?

RA: Trudy?

LH: Has she been an artist?

RA: No, she studied languages and philosophy and writing when she was a student. She studied at the University of Helsinki for a while, and in Germany and elsewhere, but most of her training was at a little Finnish college in [Hancock], Michigan called Suomi College. That's where she did her undergraduate work. Gertie, as I call her-- everybody else calls her Trudy-- Gertie has lived in East Lansing, Michigan, for many years, 30 years, I think.

LH: So out of your immediate family you are really the only one who has been an artist.

RA: Yes. Well, Gertie weaves; she's a good weaver.

LH: Oh she does.

RA: Um hmm.

LH: Did your family take advantage of a lot of the things that were happening in Butte, such as... Did you say opera? Was there opera?

RA: Well, that happened in the cultured part of the community. No, I don't think my parents were involved in that. They were very active in their church and that kind of activity, but... Opera in Butte at one time was, you know, part of the hoi polloi that you have to cross, but they did have these theater companies come through and put on plays and all kinds of things, in the early days, before the movies got big. I'm talking about an older history of Butte that I really don't know that much about, just to tell you what kind of a city it was like.

LH: As you look back at it, what kinds of effects, besides what you've already touched on somewhat, did the mines have?

RA: On?

LH: On the atmosphere of the city.

RA: Well, of course, the mines provided the main economic activity of Butte. And there were just literally thousands of miners there from all ethnic groups, and there was a great intermixture of that. But how can you typify a mining city? It's a hard-drinking, tough, you know, fun-loving, but hard-working kind of a city, and that's the way the people were that I knew.

LH: You know, I often wonder... We don't hear about mining cities very often except when there're labor problems, or when there is a mine cave-in.

RA: Um hmm.

LH: Those are two things that I remember in my mind at least, when mining comes to my attention. And of course there's been more [attention] now with emphasis on the environment in recent years, but I think about the dangers of the mine, and...

RA: They were tremendously dangerous places to work in, and there were terrible accidents there almost constantly. But of course the company knew, you know, the newspapers and none of this became wide public knowledge.

LH: Oh, the companies ran the newspapers probably.

RA: Right, the ACM Company ran both of the newspapers in town, and so if there was a terrible accident, it was usually buried in the back pages. Unless it was something like the spectator mine disaster where, you know, over 200 men were killed in that particular fire.

LH: That came out, uh huh.

RA: There were several of those kinds of incidents, but they weren't big news, necessarily, national news.

LH: I've thought about the way people must feel in a mining city, and you were speaking about it, about their being very hard-working, but also you were saying hard-drinking...

RA: Yeah.

LH: ...and fun-loving. And it does seem to me that if you lived under the spectre of tragedy all the time, that people would tend then, perhaps, to be more like that than other people might be.

RA: I think you're right, LaMar. I think that's probably generally true, but I can't speak for other mining communities. Certainly it had a lot of similarity to places like Pittsburgh, maybe the steel mills, which was also very dangerous work in the old days, and...

LH: I wonder what this would have to do, too, with religion. If we're comfortable, we don't pay much heed to religion, generally. But if there are problems in life then you begin to embrace it more.

RA: Um hmm, um hmm.

LH: It would seem to me that religion might be, I mean, you can't really generalize maybe, but it does seem to me that churches might be very important in a mining town.

RA: Oh yes, and in Butte too. You know, the largest foreign population there were the Irish of course.

LH: Oh, um hmm.

RA: And there was a very strong Catholic community there. Still is today. In my neighborhood, the Irish, interestingly enough, lived on one side of the street and the Finns on the other; we all became very good friends. The Finns learned about Irish wakes, and vice versa. [spoken with an accent] (chuckles)

LH: When you were there...

RA: They drank together, and, you know, that...

LH: (chuckles) Before you ever became an artist then?-- way back then; I'm assuming you weren't an artist then?-- did you see a lot of art in

the churches around there? Traditional religious art in the Catholic churches?

RA: Well, you see I never went to the Catholic church. I knew they were full of-- we would peek in, see.

LH: Oh.

RA: And we would be amazed at all of this sculpture and everything they had inside. The paintings, very lovely things. No, the art in the Finnish Lutheran Church was very spare, if any. And so I didn't have much contact there. Although as a youngster, of course, it was church every Sunday, and Sunday school, and all that stuff. They would send Finnish pastors from the Suomi College in Hancock, Michigan, and Minnesota to come over here to preach to the flock. They were circuit preachers, who used to come around to our community.

LH: Did your church going go on all through the time that you were in Butte, and perhaps afterwards?

RA: Yes, as long as I was there. I lived in Butte till about the age of 16.

LH: Did you graduate from high school there?

RA: Um hmm, um hmm.

LH: What about some of your relatives? Did you have aunts and uncles there?

RA: Oh yes. I had aunts and uncles, primarily on my mother's side. When my mother emigrated to this country, she had an uncle and a sister living in Butte. That is, one uncle in Michigan, I believe, but a sister in Butte, which was the means by which she was able to come from Finland to the United States. Her sister paid for her passage, in other words. So mother came to the United States, as I remember, around 1914, and Dad had arrived here. They met in this country, of course. Dad was a miner in a small goldmining camp west of Butte, a place called Southern Cross, Montana. And Mother got a job as a boarding-house worker; that is, she was a cook and a waiter. So that's how they got to know each other. And they were married in Butte, in about 1917, I believe. Maybe earlier than that. Yes, it had to be earlier than that. I'm a little fuzzy on those dates.

LH: Are their remains now in Butte?

RA: Yeah. Mother passed away at the age of 90 last year. And Dad passed away about two years before that.

LH: Amazing. I guess I keep wondering then where along in here did you start to be interested in art?

RA: Well, I think that we had very excellent public schools in Butte. I'd like to talk about that a little, because I feel that the grade school and the high school were very important to me. The grade school was completely staffed by wonderful Irish schoolteachers who had a love of poetry and drama, and were very friendly to the arts. We had the Sullivans and the Mulhollands and the O'Briens and they were terrific people, and very good with the youngsters. You can imagine the kind of youngsters they had to deal with; half of them couldn't speak English when they entered the first grade. But by the time they got through with you, you really had quite a lot of exposure to poetry, the arts, and... I think much more so than they do today! I think the art appreciation programs in the grade schools, at least in Missoula, as far as I can compare, are much thinner than what we had. But then again, there was another adjunct to this. In addition to the good grade school background that I felt I had, we had the WPA art program.

LH: Ohhh.

RA: Works Progress Administration. They had artists who were, you know, being supported by the Depression assistance, whatever.

LH: When you were six or seven, something like that?

RA: No, when I was about nine. And they used to come in the schools and put on art shows. And they would teach evening classes, which I attended. I learned to draw from those people.

LH: That would have been over several years, probably, wouldn't it, to...

RA: Well, I can't say that I did this a long time.

LH: You were nine years old in 1935.

RA: I can certainly remember about a year of intensive evening classes with the WPA art people. And then that remained an interest. I used to go up to their center, up on Montana Street, and watch them make silkscreen prints. They were skilled artists at the time. You know, trained artists.

LH: Now probably most of those artists who were working with WPA were from the state of Montana. Is that right?

RA: I don't know if they were or not, LaMar. I wouldn't have any way of knowing.

LH: I think in most states it was that way.

RA: It could be, yeah.

LH: I wonder if you can remember any of their names.

RA: Gosh, I wish I could. I just don't remember.

LH: Well, so really, along in there, you did become interested in art.

RA: Yeah.

LH: Quite early actually.

RA: Um hmm. I had my first show of drawings when I was nine years old, (laughter) which traveled to Billings. I was pretty much of a whiz at drawings, see, and they were impressed because I could copy things out of magazines and do the shading and that kind of drawing pretty well. And then of course, following the grade schools there, I went to a high school and studied with a wonderful lady named Carolyn Busch Jacobs, who had been trained at the Parson's School of Design. She had gotten her degree from Bozeman [at that time Montana State College], studying with Olga Ross Hannon, and she had studied in Paris, so she really was well trained in fine arts.

LH: Now tell me again the name of the person she studied with at Bozeman.

RA: Olga Ross Hannon.

LH: And this teacher's name again?

RA: Was Carolyn Busch, and Jacobs was her married name then.

LH: Isn't that intersting that she had gone to Parson's School?

RA: Yes, um hmm.

LH: And what was her specialty?

RA: Well, it was?-- I can't be sure now. As a teacher she taught us many things like painting and crafts. There was another art teacher, who was equal in importance, and his name was Pop Weaver. We all called him Pop Weaver. Today I don't know his name... I think it was Charles. But anyway, Pop Weaver had studied at the Chicago Art Institute. And he had worked the Ashcan group. His painting and his poster-making were wonderful. And he was a real stickler for having us do a lot of drawing. Practically all we did in his classes was draw portraits and figures. And we used to sit there every day and draw a portrait of some student who'd sit up there, and so we got pretty good at portrait drawing. And Pop was a good teacher, in that respect. He wasn't as good as Carolyn, but he was a more active maker of art himself. He could do all these wonderful beaux-arts posters of school activities, football games, and things like that. I think they were classics.

LH: You had a lot of art training in high school!

RA: Well, really I think so, yeah!

LH: This is something else I didn't know about. This is wonderful. So, you must have graduated, did you say, at age 16 or 17, something like that.

RA: Well, I graduated from high school in 1944. By this time I had joined the navy, and I came back to graduate with my class in the spring of 1944. I was on leave.

LH: So would you have joined the navy in that last year, or...

RA: In April of '44, I think it was.

LH: So then, when you left high school, what happened about the navy? The war was almost over.

RA: Well, it was almost over, but it went on for a couple of years, well, about a year or a year-and-a-half longer. I went to Farragut for my boot training and then I went to Oklahoma, where I was trained as an airplane mechanic. And I spent about two years in Galon, Nevada, out in the desert. (chuckles)

LH: What did you do in Oklahoma?

RA: I was sent to an aviation machinist...

LH: Oh. Yeah.

RA: Training school. I was in that training for about five months, I think.

LH: And then after Oklahoma?

RA: Well, I was briefly stationed at Alameda, California, and I volunteered to go to sea. I wanted to go see some action, see. So they put us on a train; instead of going out to sea, we went out in the middle of the Nevada desert. (chuckles) I couldn't believe it! Here we were out in?-- Hazen, Nevada, had some kind of a railroad stop; there wasn't anything there, and then finally about five minutes later some kind of a truck pulled up and we threw our sea bags into this truck. (chuckles) And it took us out to this air base way out nowhere.

LH: (laughs)

RA: And that's where I spent my navy experience.

LH: So you were really happy that the war was about over then. (laughter)

RA: Yeah.

LH: So after that, did you go almost immediately then to Montana State?

RA: After I got out of the navy I went to Montana State, yeah. [I] enrolled in the architecture program there. And I was a very sloppy architect. I kept thinking of how good looking the girls were over in the art department, and I thought, "Hell, I don't need this." (chuckles) And I went over to the art department, really liked it, and... In the meanwhile, I'd gone back to talk to Carolyn, my old high school art teacher, Carolyn Jacobs, and she said, "Sure. You'd like art. You'd do fine." And so I did. There I met good people. I met my wife Lela, who was a crackerjack art student and president of the Art Club. (chuckles) We fell in love with each other and ran around with each other. And there was Pete Voulkos; he was a student over there at the time. And a lot of good friends that I still maintain close touch with today.

LH: So when you started out, you were actually majoring in art, then? So there wasn't a question...

RA: Well, I majored in architecture for one brief quarter before I entered into the art program, where I stayed.

LH: Oh. So you were really majoring, so there wasn't really any question about what courses you were going to take, probably.

RA: Yeah, right.

LH: What about Frances Senska?

RA: Well, Frances Senska was a brand-new teacher there at the state university, or state college, as it was called then. She'd just gotten out of the Waves-- she was a captain or a lieutenant in the Waves, but she'd had art training at Grinnell College. She'd also had home economics there. But she had studied with Moholy Nagy and Fyorgy Kepes at Chicago Art Institute. She had studied with Maija Grotell, the famous Finnish potter, at Cranbrook. I think this was a brief contact; it wasn't concentrated study. And she had worked with Marguerite Wildenhain for a while. So she had about as much pottery training as one could find, among...

LH: Very broad...

RA: Right!

LH: ...when you think of all three of those.

RA: And so Frances set up a ceramics department there. Not that we were particularly interested in it; we had to take it, see. It was a required course. But it was fun to work with Frances and help her build the shop, you know, build the kick wheels and the kilns, and set up a basic shop, and we dug clay near Bozeman. We used that kind of material. And Pete [Voulkos--Ed.] had to take it too, along with the rest of us-- although he was primarily a painter. But he fell in love with ceramics. He was very good at it. He took to ceramics like a duck to water. And pretty soon he was throwing large vases about eight inches high, and they were perfect. (chuckles) After a while, he was spending all his time in the ceramics department. Pete always had this magnetism about him, even as a student. So we all hung around Pete and watched him throw and make stuff. His work really became very good, you know, in the late forties there. To a point where he was sending to the Witchita show and other nationals and to the Oregon Ceramics Studio?-- you remember that?

LH: Um hmm, good.

RA: Under Lydia Hodge. And he started to win prizes all over the country, even as a student. He was still interested in painting, along with ceramics, but ceramics gradually started to take over in his case.

And I hung around Frances a lot. I practically took every course she taught. But you know there were only four teachers there. (chuckles) So they had to teach everything.

LH: In the art department?

RA: In the art department. Frances taught crafts and lithography and ceramics and design. And so I took everything Frances taught.

LH: And were you doing some throwing? At that time?

RA: Oh, of course, we all had to throw a little bit. And then we all had to make things and glaze them. There were certain class projects that we had...

LH: Also hand building? Did you do some hand building?

RA: I started to do that, yeah, I wasn't very good at throwing even then. I can't throw pots. (laughter) But, yeah, sure, I can throw pots, I guess, and I did throw some, later on, but not very well.

LH: How about influences from outside at that time? Was there any opportunity to hear about things that were going on other places?

RA: As you can imagine, we were very isolated. Practically all the information we ever got about the outside art world was through magazines. There were no shows to speak of. No museums to see, or anything like that. So it was a an inbred kind of training that we got. I think Montana State College had a good art program as far as being an isolated little college town was concerned, but there just simply wasn't any contact with the outside. Except through some wonderful teachers. Bob De Weese came there then, as a painting teacher, young guy, fresh out of college. We were very close to him. He'd studied in Ohio and Iowa, amongst some of the best painters of that time. I can't remember Bob talking about these painters, but Bob was a good painting teacher. We had a lot in common with him. And Frances?-- and Jesse Wilbur, of course. Jesse had studied in Greeley, Colorado, with a lady named Stinchfield, and she had these ideas from cubism and that kind of influence, you know. We were aware of Picasso and Matisse and the great luminaries in the art world, of course. We took art history surveys and studied modern art through slides. But beyond that, we didn't really ever get a chance to see the real thing.

LH: The person that you just mentioned a minute ago, was she in Colorado, did you say?

RA: Jesse Wilbur?

LH: No, the one that she had some contact with.

RA: Stinchfield?

LH: Right. Can you spell that name?

RA: It's S-T-I-N-C-H-F-I-E-L-D.

LH: So when you graduated from Montana State, you went to Washington State University for your graduate training, but you also got involved with Archie Bray, all kind of together.

RA: Well, now...

LH: Which happened first?

RA: Following graduation, I applied to several schools in the Northwest, and I got the T.A. offer at Pullman, so I went to Pullman. Pete went to Arts and Crafts, in Oakland, for his graduate work. Pete is a little older, and so he was a little ahead of me. But then, after there, we had done one year in graduate school, and then Pete got... Now, mixed with this, we had met the brickmaker, Archie Bray, you see.

LH: Right.

RA: And he wanted to hire a couple of potters, or a couple of art people who liked to work in clay. And through Peter Meloy, who's another friend of ours in Helena, we got to know Archie. Pete got the job working as a potter there, because in the meanwhile the Archie Bray Foundation had gotten started. So Pete went to work there and I graduated about a half a year later, and Pete says, "Well, come on over, you know, there's a place for both of us." So we both started to work there, and we helped build the shop, and the wheels, and the kilns, and all of that.

LH: Now an awful lot has been written about the Archie Bray Foundation, I think?-- I know of about three different places. But would you want to make any comments about Archie, Senior?

RA: Well, he was a very dynamic kind of person in his own way. He was kind of short, but a tough boss in the brickyard. He liked to be the hard-driving boss in the brickyard. And he was a different personality over there, than he was after five o'clock, when he was just as gentle as a lamb. Going back into Archie's history a little, he was one of the first ceramic engineers to graduate from Ohio State, in their ceramic engineering program, which I think was around 1910. Then he inherited his father's brickyard, in about 1930, but he always had a close feeling for the arts, you know. He would actually underwrite the cost of a community concert, for example. I think he played the piano a little. And he was interested in the local theater productions. I can remember working for Archie there. He put on a play, called My Friend Anna. I don't know how he did this, or why he did it.

LH: Was he the producer, or the director, or did he act in it?

RA: Well, he kind of organized it all, and got the players together. I remember Lela and I going down there, painting the backgrounds. (chuckles) Archie always had his hand in things like that. But he wanted to make the Archie Bray Foundation happen. First of all starting as a pottery, but he envisioned painting studios there, possibly printmaking studios, music studios, and the only thing that really got off the ground in his lifetime was the pottery.

LH: Before we go into more on Archie Bray, let's talk then about Washington State.

RA: Okay.

LH: You went there...

RA: Well, I went to study with George Laisner at Pullman, because I'd heard that George Laisner was doing bronze casting, and that interested me. I was interested in sculpture when I graduated from Bozeman. And I'd done some woodcarving and casting?-- plaster casting, that kind of thing, that every art student does?-- but I wanted to get into sculpture. I heard that George was a real crackerjack at casting and making things like that. So that was another attraction for going there.

LH: So you really hadn't done any of that, then, when you were still in Montana?

RA: Not at Bozeman, no. Not in my undergraduate years. And having gotten to Pullman I found out that George wasn't interested in casting at all! (both chuckle) But he was interested in many things. In any case, Pullman was a good experience, and I met people like Andy Hofmeister, who was a painting teacher there. And worked with George, and Keith Monaghan. And so it was?-- and Harold Balazs. Harold Balazs was a fellow student and he was worth going to Pullman for, you know, just to get to know him.

LH: What about Harold? What can you say about Harold?

RA: As a student then?

LH: Yeah, and as an artist and...

RA: Oh, he was the same as he is now. Just, you know, going in high gear, running when everyone else was walking, and very active. Gosh, he was making jewelry and painting and doing prints and... The single most memorable thing about Harold in those days-- I remember his graduation, you know. I had another year to go, but he was leaving. And he had a box of jewelry, enameled jewelry, and this is what he set out into the world with. He says, "Well, I'm off to be an artist. I've [got] this little box of enameled jewelry." (laughs) And, you know, he went off to Spokane and started to be an artist and he's been an artist ever since. Glad to say, tremendously successful at it.

LH: So successful at the so-called public art, or architectural kinds of art.

RA: Yeah, right. And today you can go all over Spokane and Seattle and see Harold's work, all over the State of Washington.

LH: What do you remember about his personality?

RA: Oh, just bubbling, all the time. Dynamic. And mixed with that a real kind of intellectual streak. Concerned about good issues, and he read well, and he was active in drama and sports and, you know, just a very active person.

[interruption in taping]

LH: I've seen him [Harold Balazs] in situations where he'll come to Seattle and then?-- I don't know how he gets these [school] kids together, but it probably is something to do with the art commission?-- and he will sit with them and talk with them about a piece that he's done and it seems to me that he relates very well to them. And it inspires them.

RA: Yeah, it does.

LH: And I wondered if you saw any of that in those days?

RA: Well, there really wasn't too much opportunity to see that in Harold then, because aside from the fact that we were in classes together, in some classes, I just knew him as a fellow student. And so I didn't see him in any kind of a teaching role or anything like that. But I've seen him since, you know. We've been good friends over the years. And he's got magic when it comes to dealing with kids. I think maybe partly because he's never had to teach before, in the strict sense, and it's never gotten to be dreary.

LH: Yes, and it's actually a very informal situation usually, when he does that stuff.

RA: Sure.

LH: Another name that stands out for just a very short period of time at Washington State-- but it was probably long before you were there-- but I wondered if you, while you were there, heard anything about Clyfford Still's period there.

RA: Well, I had heard of Clyfford Still having been a student there, but of course he had gone to New York by that time.

LH: Okay.

RA: And really didn't mean much to me then.

LH: So when you were at Washington State, what about influences there?

RA: Well, this is a hard one to remember too. Now here, I probably did myself a disservice by going to another isolated school (both chuckle) when I could have gone to the University of Washington or to Oregon. Those were three options, but Pullman paid the most and I needed the money, with a young family. By that time we had Arne. And so I can't really think of influences. I did make a few trips to Seattle to the Puyallup Fair [Western Washington State Fair.]. We did this with George [Laisner.] a couple of times. But in those trips I met Kenneth Callahan, for example, and-- who else did I meet? The names get by me right now but?-- oh, Glen Alps. I worked with Glen Alps during the Puyallup Fair; we were making prints. Glen Alps and I were doing lithographs together. And of course, you know, he was quite a force by that time himself. And...

LH: Was that at the time that there were some quite good exhibitions of art at the Puyallup Fair?

RA: Yes, I think there were pretty good exhibitions. This was about...

LH: In the middle fifties?

RA: In 1951 and '52.

LH: Oh, I see.

RA: There's nothing really memorable. I remember?-- wait a minute. I think I remember seeing Boyer Gonzales paintings at that fair, which were very good for the time. And I think Boyer was a good painter, but shortly after that he became the chairman of the department at Seattle [School of Art, University of Washington]. I've always admired his paintings, but I don't think he painted much after that time, after he became chairman.

LH: He tried [to paint regularly--LH], I think. And every once in a while would paint a one-man show.

RA: Ah, uh huh.

LH: But I think it was very difficult. He was very busy at the university.

RA: Um hmm.

LH: So while you were at Washington State, then, what happened about your own art, as far as...?

RA: Well, I didn't get along with the potter at all. There was a lady named Harriet Middleton who taught pottery, who wouldn't let me come into the shop. (laughter) You know, it's interesting that by this time, Pete Voulkos had quite a reputation, even in 1951 and '52, and she knew we were friends. But her alliances were a little closer to that of Carlton Ball, under whom she'd studied. Carlton Ball and Pete at that time were at opposite poles of the ceramic world. Carlton thought Pete was an upstart, which he was, and (laughs) and Harriet Middleton was Carlton's student. And I suffered from that association.

LH: Ahh.

RA: So Harriet wouldn't let me into the shop and wouldn't let me take ceramics. (laughs)

LH: That's terrible! I mean were you studying ceramics?

RA: Well, actually I was studying sculpture so it was all right, see, I didn't really care. But I knew quite a bit about ceramics and I guess she felt threatened or something, and I'd made a big piece that filled her kiln once, and she wouldn't let anyone else fire, so she had to fire my piece which must have rattled her no end.

LH: (laughs)

RA: She had to do it because it was part of my thesis exhibition. But that's the only time I ever had a chance to work in the shop there.

LH: So you worked with George. In metals?

RA: Um hmm.

LH: Constructing metals?

RA: Mostly I did all kinds of mixed media. I worked in wood, I carved stone a little, I did an aluminum casting, and I did some soldered wire pieces, and just a variety of media, which ultimately became my thesis. It's something I'm not too proud of-- that phase of work, you know.

LH: Now I'm assuming they didn't have any glassblowing at that time.

RA: No, they didn't. But George was a fun teacher. He was always active and, you know, always running around and doing interesting things, so it was fun to be around George.

LH: He did a lot of different things, didn't he?

RA: Yeah.

LH: I remember when he used to enter the Bellevue Fair [Arts and Crafts Fair.]. A lot of people around the Northwest entered that in those years, regularly.

RA: Um hmm.

LH: Every year you never knew what was going to come in from George Laisner.

RA: Um hmm.

LH: And it seemed like he was very much interested in a lot of things, and most of the things that he entered were really quite good quality, as I recall, too.

RA: Yeah. He was a tremendous craftsman, in the sense that he could make things work.

LH: Would he have used some flat glass pieces of some kind during that period, do you know?

RA: Could have. I remember there was quite a lot of painting that he was doing. And then his sculpture was very jewelry-like.

LH: He entered some sculptural things that were called jewelry.

RA: Yeah.

LH: To the Bellevue Fair.

RA: Yeah. But also some of this jewelry-like-- or its jewelry-like parts-- could also have been part of a kind of a large wood carving too. And it's a kind of mixed...

LH: Combinations of materials.

RA: Combinations like crazy.

LH: Uh huh.

RA: To a point where they didn't really work sometimes. But [he was] a skilled craftsman and [had] a lot of enthusiasm.

LH: It also seems to me that as the years went on George's design didn't really change a lot. Is that right or not?

RA: Very much the Bauhaus... You know the Bauhaus [steel] and that school and...

LH: Um hmm, yes I do.

RA: That was very much a part of George's thinking, as it was, you know, a very pervasive kind of thing in those years.

LH: Um hmm. Now in your own work, were you doing all abstract, or were there figurative kinds of things?

RA: I think they tended to be figurative, but also verging on abstract... Some pieces were totally abstract in nature. And I guess, no, I'll have to take that back. I think there was always some kind of imagery involved, either taking off from the use of the figures, or... I wasn't comfortable with total abstract work, you know. I always had to have something there that I could deal with in the way of figures or animals or landscapes. I did a lot of watercolor painting in those years. And I think that if I were to really look at it, I probably did more painting than I did sculpture.

LH: Um hmm. Did you do a lot of drawing, through all those years?

RA: Well, quite a bit, um hmm, printmaking.

LH: So the drawing really started very early, as early as when you were in secondary school, actually, and has come right along through all...

RA: Yeah, um hmm. I've always maintained a strong interest in it.

LH: So you got your graduate degree there, and I guess that probably took you two years?

RA: Took two years, um hmm.

LH: And then you went back to Archie Bray.

RA: Yes.

LH: Which you apparently had promised to do. Is that right, before you left there?

RA: Well, I had. We had worked there that summer. You know, there was an intervening summer? [Between normal academic years at WSU]

LH: Um hmm.

RA: And then both Pete and I went back to graduate school, and then we returned. So the second time I returned, it was full swing at Archie Bray.

LH: Um hmm. And the Western Clay Manufacturing Company, which apparently had been the name of the firm for a long, long time, was a commercial brickyard?

RA: That's right.

LH: And sometime in there, then, Archie had started this foundation. Is that right?

RA: Yes, by this time, it was established and the trustees at the time were Peter Meloy, Branson Stevenson, and Archie himself.

LH: Oh! Let's talk a little bit about the Meloys. Apparently they and Branson Stevenson were quite instrumental in getting [the thing built].

RA: Yes, they were. Branson Stevenson has always been a trained artist, but he was a businessman by profession. And he used to do prints and ceramics. Peter Meloy was a lawyer. And he was interested in pottery, primarily due to his association with Hank Meloy, his brother. Hank Meloy taught painting and drawing at Columbia University and he used to come out in the summers to visit Pete. So they would work together in their pot shop and Pete would make the pots and Hank would decorate them. Well, Hank would also do sculpture. Did some beautiful horses and things like that. He was really an outstanding artist. The reason we don't hear much of him [is because] he died very young.

LH: Now this was...?

RA: Hank Meloy.

LH: Hank. The one that was from Columbia?

RA: Yeah, right. And even today his drawings and paintings are just fantastic and he's unheralded, unheard of.

LH: Now I've seen a little bowl, one small bowl, in the collection of the Portland Art Museum.

RA: Yeah?

LH: And it is incredibly beautiful, the drawings on it are [see illustration Harrington, Ceramics in the Pacific Northwest, 1979, page 10].

RA: Really, yeah. That's true. Well, there are literally thousands of drawings, hundreds of thousands of drawings. I just don't know how many that Pete [Meloy] still has of Hank's work and paintings. You see, Hank died when he was quite young, 40, 45, dropped dead in Grand Central Station. Before he was really in full stride.

LH: In New York, in Grand Central Station?

RA: In New York.

LH: Ahh.

RA: But up to that time he had done all this painting, and even today you can go and see them, if anybody wanted to, but Pete has kind of given up on how to get his [Hank's] work known. I really love Hank Meloy's work, even today; I think it's very strong, interesting, good, solid work. Hank was doing a lot of drawing and just starting to paint quite a bit, but I'd say that his main interest was drawing, and sculpture, and to some extent painting.

LH: I think I've heard that the horses that he drew, that were so fine, were based on Chinese horses. Is that right?

RA: Yes, um hmm. He used to make horses like T'ang horses. He'd sculpt them. But his drawing then was a little different from that. Anyway, I think Hank has been a great influence on my life and my work. Even though I just knew him such a brief period of time.

LH: Do you own any of his drawings?

RA: Yes I do. I own one abstract drawing of Hank's. It's a colored drawing, just very fluid, with red and green shapes and black drawing. You know, I think that Hank also, in his own way, was probably interested in Gorky.

LH: Oh.

RA: I see hints of it in his work. But you know at the time Hank was working, people like Pollock weren't really very visible or that well known yet.

LH: Yes, um hmm.

RA: And so it's logical to think of a connection between Hank and Gorky, you know. And yet Hank's work was different, but you just see a few little things about it that was...

LH: Some little things that might remind you of some of the early Gorky things? Or...

RA: I would say the Gorky pieces of the middle forties. The kind of flower shapes.

LH: And strange little forms floating around here and there.

RA: Yeah. You see sometimes Hank would do straight abstract work. And there, I sense a connection. Now I might be wrong. But it stands to reason that being in New York at the time he would have absorbed that.

LH: Well, you know it would be really interesting for more people to see that work too.

RA: Oh, I think so. I think he should be seen. The guy is-- I mean, if it took a good archivist to go in there and select a show of Hank's drawings and paintings, I think it'd be very great.

LH: Because, the time is so right for doing something like that, it seems. Now, his brother may have lost hope that that could ever happen, but he may have lost hope before this period that we're in right now, when people are looking for things like that, it seems to me.

RA: Right. He was, well, let me put it this way. He was so much the artist, if you want to look at it and find a real Montana artist, he was so much better than anything else that was going on up here at the time, like all the cowboy painters and, you know... Charlie Russell, of course, is the big hero here, and he's best known. But Hank, I think, has equal stature, but was never known.

LH: Where did Hank go to school?

RA: I think he studied at the Chicago Art Institute.

LH: Oh.

RA: So in a way he was no longer a native here, [he] kind of moved on.

LH: But Pete remained here?

RA: Yeah, Pete remained here.

LH: And then Branson Stevenson was the businessman.

RA: Um hmm. Well, Branson was probably less visible as an artist. He did do prints, nice prints, nothing earthshaking. But he was always interested in promoting the arts and, oh, he did things, like he headed the art section at the State Fair every year. [He] put on the big exhibition for Montana. And then he was quite a force there, too, you know. He was one of the early potters around here.

LH: Now, before you went to Washington State, had you been hand-building anything?

RA: Probably, but I can't remember too much. Just student projects, you know.

LH: I see. So when you came back then... Oh, I know a name-- Lillian Boeschen.

RA: Lillian Boeschen. Right. Well, you see, in the interim year when Pete and I both returned to school... By this time the pottery was built; it was ready to go. So Lillian Boeschen, I don't know how, but she got the job as being the first resident potter here.

LH: I see.

RA: So really, in a sense, we're skipping Lillian when we say that we were the first ones; it's not quite accurate. Lillian was here for a very brief period, maybe six months, and then Archie fired her. Eased her out.

LH: Now thess buildings that you're talking about. You and Pete had helped build those. Is that right?

RA: Right. And volunteers.

LH: I see. And by buildings, there were kilns?

RA: We built kilns and the necessary equipment for a ceramics shop.

LH: But the beehive kilns, that was part of the brickyard.

RA: That's right. We used to fire in the beehive kilns, in the brickyard, before we had our own kilns built.

LH: I see. I've heard lots of stories about how Archie-- Senior-- used to sell the bricks, and he'd sell your murals along with them.

RA: Right, um hmm. Well?--

LH: And those would have been your first murals, I suppose.

RA: Yeah, you see, it started out this way: He'd go to a contractor or an architect, and he'd say, "Well, if you get this brick from me, why I've got a kid who'll make a nice plaque for you, you know." And (laughs) so I would make plaques. And that sort of started my interest in working with carved brick, and different kinds of things that went into buildings.

LH: Did you also hand-build some of those murals?

RA: Yes, um hmm. But, see, this is the way it started out. It started out in an old terra cotta, traditional terra cotta technique, where you made the model out of plaster, then you cast molds of the model, then you pressed clay into those molds, and that's the way it's done.

[Break in taping]

LH: Okay, now, to continue about the murals at that time, you were mentioning that there was a lot of press-molded kind of work.

RA: Traditional terra cotta forming, which Archie was familiar with. And he kind of showed me how to do this work, and so it was kind of unique to learn how to do it. Somewhere in there I also made a trip to the Denver Terra Cotta Company and watched some of the old craftsmen working. There were still a few of these old terra cotta facades that had to be repaired, and it was kind of sad to see this old plant with these great old craftsmen, you know, in their sixties, who were still pressing molds, and all the skill that they had. Hand craft.

LH: Now what was the name of that place?

RA: It was called the Denver Terra Cotta Company.

LH: I see.

RA: They were interested in me, because, hell, they'd never heard of anybody who still wanted to do ceramic decoration for buildings. (chuckles) And so they were very nice to me and showed me around the shop and how they did things. I wish I could have actually worked there for a while, because then I would have really picked up a lot of information, but with those few ideas and those that Archie had, why I worked in typical old terra cotta techniques. And, oh, I read some treatises by, what was his name? Wilson, of the University of Washington! I guess he was a professor of ceramics there.

LH: Yes...

RA: Many years ago, probably in the twenties. And anyway those were all helpful. But I didn't do all that much. I finally started to make these things out of carved brick, which was easier in a way, it was more direct, and I did four or five of these things for public buildings around Montana.

LH: Now this is still while you were at Archie Bray?

RA: Right.

LH: And would you say that most of these had some imagery, rather than [being] abstract?

RA: Yeah, they were practically all for churches. So they dealt with religious subject matter.

LH: So in addition to the murals, what other kind of work were you doing at that time?

RA: Well, that was principally it, and I did do ceramics and pottery. I did some sculpture, some pieces that weren't related to selling or anything, but working in ceramic sculpture. Some were nonobjective. Some contained imagery. I was feeling around for a lot of different ideas.

LH: How about horse imagery at that time? Did you do some horse sculpture?

RA: I did do some horses.

LH: And maybe some reliefs with horse heads?

RA: Yeah, I did some horse heads, and I did some reliefs, and pressings, and...

LH: I heard that you did something for chimneys. You took it on top of the roof.

RA: Oh, I made chimney pots.

LH: Chimney pots.

RA: Yeah.

LH: And were they more than just functional? Did they have some kind of decoration?

RA: No, they were simply functional, but here was a chance to deal with shape, of course. I didn't know what a chimney pot looked like, but an architect came by and said, "Do anything you want to." Well, of course, not having seen any chimney pots, but he just gave me a general idea of what had to be done, and I went ahead and made these.

LH: I've often thought I'd love to see one of those one day. And I tried to find one of those [at the Bray Foundation--LH] when I did the [historical ceramic show at Seattle Art Museum, 1979--LH], but nobody could seem to find them. I guess there were some hanging around Archie Bray for a while, but they couldn't seem to find them then.

RA: Could be. I think they were used on the job, and they're on a house in Great Falls.

LH: Oh.

RA: I did several of them, but I wouldn't say that this was any kind of extensive direction.

LH: I see. Another thing that you mentioned to me, about this time, you might have been becoming interested in, how can I say it? Something having to do with Eskimo.

RA: Okay. Well, that's true. We were in close association with the De Weeses through those years, and Jenny and Bob [De Weese] and I and a lot of people became interested in Indian dancing, or watching the Indian powwows. So some of that stemmed from an interest in watching the Indian dances. I can't say that it was a profound thing, or a deep-rooted thing, or something that affected me greatly, but I did do some pieces dealing with Indians, Indian dances, their costume, and that kind of thing, in the sculpture.

LH: But not doing necessarily Eskimo, perhaps?

RA: No. But I was interested in Toltec, the Aztec, some of the pre-Columbian, which kind of looks like Eskimo, perhaps. And I did see some Eskimo sculpture that I liked very much, but I didn't really make any pieces based on that interest.

LH: Do you remember by any chance the piece that the Weinsteins own, in Seattle?

RA: Yeah.

LH: I found it after my book on ceramics was published. I'd been searching for the earliest abstract slabwork that you'd done, and here I found this piece out in their garden.

RA: Um hmm.

LH: Would that by any chance be around that period, I mean from this Indian...?

RA: Yeah, that's one of the very early pieces. As a matter of fact, I kind of wanted to get that for my retrospective. But I guess it's damaged or something.

LH: Oh is it?

RA: I don't know now. Well, anyway, it was one of my very early pieces, about 1952, possibly even '51.

LH: And might it have been rather Indian imagery?

RA: I can't know, LaMar, you know. [RA appears to be trying very hard to remember].

LH: It's a figure, I'm sure.

RA: It's a lot of involved, kind of gingerbread, and it...

LH: Well, it seems that in the bottom part of it, from about here down, the slabs are more vertical and horizontal, and then up here there seems to be something that's circular.

RA: Yeah, but it's not really a figure.

LH: No. It's constructed. But the top of it, somehow I see a head, a human head on it, but I may be all wrong about that. So I'm trying to figure out if that's tying into all this Indian imagery.

RA: I don't think so. I think it was a piece that, interestingly enough, I still like a lot. It worked well for that period, you know. Good piece.

LH: And it worked out very well in that show too.

RA: Yeah. I was glad to see that in the show, because it was fun to see it again.

LH: Now, Pete [Voulkos], at this time, at Archie Bray, while you were going through all these things that you're now talking about, was he throwing more?

RA: Yeah, he was throwing pots, and I think he was in what you might call his "Elsie" period [from "Elsie the Cow," openwork bulls], you know; he was starting to attach things to pots. He'd throw a pot, put it upside down, and he was also drawing on them, and flattening them out, and just... It was after he'd gone to Black Mountain College [1953] and worked with, you know, the very latest people in the art world that there was a radical change in his work about that time.

LH: While he was still at Archie Bray?

RA: Yeah.

LH: And before, now I'm talking about the period before [Soetsu--Ed.] Yanagi and [Bernard] Leach and [Shoji] Hamada came [1952.]. Was he, or you, at that time, using any of the Japanese techniques, like in glazing and so forth?

RA: No, Pete was up on that stuff because he'd been doing that at Bozeman, as a senior student in ceramics. He'd also been doing it down in Arts and Crafts [Oakland] and at Mills College, where he worked with Tony Prieto for a while, I think.

LH: So he was doing a lot of that before Hamada and company ever came around?

RA: Yes. Very much so. I don't think that Hamada, Yanagi, or Leach showed us anything new about technique. We knew about technique. But what they showed us, I think, was a spirit that was very much different.

LH: I think we won't talk about visitors [to Archie Bray]. There is quite a bit of information about that in other places. Archie died in 1953.

RA: Yes, um hmm.

LH: That must have been the very strong end of a period.

RA: Well, we thought the end had arrived. He was the sole support, and we didn't feel that kind of sympathy or interest from Archie, Junior. As it happened, we were very wrong. Because Archie, Junior, was as interested and as helpful and as supportive as he could be without having any, you know, drive behind it. Archie had the motive to do it. And Archie, Junior, simply wanted to sustain his father's wishes. I have to admit Archie, Junior, was very supportive, but he just didn't have that?-- I don't know, had Archie, Senior, lived maybe we couldn't have stood it. He wanted a lot of things done his way, you know.

LH: Archie, Senior?

RA: Archie, Senior. And very often I was doing real dumb projects that I didn't like very much; you know, being under his thumb. Like doing a glaze tree [described by RA as a tree in clay relief with a bunch of leaves in different colors--LH] for Branson Stevenson.

LH: So there is a lot...

RA: I started to chafe a little bit under Archie, Senior.

LH: There's a lot of romanticism of course attached to Archie Bray, Senior, because that was most unusual for a man to have the drives that he had...

RA: Yeah.

LH: ...and the idealism about a lot of these things that he had. So it's easy for that to take over and the practical sides not. To sort of forget about all that.

RA: Right. Sure.

LH: Well, I think we'll quit for today, Rudy, and then start in 1954, at the time that Pete left for Los Angeles County Art Institute.

[Break in taping]

LH: This is a continuation of yesterday's interview with Rudy Autio. We're in the Fine Arts Building of the University of Montana. Yesterday, we were just finishing up about midway through the Archie Bray period.

RA: Um hmm.

LH: And we talked some about your work at that time. Did we talk about production work that you may have done at that time? Did you and Pete both do some production work as I've heard?

RA: Yes, we did. One of our projects was to do cast work. We made little dishes and gift items. Not dishes, ash trays, and planters. Some of these were slipcast in molds, and we did this for quite a while. Oh well, at least a period of about a year anyway. We had a jigger machine where we jiggered some planters. And Harold Balazs provided us with a stand that we put planters in. It became a very popular kind of thing that we sold at gift stores all over the country.

LH: Was that a wood stand, that Harold made?

RA: It was a metal stand.

LH: And so that was done mainly to make some money while you were there.

RA: Yeah, this was just a bread-and-butter item. Along with that, Peter would make some very beautiful pots that we would send. They were teapots and covered jars and bowls and little bottles, and they were very nice things. I used to do a little bit of that, but this was mainly after Pete left. We had a lot of gift shops that we had to fight to kind of keep supplied. And to a very limited extent, I tried to do that, but I couldn't sustain it. There were other potters that came there then: Doris Strawn and Jim and Nan McKinnell, and they kind of moved into the making of pottery because I couldn't keep up with it.

LH: And as we said yesterday, some of your time there was taken up with making murals and you described the techniques that you used with that.

RA: Yes. Those were terra cotta types of murals. I think I was talking about having gone to the Denver Terra Cotta Company...

LH: That's right.

RA: ...and watching some of these old craftsmen press molds, and they took me through the whole operation there, which was very interesting.

LH: And most of the subject matter for those murals at that time was religious?

RA: The ones I was doing, yes. They were primarily religious murals, primarily for churches and, in a few cases, for public buildings. There happens to be one of the very early ones right on the campus here at Missoula. It's on the Liberal Arts Hall.

LH: Is it on the outside of the hall?

RA: Yeah, it's a real ugly thing.

LH: I see.

RA: Yeah. (chuckles)

LH: It may be illustrated in the catalog. [They continue while looking at the catalog that accompanied the Autio retrospective exhibition of 1983--LH].

RA: Yeah, I think it is. It's this piece here.

LH: Ohhh!

RA: You see, this being composed of sections was then taken apart, each section was cast into a mold, and then pressings were made of each section, and those pressings were fired, glazed, and they're now on the wall over here on the Liberal Arts Building.

LH: That's the round one that's illustrated on page 6 of the catalog.

RA: Uh huh.

LH: Maybe I can go over and look at that when we've finished. Also, I was interested to see the two or perhaps three pieces in the catalog from that early period of figurative work, one being this one on page six, Mother and Child, as early as 1951.

RA: Um hmm.

LH: And then The Musicians and The Jugglers.

RA: Um hmm.

LH: Those were all apparently from that period.

RA: Approximately the same period. This [Mother and Child--LH] was earlier. The picture of the Mother and Child on page six here in the catalog is a piece I did as part of my graduate work at Pullman.

LH: Ah, I see!

RA: And so that actually is probably 1950 or '51. Even though it's labeled '51 here. I think this is probably a little more accurate because this in fact was part of my thesis exhibition.

LH: And that's terra cotta, unglazed, isn't it?

RA: Yes.

LH: Then you did pieces like The Jugglers and The Musicians when you were at Bray?

RA: That's right.

LH: And those are terra cotta, and are they unglazed?

RA: They're unglazed. No, one is glazed and the other is unglazed. Or one is partially glazed. The Jugglers is partially glazed and The Musicians is unglazed-- stoneware, cone ten.

LH: And it was during this early period at Archie Bray that you did, for instance, the horses.

RA: Yes. I think so. And the Weinstein piece in Seattle. And several like that, which I have no record of any more.

LH: And the ones?-- let's see now. Say the one on page 29 of the catalog, which is now in the Museum of the Rockies collection, this piece.

RA: Yes.

LH: I notice it has quite a bit of glaze on it.

RA: That's probably all glazed, yes. That's a stoneware piece about 1955, I think, somewhat later, that kind of followed the sculpture interest; we [Autio and Voulkos--LH] were doing a lot of sculpture, kind of wild sculpture. We started to do wild sculpture in clay. We got away from pots and it sort of paralleled the abstract expressionism movement that was just beginning in New York.

LH: Now, if this is 1955, were you just saying that you and Pete got away from the pots? Is that what you said?

RA: Yeah.

LH: '55 would have been after he left.

RA: Yes.

LH: But going back to another piece then, that is a constructed kind of work, on page-- just a minute I'll find it-- page eight, the one that's called the Tower. This one.

RA: This was fairly early on.

LH: This is dated in the catalog as 1952.

RA: I think that's probably right, um hmm.

LH: And I notice, for instance, that's glaze there, is it not, around that one aperture?

RA: Well, it's probably just slip. No glaze.

LH: I see.

RA: Most of these pieces were unglazed. I wasn't totally comfortable with glazing everything I made in those days. I still kind of liked the unglazed look about it. Because I felt that glaze oftentimes blunted the sculptural detail.

LH: I remember when I had a conversation with Pete some years ago. He had said he couldn't remember any slabwork or constructions that he had made before he left Archie Bray. And we talked about that quite a bit at the time, and he could not remember anything. There is a very nice piece in Seattle owned by the Jarvises [Connie and Fred], which is made up-- by Pete-- which is made up of four thrown elements. There's a thrown element at the bottom, kind of like a vase, and then three, I think, very similar elements that are stuck together like this.

RA: Yes.

LH: Maybe with epoxy, maybe he wasn't yet using epoxy. But the best date that I could find for that was probably 1955 and although Connie Jarvis had her connections [as a student--LH] with you and Pete at Archie Bray, she may have purchased that at a later time, because I don't think he remembered putting together any parts like that [as a totally abstract form--LH] at Archie Bray either.

RA: Well, there's one basic difference between the way Pete and I worked there. I was usually either coiling or slab building, whereas Pete's tool was the wheel, primarily. And even though he cut, slashed, and assembled, and put parts together, most of his approach was to throw the forms on the wheel and whether he opened them up afterward or not-- I'd say that that was the mainstream of his working technique. But Pete also used to hand build certain things like bulls, you know, with very open structure in them.

LH: Was this still at Archie Bray or...

RA: In the very early days at Bray's.

LH: I see.

RA: He constructed a few pieces that way, not many, two or three pieces. One was a figure. Kind of open, but hand built. And carved. And then another piece that I remember very clearly was a bull, a sculptural bull that was sort of open structure. There were holes in it, and that kind of thing. [It had a] large body with a small head, with horns, and it was a lot like some of the incised decoration he was doing on his pots. He didn't do too much of that, and going back to my earlier statement, his tool was the wheel. And so, as a consequence, those pieces that he did in those years were assembled to some extent, but wheelworked.

LH: So that would be the kind of piece that the Jarvises own, I imagine.

RA: Yeah, I think so. We kind of referred to it as his "Elsie" period.

LH: Oh, I wondered. You said that the other day. Do you mean Elsie the cow?

RA: You know, Elsie the cow. The udders hanging on...

LH: Yes. Yes, I see.

RA: ...and not that we disparaged that, but it was what he himself called Elsie pieces, I think.

LH: Now we also spoke yesterday about Pete having gone to Black Mountain in 1953, and the influences on him at that time. I think we didn't talk yesterday about the Hamada-Leach-Yanagi visit in 1952. You've covered that in a number of conversations, I think.

RA: Yes.

LH: But if you can stand to go through it again, it...

RA: Well, no problem. I may probably remember different things, in talking with you now. But a lot of this is fading into the distant past now, so I can't be too clear on everything that happened there now. The things that seem most memorable to me was the ease with which Hamada worked on the wheel. I think this was the most beautiful part of it, to watch Hamada work on the wheel was just beautiful. It was the economy of everything he did. The feel he had for clay, which can't really be described. For example, if it took one spin of the wheel to make a mark on it, that's all that was necessary, you know. When we throw on the wheel, we sit there and crank away and crank and crank and crank and crank and hope that by cranking something great would happen. [said with a smile in his voice] But Hamada didn't need to do that. And then, the other thing that I noticed was the casual way he handled pieces. He just sliced them off the hump and if he left an accidental finger mark on it, which you know we would have cleaned off with a sponge, why he just left it. And why not? It was just a very comfortable way of looking at it. And I often watched him when he picked these pieces off the wheel; he would examine them, turn them over a little, and then approve, and you could just see that he was at one with the material. [He would] put them aside and kind of look at them a little and then he'd go on to another one. But it was that comfort and ease that he had with his material, the mind and idea and the material was all together.

LH: And at that time...

RA: That was a real revelation to me, just to see it. He didn't have to speak English to be able to tell me what he was doing, you see. And so that was neat. Leach, on the other hand, was the scholar, and he would expound about philosophy and taproots and many things that in retrospect were...

[Break in taping]

LH: [I believe you are saying in retrospect--LH] that Leach's contributions didn't have as much effect on you as Hamada's would have had.

RA: I think watching Hamada meant more to me than hearing Leach explain the philosophy of ceramics.

LH: As you thought...

RA: And yet there was another person?-- I don't want to minimize him, either-- Dr. Soetsu Yanagi, who traveled with the group. He was a very perceptive gentleman, who was pretty kind to us and we could see his sense of appreciation as being very important to the whole business as well. He would walk around the yard with us and look at the salt glaze on the sewer tile, and I was a little amazed that a scholar of aesthetics would be arrested by looking at some salt-glazed sewer tile. (chuckles) He appreciated a lot of things like that. He also delivered a lecture about Zen and Korean pottery. This was an important lecture because he was a Zen scholar, having taught at Harvard, and was returning now to Japan, where he later founded the Mingei Society, the folk craft museum. In retrospect, as I looked at Yanagi, he was a very gentle man with a lot of perception and he didn't look down on us, like perhaps Bernard Leach did a little. I never felt that about Hamada. Hamada tolerated us as as being young people who were promising in the arts, and he was very kind to us, whereas Leach was a little impatient with us.

LH: I remember Frances Senska saying how important the Yanagi part was to her, how it gave a whole new kind of philosophical view to the importance of what you were all trying to do.

RA: Um hmm.

LH: And an interesting story about Hamada was when he-- this would have been in 1963, when you were at the university.

RA: Yes.

LH: When he came to visit, you may not have been there quite then, I'm not sure. But we went down to a conference in Oregon. I drove him down, and by that time we had a very good collection of his work at the Henry Gallery. I had looked it all over and I had my favorites. And so on the way down we talked about a lot of it and I said, "Mr. Hamada, one that is really my favorite," and I described it to him.

It was one of those square bottles, and each side looked like an abstract painting.

RA: Um hmm.

LH: It was so beautiful, and it was very melted, the glaze and all, and there was no indication of any brushstroke on the outside of it. So it made it a little different than some of the other works that he did. When I told him I liked it, he said, "That's your error!" (laughs) and pointed his finger at me, and apparently he did not like that piece at all. And I learned from him that it had been overfired and the glazes had run. It was looking very abstract expressionist [and loose--LH] on each side, you see.

RA: Oh really?

LH: And he didn't like that piece at all. Well, that was interesting from that standpoint, [that although spontaneity was a major aspect of ceramic production to him, he felt he had lost control in the firing of this piece--LH]

RA: Um hmm.

LH: Do you have any new feelings about Leach's comment about "no taproots"? That's a famous quote; you hear it all the time, and I think that the people who were there were taken aback by what he had to say. I suppose you might mean when you say that he was, I don't think that you used the word arrogant, but some people have used that word in respect to him.

RA: Yes, I don't mean arrogant. I guess I don't really mean that. He wasn't being unkind I don't think. It's like saying to somebody, "You have no past." Well, what can you say to that, you know? You simply don't! (laughter) And so we just kind of took it from there. We didn't feel that that was any great handicap, really. We had a lot of things to do there, and we were very busy doing our sculpture, and pots, and so what? (laughs)

LH: At the time that he said it, then, did it just?-- Well, I would think that almost anyone would hate to hear it, but it's as you say, what can you say, and you were busy-- did you have any kind of response to that? Any kind of verbal response to it, or did you just...?

RA: Absolutely not.

LH: No.

RA: At that time I thought that, well, Pete's just as good a potter as Leach. Pete was doing some magnificent things! Of course he didn't have that depth, or that history that Leach had. But it didn't seem important. We were kind of upstarts in our way. You have to remember that we were products of an art school, where we had done drawing and painting, sculpture, and had been serious in those activities, and pottery was the way we were going at that time. We were bringing a lot of the art school ideas to our ceramics. Not that we felt we were doing anything new; we were just doing the kinds of things we were interested in. I think the most significant change following that was when Pete returned from Black Mountain. He was like Christ having come down from the mountain, or something. Moses. He had a new idea and you could see it. He was just glowing with that kind of inspiration. His work started to go through very dramatic changes after that time. It seemed like he had just been born again, or something. He looked at abstract painting, and we felt that he understood abstract expressionism. And we didn't. So we were wondering, "Pete, what do you see in that?" You know. I remember one time we took a painting that he had?-- I'm trying to remember the painter. I think it was Esteban Vicente.

LH: Oh yes.

RA: And we borrowed it for a while. And Lela made a copy of it, using the same expressive gestures and everything. And I put it in a frame that was just like the one on the painting that he loaned us. I returned the fake painting to Pete, wondering if he'd know the difference. And we hung it up in his house in the back there, where he lived in that chicken shack [at Bray]. He looked at it for a while and he says, "That's not my painting!" So, even though to us it was just identical?-- gestures, movements and everything-- he spotted it right away.

LH: Isn't that interesting. Well, then, that time was after the Yanagi visit and going to Black Mountain, then Pete made the decision to leave, to go to Los Angeles County Art Institute [later known as Otis Art Institute--LH]. And you stayed on until either '56 or '57?

RA: '56.

LH: '56. I was wondering if we could go through a few of the visitors who came about that time and on to the time that you left for the University of Montana. [Robert] Sperry I know came...

RA: Yes, Sperry was there...

LH: While Pete was still there. Is that right?

RA: Yes. Sperry was there fairly early in our work together, and he came for a summer.

LH: He would have come in 1954, the summer just before he took his job at the University of Washington.

RA: Yes. Now you see even though Pete had left at that time, he returned for a couple of summers, to work for a while.

LH: I see.

RA: I think he really missed Montana, and of course we missed him. But we knew he had to do this move. I remember Pete having had this offer from Millard Sheets, who was the director of Los Angeles County Art Institute at the time. He had an offer of $7,500 and it just seemed like enormous amounts of money. And I said, "Pete, I don't know how you can turn this down." You know, "You've got to do this." I will really miss you, and I hate to see you go, but it looks like this is what you have to do." And then, you know, it seemed right that he should go. By this time, Archie had died, and Archie, Junior, didn't really have that much enthusiastic support to run a huge organization. Archie could probably see what I was doing more clearly than what Pete was doing. And so there were other reasons why it was necessary for Pete to leave. Besides, he was getting this attention. Winning prizes all over the country. Pete was winning major awards back there and getting recognition, the Syracuse and Wichita shows. The coast shows in Seattle and Portland and Los Angeles, and so he was beginning to get quite a name. So they were very aware of him down in Los Angeles. Millare Sheets was aware of Pete's work and wanted to get a topnotch potter down there and so he hired Pete. And so he went down there and established that pottery, that ceramic center.

LH: When Sperry was at Archie Bray-- I don't know how long he was there. Was he there long enough to do anything?

RA: It seems to me a summer.

LH: I see. Do you remember what he did while he was there?

RA: Well, he started off in a kind of feeble way, making small pots, but it didn't take him more than about a week and he was making beautiful pieces. He just needed that kick. He was ready for that kick to make some big pots and good pots. And in a space of about a week or two, Sperry was just grooving like crazy. And he was more knowledgeable than a lot of us. He knew how to fire kilns. He knew a lot about glazes?-- or seemed to know quite a bit. And I think he had studied with Leah Balsham at the Chicago Art Institute so he had pretty good background in a technical way. And so he was ready to move in a physical way with his pots. Beyond that, I don't remember much more about Sperry's work, except that there were a lot of Hamada-Leach pots around that were unglazed. They'd been bisqued and he mixed up a batch of glaze-- wrong as it turns out?-- and fired a whole kiln full of Leach and Hamada pieces with the wrong glaze on them. (both chuckle) And as it happens it wasn't bad! He'd left something out, silica or kaolin or something, so it was a thin red-iron glaze that ran quite a bit, but at least he did that for us, and fired all those pieces that were made from the previous visit.

LH: Could you discuss some of those other people? For instance, the McKinnells, both the McKinnells [Jim and Nan] and Carlton Ball. Did we talk about them yesterday?

RA: No, we didn't. I think we mentioned it briefly. Jim and Nan were there for quite a while from those very early days on. I can't remember specifically when they came there, but I think that they were there at the Hamada-Leach workshop. At least they were participants or visitors. I may be wrong, but I think so.

LH: His mother lived in Seattle.

RA: Yes.

LH: And so they were around, at this moment, I don't know exactly when they were here, but it did seem to me that they moved back and forth between Seattle, to see their mother.

RA: I think that might have been the case. They moved in for a week or two and then went back, and then they came back on a more or less permanent basis. Because, I couldn't throw the pots and do the other things I had to do. Jim and Nan brought an expertise to the ceramics activity there, that I didn't have. And so, they were there for a number of years, along with me, up until the point where I left. There were other people there: Doris Strawn and?-- gee, I just don't remember now.

LH: How about Carlton Ball? What comments do you have about him?

RA: Well, Carlton Ball came there one summer, I believe on a Ford Foundation grant. This was also a time where Pete had returned for a summer. So their visit overlapped. Carlton Ball was very good at all of the things he did, because he was so knowledgeable about firing kilns and very much up to date on materials. We learned a lot from Carl. He was a good potter. He was probably the best potter on the coast at that time, you know. Certainly a lot of what's happened on the west coast was Carlton Ball's doing.

LH: And from several standpoints? For instance, the glazing and...

RA: Glazing and clay bodies and firing techniques and...

LH: And throwing? Was he quite good at throwing?

RA: And throwing. He was throwing big pots, and he was a very good potter and, you know, handled the material and knew what he was doing.

LH: Someone, it would have been Ivarose Bovingdon, I think, said that she visited San Francisco during the World's Fair down there, on Treasure Island. And she saw him throw at that time, and...

RA: That would have been 1939.

LH: Right. The way she described it was, "He threw a pot up to his elbow." Now, as time goes on, those kinds of things are hard to remember exactly, but that sounded impressive.

RA: I think she was probably wrong.

LH: Uh huh.

RA: In '39. Because I remember Carl telling me a story that he had worked with Glen Lukens or something, but he really hadn't learned how to throw very well. He pretty much had to learn how to do this on his own.

LH: I see.

RA: I vaguely remember him telling about that San Francisco World's Fair time, where he had just gotten some clay and was having to figure out how to throw pots and he just, he knew how, but not all that well. So I gather he was very young then and just figuring it out, and...

LH: And probably very early in trying to throw.

RA: And very early. Sure.

LH: Let's see. Were there other visitors that stand out in your mind?

RA: Well, of course, Marguerite Wildenhain.

LH: Oh yes.

RA: She came in, for about a week, I believe. And talk about a dynamite lady! (chuckles) By this time, well this was another summer where Pete had returned. He was there along with Marguerite. Not along with, but he was there at the same time. Marguerite was the star of the show, but Pete kind of overshadowed her performance because he could throw pots like nobody's business. And I think everybody got the message that, well, poor Marguerite, you know, this stuff you're doing is nice, but in the background there were Pete's pots, about, you know, 36 inches tall, with beautiful glazes on them and wonderful drawing-- energetic pieces. Marguerite's were pale by comparison, you know.

LH: And she had been so revered before that...

RA: Yeah. What a comedown!

LH: ...and was probably quite a bit older than Pete?

RA: Much older. And I think she just chafed under his presence there, you know.

LH: She also was a very strong woman, as I understand it.

RA: Oh, she was a powerhouse of a woman! But then, I can remember those lectures she gave us, how important it is to apprentice yourself for ten years and...

LH: Sounds like Hamada.

RA: ...be working under the thumb of the master in order to do these kinds of things that I'm doing. (laughs) Well, no, she wasn't fooling anybody really. And, oh, we respected what she had to say, but she was just sort of completely overshadowed by Pete's presence there.

LH: You know, another similar story?-- just the whole atmosphere-- when Hamada was in Seattle and we were together on that trip, we went to this Oregon college, and everyone was there before we arrived and they were awaiting the arrival of Mr. Hamada. And when he arrived they had made it possible for everyone to make raku?-- in his honor. So they asked him to come over and make some raku. And he declined, saying that he would have to work for many, many more years before he would be able to do that. [He was probably 70 or 75 years old--LH] (laughter) And it was almost a kind of put-down, you know, in a way.

RA: Yeah.

LH: Everyone was so taken aback and they didn't get to do this ceremony that they'd hoped they could. And that ties in a little with what you were saying about Marguerite and the need for having a long apprenticeship and so forth.

RA: Well, that was so far out of our concept, to have to do an apprenticeship. I mean we could make pots like that. I learned how to do that in two weeks, you know! (laughter) Which wasn't exactly the case, but since we didn't know any better, why it didn't mean much to us. (laughs)

LH: Would you discuss Lela [Autio] and Peggy [Voulkos] at Archie Bray? They were the two most principal women there, were they not?

RA: Yeah, um hmm. Peggy was doing the enameling. And this was a very popular kind of thing at that time. Bright colors.

LH: On jewelry? Or...

RA: No, we were doing trays, little nut trays, ashtrays.

LH: Oh I see.

RA: Yeah. Lela and Peggy did that. Peggy more so than Lela. Lela was raising a family then, you know, young kids running around. So Lela's activity was mainly painting at home and when she could she'd come down to the ceramic shop and make enamels. Not so much together with Peggy, but sometimes they worked together. And sometimes we'd all make enamels together. I remember we had to do a bunch of favors for a bankers' convention. We had to make about 250 of them. By the time we were getting to around number 150, those designs were getting pretty jaded. (laughs) We were just sprinkling color on and drawing a few lines on them, you know. Every one was supposed to be an original ashtray, for a gift, a favor. And we were just knocking it out. As it happened they turned out nicely. But once in a great while we would do things like that, you know.

LH: Lela had a fine background in art.

RA: Um hmm.

LH: At Montana State University.

RA: Yeah.

LH: And did she graduate from there?

RA: She graduated from Bozeman, along with me, probably graduated about a quarter or two earlier than I did. We were married at the time.

LH: Oh, while you were in college?

RA: While we were in college, yes. By that time we had Arne, our oldest boy. Well, Lela was always interested in painting and she did some excellent, wonderful paintings in the early fifties. She managed to do all of that. And paints occasionally, still, but doesn't have that kind of constant production that she... She works quickly and it didn't take her long to get a whole roomful of paintings together.

LH: How many children do you have?

RA: We have four. By that time, Lisa, our daughter, was born. That was in 1952. And so, with a young family and kids, why she didn't do too much around the ceramics.

LH: Well, she must have been really busy.

RA: Well, of course she was!

LH: I think I heard that for some time she was interested in fiber art, was she?

RA: Yeah, this came on later, much later, I would say in the late sixties?

LH: Maybe when the children were grown, actually.

RA: Right.

LH: And does she now paint sometimes?

RA: Well, she does fiber and she paints. She hasn't done it for a while now. She retired from teaching at the high school last year.

LH: She was?

RA: And [God], she'd been teaching all this time at Hellgate High.

LH: Teaching art?

RA: Teaching art, uh huh.

LH: That's in Missoula.

RA: Right.

LH: I didn't know that. She must have been a tremendous support for you too.

RA: Oh, absolutely. I wasn't smart enough to, you know, do this all alone!

LH: (laughs)

RA: You know, Lela's been kind of the driving force, the organizer behind me and I have to admit that it could have very easily been the other way, you know. Lela's a very talented artist. And I think that she let a lot of that slip because she's been supporting me. And I regret that. I wish that Lela's career could have paralleled mine and... Well what can you say. The years have slipped by and it's hard for her to pick up the things that she did before