Chance Operator: Paul Hultberg’s Aleatory Aesthetics
Paul Hultberg at work in his studio in 1969 (images: courtesy of Moderne Gallery).
Paul Hultberg (1926-2019) was an artist whose pioneering work with enamel fell within the US’s studio craft movement, and who can be understood as part of the wider abstract expressionist movement. Despite this, his practice has never received the same level of attention as many contemporaneous artists.
Now, however, a new exhibition hosted by Moderne Gallery in Philadelphia is seeking to remedy this. Rediscovering Paul Hultberg (1926-2019): Abstract Expressionism in Enamel displays Hultberg’s work with enamel, as well as his early prints and drawings and later portraiture on canvas. “The past few decades have seen Hultberg’s work surpassed in popularity by his many contemporaries,” says Robert Aibel, co-director of Moderne Gallery, “but we’re seeing now a real appetite to explore the history of craft in America and the moment feels right to give Hultberg the recognition he very much deserves.”
Alongside the exhibition, the gallery has published a new publication exploring Hultberg’s work, which includes an essay written by the curator and historian Glenn Adamson – a regular contributor to Disegno.
To celebrate the new exhibition and publication, and to explore Hultberg’s work in more detail, we are delighted to republish Adamson’s essay online: ‘Chance Operator: Paul Hultberg’s Aleatory Aesthetics’.
“They have gotten big.” It doesn’t seem like the most incisive of critical comments, perhaps. But when the poet and potter M. C. Richards made this observation of Paul Hultberg’s enamels, in an article published in Craft Horizons in 1960, she put her finger on something. Size, in this case, very much mattered. Richards was thinking, in part, of a pair of panels, each six feet wide and eight feet high, that served as the doors to an exhibition of enamels held at the Museum of Contemporary Crafts in New York, the previous year. In this context of this display – which included both historical examples from the medieval and renaissance eras, as well as other contemporary American makers such as Kenneth Bates, Karl Drerup, and June Schwarcz – the nature of this achievement was unmissable.1 This medium had, for centuries, been dimensionally constrained, and hence oriented to precious objets d’art. Hultberg was reinventing it, on self-evidently ambitious terms. As Richards put it: “Hultberg’s enamels are not the little jewel-like miniatures one sometimes associates with this craft. His surfaces are the more original expressions of an artist who mixes the visions of painter, print maker and adventurous inventor.”2
Paul Hultberg, Abstract #2.
As regular readers of Craft Horizons would have immediately grasped, Richards was positioning Hultberg as the latest in a series of breakthrough figures. Peter Voulkos, in ceramics, and Lenore Tawney, in fiber, had recently been singled out by Craft Horizons as avatars of a new era for craft media.3 Like them, Hultberg had arrived at a potent combination: masterful skill in his discipline along with a willingness to break all its rules. Voulkos’s skill at the potter’s wheel was unsurpassed, and Tawney a structurally inventive weaver. But what made their work important was the introduction of totally contrary impulses, a disruption and recombination of the canon. Hultberg, similarly, embraced the visual possibilities of firescale (the oxidization and discoloration of the copper substrate, usually cleaned off the surface), as well as complex and unpredictable interactions of sgraffito and acid etching. As Alan Rosenberg aptly observes in a recent biographical study of the artist for Metalsmith magazine, Hultberg’s repertoire was based in an “overplaying [of] certain steps in the enameling process.”4
Richards positioned Hultberg’s medium-specific innovations and exaggerations in relation to another, still more significant breakthrough: the triumph of American avant-garde painting in the years immediately after World War II. Noting Hultberg’s “emphasis on the brush stroke,” she described him as expressively deploying his enamel colors accordingly to the variables of “pressure, length, speed, area—a sense of kinetic forces pressing outward.”5 This was a clear allusion to the core principles of Abstract Expressionism, an idiom that has often been invoked in relation to Voulkos and Tawney, but is more obviously pertinent to Hultberg. Gestural, abstract, polychromatic, organized on a flat plane, and – yes – big, there is very little to distinguish his work from contemporaneous painting, apart from its materials.
Paul Hultberg, Untitled 10.
Yet Richards, perceptively, went still further, implying that Hultberg was more than a follower of Abstract Expressionists. He was drawing on the same sources as they did, but also forging his own parallel development. Most importantly, she described Hultberg not as a painter, but specifically as a maker of murals. This term, now little used and relatively innocuous, was deeply charged circa 1960. It was associated, most proximately, to the Mexican muralists, among them Diego Rivera, José Orozco, and David Siqueiros.6 Hultberg had studied at the Instituto Politécnico Nacional in Mexico City in the late 1940s, and there worked in the atelier of José Gutierrez – an associate of Siqueiros, who helped him develop a modern technical apparatus for the realization of his outdoor murals, including early synthetic paints, spray guns, photographic projectors, and movable scaffolding.7 This experimental atmosphere clearly had an influence on Hultberg, and upon his return to the USA he briefly worked as a muralist in this specifically modern sense of the term.
Jackson Pollock was strongly influenced by the Mexican muralists as well, particularly Orozco and Siqueiros. It is no coincidence that his legendary breakthrough into “all-over composition,” executed for Peggy Guggenheim in 1943, was simply entitled Mural. As art historian Romy Golan has argued, such architecturally-scaled paintings and kindred media, such as photocollages, tapestries, and mosaics, had been politically inflected in the 1930s across Europe and the Americas.8 Whether they were deployed by Mexican socialists, Italian fascists, American painters in the service of the Federal Art Project, or by Pablo Picasso in his great Guernica, murals marked a conspicuous departure from the standard easel painting. They were not commodities, but collective experiences. Often made by groups of artist-artisans working as a team, they were also meant to be seen not in splendid isolation in a museum or gallery, but by groups of people, in public.
Paul Hultberg, Untitled 35.
In the postwar American context, these political implications of muralism were somewhat muted, but by no means absent. By the 1950s, it was obvious that craft had little chance to contend with industry, as a way of actually getting everyday goods made. It was the era that mass production truly triumphed, with wartime production levels converted smoothly into the manufacture of consumer goods, an unprecedented volume of stuff. Critics – and there were many of them – found this situation to be dismaying, a victory of quantity over quality, of superficiality over substance. Richards was among the most influential of these voices. In her widely read 1964 book Centering: In Pottery, Poetry, and the Person, she described herself as “a question-asker and a truth-teller,” and advised a practice of spiritual connection: “An act of the self, that's what one must make. An act of the self, from me to you. From center to center.”9
Richards herself had little interest in economics. Her focus was not on how best to make a living, but how to make the best life. But others associated with the studio craft movement, more practically minded, shared her reservations about America’s postwar culture as shallow and alienated. From this perspective, it was imperative to find new roles for skilled artisans: perhaps by making industrial prototypes or serially fabricated products, infused with human integrity (the “designer craftsman” ethos); or perhaps by furnishing sacred contexts, where the machine-made would feel out of place.10 Public art was a third possibility, and this was the context in which murals came into play. While their work was rarely explicitly political, craftspeople embraced large scale not just to express their own personal ambition, but as a way of occupying space in an otherwise conformist culture.
Paul Hultberg, Little Yellow.
Hultberg was a leading exponent of these tendencies. In the 1950s, he operated as a “designer craftsman” through his company Domesticrafts. Sharing a workspace with Ka Kwong Hui (best known for his later collaboration with Pop artist Roy Lichtenstein, and like Hultberg, a teacher in the Brooklyn Museum’s art program), he turned out large quantities of enameled bowls, plaques, and boxes, as well as panels that could be mounted on furniture. He also made architectural murals, which were also serially produced in that they were made of many panels, adding up to a whole composition. This modular approach was the obvious way for studio-based practitioners to achieve large scale and was pursued by many other artists at this time, among them John Mason, Voulkos’s close associate, whose Blue Wall (1959), twenty-one feet long, was arguably the purest of all incarnations of Abstract Expressionist ceramics; and Doyle Lane, whose expansive and luminous tile walls were somewhat similar in effect to Hultberg’s enamels of the same era. Another was Frans Wildenhain – former husband of Marguerite Wildenhain, and like her a product of the Bauhaus – whose work M. C. Richards discussed in a further article in Craft Horizons, published in 1962. This essay, headed “The Architectural Mural/Ceramics,” can be read as a sort of pendant to her profile of Hultberg. Despite the difference of media and style, she found similar dynamics at work: “drawing is the beginning and the end of everything, and his architectural walls have evolved, in the impression of this writer, out of a steady growth principle which starts with the moving hand.”11
Wittingly or not, Richards was here reprising an influential description by the poet Nicolas Calas, describing the Surrealist principle of automatism: “one has the impression that the objects have been produced by a rhythmical movement of the arm and hand.”12 The Surrealists employed this principle both in writing and in visual art, encouraging an undirected, dream-like creative state. The idea was to break free from the constraints of the logical mind and tap into the more potent wellsprings of the psyche. The famous “Exquisite Corpse,” in which multiple artists contribute elements to the same composition without seeing the work of the others, was a parallel tactic. New York painters discovered these ideas in the Museum of Modern Art exhibition Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism (1936), and embraced them wholeheartedly. Pollock’s drip paintings were, among other things, an almost literal exemplification of automatism. His non-rational traceries, if they depict anything at all, depict the overlapping, undirected pathways taken by the active mind.
Paul Hultberg, painting on paper.
In Hultberg’s medium of enamel, normally a slow and multilayered process, would seem a total mismatch with automatism and the “action painting” it helped to inform. But not the way he did it. A 1966 film of Hultberg working shows how he dropped and sifted the sand-like enamel on to the surface, or dripped water from a brush (a technique very similar to Pollock’s) to make splashed patterns for the enamel to adhere to.13 When he had a one-man show at the Museum of Contemporary Crafts the same year, critic Elizabeth Breckenridge noted that he had been developing techniques to work as quickly as possible:
…the technical process can be completed in minutes. Working swiftly and in an apparently effortless manner, Hultberg sifts and scatters the powdered glass into water-patterns splashed at random on the plate. Although he exercises the right of choice over the colors and qualities of the enamels, and knows roughly how the elements he selects will work together, the artist enjoys the sense of risk which stems from the fact that he cannot foresee the final form until the plate has been fired and it is too late to change.14
This is an evocative description, quite similar to descriptions of Pollock working. But the last point was perhaps the crucial one. Richards had quoted Hultberg as saying that the enamelist is “not like the painter, who makes a stroke and there it is—paint… As in print making or ceramics, you don’t know exactly how it will come out.”15 Yet Hultberg realized that these mediating steps were also compatible with automatism. The unpredictability of the medium, particularly the way that colors and compositions take on a life of their own when the piece is kiln-fired, was in fact an exciting extension of the principle.
Paul Hultberg, print on paper.
He seems to have come by this insight by way of his friendship with John Cage, the great avant-garde composer and theorist. Ethel Hultberg recalls that she and Paul met Cage in 1948 and moved to the Gate Hill Cooperative in 1956 partly because he was already living there.16 Gate Hill, also known as “Stony Point,” or simply “The Land,” was an early counterculture commune. Located in in Rockland County, New York, it was founded in 1953 by Paul and Vera Williams, who had been students at Black Mountain College in North Carolina. This famed experiment in progressive pedagogy was just entering its terminal decline (it officially closed in 1957), and Gate Hill became a natural refuge for figures associated with the school. An astonishing cadre of avant-gardistes gravitated to join them, among them Cage and his partner Merce Cunningham; pianist David Tudor; film maker Stan VanDerBeek; sculptor John Chamberlain; the potters Karen Karnes and David Weinrib; and Sari Dienes, another craftsperson who made architecturally scaled murals, in her case with glass, wood, and concrete.17
M. C. Richards lived at Gate Hill too, and it was through the community there that the Hultbergs came to know her. They also associated with many others who did not live at Gate Hill, but passed through at various times – a veritable who’s who of American progressive culture and politics at the time: artists Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Marcel Duchamp, Jean Dubuffet, and Nam Jun Paik; film makers Maya Deren and Stan Brakhage; Beat poets Allen Ginsberg and Michael McClure; Craft Horizons editor Rose Slivka; even John Lennon and Yoko Ono.18 If there was one common interest across this broad group, it was the continued search for an authentic expression, freed from the restrictions of conventional form. For many of them, as for Hultberg, automatism was the portal, and Cage was the man who held the key.19
Paul Hultberg, Coastal Drain.
Cage had by this time become fascinated with “chance operations,” as pioneered earlier by Duchamp and the Surrealists. He was making his musical compositions according to coin tosses and the ancient Chinese divination manual, the I Ching.20 For him, this was a way of radically departing from the limited perspective of individual taste and embracing the full possibilities of a given technique or medium. Ultimately, he also conceived it as a path to personal transformation, very much along the lines that M. C. Richards was advocating. “I use my work to change myself and I accept what the chance operations say,” he explained. “The I Ching says that if you don’t accept the chance operations you have no right to use them. Which is very clear, so that’s what I do.”21
The Hultbergs were close with Cage. Ethel recalls that they all shared a car, and had breakfast together “most mornings.” It was at the breakfast table, in 1956, that they planned a remarkable document of the moment. As part of a fundraising initiative for one of Cage and Cunningham’s dance recitals, the Hultbergs had approached their friend Jack Lenor Larsen, the weaver and textile designer, and asked him to make a donation. As a way of contributing to the effort, he commissioned them to create his Christmas card that year (in addition to all his other activities, Larsen was one of the twentieth century’s great mail correspondents). This led naturally to a creative conversation with Cage. They eventually settled on a long, folding composition, with large lettering – GREETINGS JACK LENOR LARSEN INCORPORATED printed in green using wood type on newspaper. The interaction between the bold letters and the randomly selected newspaper underneath made for an open-ended, ever-changing composition.
Paul Hultberg, Bull.
Quite apart from the broader art historical import of this document – Rauschenberg, who seems not to have been involved with the Christmas card, would go on to use newspaper extensively in his paintings and Combines, and for similar reasons – it is also an early indication of Hultberg’s own engagement with aleatory form generation (“aleatory,” meaning random, is etymologically derived from the Latin word for dice). For a project at Gate Hill – a 24-foot-long mural for community co-founder Paul Williams – he arranged the enamel panels he had created according to numbers picked randomly from the phone book. Perhaps more importantly, he seized on the idea that technical aspects of enamel could be used as randomizing factors, like Cage’s coins or the I Ching. He not only embraced greater speed but greater uncertainty, plunging into an extreme version of what British design theorist David Pye would soon call the “workmanship of risk.”22 In 1966, he described his process like this:
I often apply the unfired enamel (a sand-like material) to the copper in a manner reminiscent of the way sand is affected by the forces of nature—that is, by gravity (dusting, throwing, dropping); by wind (blowing); by erosion (scratching, pushing, pulling) by water (dribbling, splashing); or by a combination of these… I feel that this mimicry of processes, rather than the artful delineation of surfaces, allows me to work as abstractly as nature and yet evoke many of those emotions which constitute our response to the visible world and that often give us a feeling of ‘place.’ 23
Hultberg here states a position poised between Pollock’s famous claim, “I don’t paint nature, I am nature,” and the equally famous verb list that Richard Serra composed in 1967-68: “to roll, to crease, to fold…” These two quasi-manifestos seem antithetical; against Pollock’s grandiose presumption of an internal sublime, Serra simply presents the facts (or better to say, acts) of the matter. But Hultberg seems to have intuited that chance operations, once channeled through the specific vocabulary of his medium, could achieve a result that was equally expressive of personality and process. In the 1966 film, he speaks of the metal sheets he used as a substrate as having already had a life before he got to them: “There are already markings of a kind, sometimes you can use what’s already happened to the copper.” He might even base one of his forms on the reflections of the studio environment: “it’s picked up what’s around you. Including yourself.”24
Paul Hultberg, Apple.
Another way of putting this is that Hultberg transposed the inherent formula that always inheres in craft – individualism plus technique – into the artistic concerns of the day. And his work bears this out as much as his words. Toward the end of the 1960s, New York gallerist Lee Nordness and Paul Smith, director of the Museum of Contemporary Crafts, invited Hultberg to participate in the bellwether exhibition Objects: USA.25 He responded with Johnson Together – the title alluding to the family company, Johnson Wax, which had funded the project – a four-by-seven-foot composition composed of discrete panels (He also made a related work, about half the size, and called it Little Johnson.) The composition recalls that of a Japanese screen in the rimpa style originated in the seventeenth century by Ogata Kōrin, whom Hultberg had mentioned to Richards as an inspiration. Particularly in the context of Objects: USA, which was replete with potters informed by Japanese precedent – foremost among them Toshiko Takaezu, whose work featured similar splashed effects to those Hultberg employed – Johnson Together would have communicated a strong connection to East Asian ink painting. It was like seven scrolls hung side by side.
Yet this specific historic reference was certainly less important than the work’s more conceptual implications. The seven panels in Johnson Together individually resemble the dramatic abstractions of Clyfford Still, with dramatic rifts of color floating against contrasting areas of textured bare copper.26 The overall effect, as in Still’s work, is of a vast landscape, craggy and untamed. This is an American painting, then. But one that has been conceived in very unusual terms. As so often in his work, Hultberg exploited an apparent technical constraint of enamel as an opportunity for chance operations: the limited size of each panel, which normally cannot exceed the dimensions of the kiln. Here too he had expanded the possibilities, working out a means of firing his panels on a rolling track above a series of burners.27 Even so, there was a limit to the scale that Hultberg could achieve, which directly determined the width of the panels used in Little Johnson. Rather than conceal the seams, he used them as a compositional device. The panels seem to slide in and out of alignment with one another: in some areas there is formal continuity, most strikingly in the work’s upper central passage, where a broad patch of bare copper stretches across two panels, then transitions smoothly into black. Similar junction-points occur all over, with contours connecting and then unexpectedly diverging, exactly as in a Surrealist exquisite corpse. But just as often, the shapes collide with one another in an apparently random fashion. This is Cage’s aleatory principle at work: chance operations, applied in a unique context.
Paul Hultberg, Abstract #6.
The expansive horizontality of Johnson Together – it has the proportions of a cinema screen – bears comparison to the experimental films being made by Gate Hill habitués like Stan Brakhage and Stan Vanderbeek, in which abstract imagery is similarly connected through apparently random jump cuts, in a cascading montage. Filmmakers of that moment often physically manipulated their celluloid, scratching or painting on to it. In Hultberg’s work, too, accidental effects penetrate the very substance of the work. He applied his enamel colors in response to a pre-existing visual pattern in the copper, established through preliminary acid etching – an automatist process. A finishing touch is supplied by the baking of the enamel, which creates a sort of dark halo of oxidization, the colors delineating their own contours in a variable fashion. Hultberg of course had mastered such effects by now, but he chose not to control them so much as unleash them. The effect is somewhat akin to the later Abstrake Bilder of Gerhardt Richter, made using a long flat squeegee that pushes the paint across the surface in a semi-controlled, semi-arbitrary manner. In these paintings and in Hultberg’s enamels, it is impossible to say of any given mark whether it is intentional or not. Artistic agency is thus held in suspension, operating dialectically with the free play of happenstance.
In the 1970s and ‘80s, Hultberg’s work evolved into a more “hard-edged” style, in keeping with prevailing currents in contemporary painting. This approach still made room for the aleatory. Ellsworth Kelly, who had pioneered the idiom years previously, derived some of his first compositions from the fall of shadows on stairs, then went on to arbitrarily arrange squares of color into grids. Other hard-edge painters like June Harwood also embraced chance operations, beginning their compositions with found images or random spills of paint. The difference was that they purged their work of gesturalism, emphatically defining contour and silhouette.
This is what Hultberg did, too, not so much a departure from his previous methodology as a clarification and distillation of it. His late masterpiece Apple Dapple (1986) was commissioned for the Manhattan offices of a company called Metromedia, just then shifting from radio and television to film production; the title perhaps alludes to the New York City context. Like Johnson Together it is four feet high, but almost ten times wider, fully sixty feet across. The composition is generally more contiguous, with forms smoothly transitioning from one panel to another, though this effect of continuity is offset by spacing between the panels. The palette is high 1980s and may well prompt thoughts of the decade’s music videos or graphic design (coincidentally or not, the forms look like they could have been generated using an early software program, like MacPaint). Look past the period vibe, though, and Hultberg’s longstanding concerns are still evident. There is enough suggestion of a landscape, here, to give the “feeling of place.” Nonetheless, the image field is populated by free-floating forms that seem to have landed somewhat arbitrarily, as if scattered by the wind.
Paul Hultberg, Little Johnson.
One topic remains: why is Paul Hultberg not much better-known today? Given the evident seriousness and quality of his work, and the privileged position he had at the beating heart of the American avant-garde, it is difficult to understand his relative obscurity. The most obvious explanation is medium: for all his intelligent engagement with contemporaneous painting, his chosen discipline of enamel seemed to occupy a space apart. Like many other artists associated with the postwar craft movement – ceramists like Voulkos and Takaezu, weavers like Tawney, and the other great enamelist of his generation, June Schwarcz – he found himself categorized within a “minor art” genre. (That he also worked as a printmaker made little difference, for it too was understood as a secondary field.28) Then too, his investment in public art may been a hindrance. The currency of the mural as a typology waned in the 1960s and later, with the rising power of commercial galleries – who had little use for a permanently installed, architecturally-scaled art work, no matter what it was made from.
A final hurdle to recognition may be the very subtlety with which Hultberg responded to the ideas around him. It is all too easy to look at his major works, like Johnson Together, and misunderstand them as just latter-day Abstract Expressionism, apparently disconnected with the conceptual tendencies that were emerging in the late 1960s. In fact, though Hultberg was drawing on the “action paintings” of the previous generation, he was also engaging with the pressing issues of the moment: aleatory aesthetics, the primacy of process, and an interrogation of artistic subjectivity. He did so in his own way, stylistically distinct from the post-industrial aesthetic pursued by Serra, the Pop-inflected collage of Rauschenberg, or the more obviously calculated approach of someone like Sol Lewitt. Perhaps only in retrospect is it easy to see the connections between all these practices. Does it seem unfair and unfortunate that what gave Hultberg’s work its value – materiality, civic-mindedness, and radical openness – are precisely the things that have limited his reputation? Assuredly so. But as Hultberg knew well, art is not ultimately validated by any external account. It is a matter of exploration and discovery, or, as M. C. Richards put it, adventurous invention. He built his career on that principle, and never wavered. It is one thing he never left to chance.
Words by Glenn Adamson
This article was originally published in the exhibition catalogue of Rediscovering Paul Hultberg at Moderne Gallery in Philadelphia. The exhibition runs until 24 September 2021.
FOOTNOTES
Enamels (New York: Museum of Contemporary Crafts, 1959). See also Bernard Jazzar and Harold Nelson, Little Dreams in Glass and Metal: Enameling in America, 1920 to the Present (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015).
M. C. Richards, “Paul Hultberg: Enamel as Mural,” Craft Horizons 20/2 (March/April 1960), 29, 32.
Conrad Brown, “Peter Voulkos,” Craft Horizons 16/5 (September/October 1956); Margo Hoff, “Lenore Tawney: The Warp Is Her Canvas,” Craft Horizons 17/6 (November/December 1957)
Alan Rosenberg, “Paul Hultberg: Abstract Expressionist Enamelist,” Metalsmith 40/4 (2020). The present article attempts to build on this foundational study by exploring Hultberg’s wider art historical context.
Richards, “Paul Hultberg,” 29, 32.
On this movement see Barbara Haskell, et al., Vida Americana: Mexican Muralists Remake American Art (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2020).
“Mural Painting: Heart of The Artistic Rebirth of Mexico in the 20th Century,” Artes De México 5/6 (Dec. 1954), 138.
Romy Golan, Muralnomad (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009).
M. C. Richards, Centering: In Pottery, Poetry, and the Person (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1964). On Richards see Jenni Sorkin, Live Form: Women, Ceramics, and Community (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016).
Key exhibitions exploring these two possibilities were Designer-Craftsmen USA, Aileen Osborn Webb’s first major initiative, presented at the Brooklyn Museum in 1953 and touring thereafter; and The Patron Church, held at the Museum of Contemporary Crafts in 1957-58. Hultberg was included in an exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum in 1952, The Artist as Artisan. Organized by the museum’s affiliated art school, where Hultberg was teaching, it is an intriguing precedent for the better-known Designer-Craftsmen USA.
M. C. Richards, “The Architectural Mural/Ceramics: Frans Wildenhain,” Craft Horizons 22/4 (July/Aug. 1962), 24.
Nicolas Calas, Confound the Wise (New York: Arrow Editions, 1942), 244.
George Ancona, dir., Reflections: The Imagery of Paul Hultberg Enamelist (American Craftsmen’s Council, 1966).
Elizabeth Breckenridge, Paul Hultberg: Enamels (New York: Museum of Contemporary Crafts, 1966), n.p.
Quoted in Richards, “Paul Hultberg,” 30.
Ethel Hultberg, letter to Robert Aibel, 2020.
M. C. Richards, “The Bottle Gardens of Sari Dienes,” Craft Horizons 22/5 (September/October 1965).
Ethel Hultberg, letter to Robert Aibel. She also names, among other associates, writers Denice Levertov, Robert Creeley, Joel Oppenheimer, LeRoy Jones (later Amiri Baraka), Robert Duncan, and Gregory Corso; composers Karl Heinz Stockhausen, Luigi Nono, Pierre Boulez, Morton Feldman, and Toshi Ichiyanagi (first husband of Yoko Ono); jazz musicians Ornette Coleman and Don Cherry; political activist Bayard Rustin; and artists Karel Appel and Pierre Soulages. The creative connections continued even in the next generation: in 1980, the Hultbergs’ son Jesse formed a band called Three Teens Kill 4 with David Wojnarowicz, who went on to become one of the leading lights of the New York underground art scene.
On Cage and the Gate Hill community, see Mark Davenport, “Paul Williams: The Cage Mix,” Journal of the Society for American Music 14/2 (May 2020).
On Cage’s use of chance operations see Louis Menand, The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021), 246.
John Cage, Conversing with Cage (New York: Routledge, 2003), 215. Rose Slivka later interviewed Cage and Richards: “Lifecraft: John Cage and M. C. Richards Talk on Work and Worth,” Craft Horizons 38/8 (December 1978).
David Pye, The Nature and Art of Workmanship (Cambridge University Press, 1968).
Paul Hultberg, artist’s statement for The American Craftsmen’s Invitational Exhibition (Seattle: Henry Gallery, University of Washington, 1966).
Ancona, Reflections.
The show was organized by material, and he was one of only eight artists included in the enamel’s category. Hultberg’s entry in the book was largely given over to a reprint of Elizabeth Breckenridge’s above-cited essay from his 1966 Museum of Contemporary Crafts exhibition. A short prefatory note echoed Hultberg’s ideas: “he sifts and scatters the ground enamels into random patterns which reflect and embody the orderly chaos of natural phenomena.” Lee Nordness, Objects: USA (New York: Viking, 1970), 33.
Interestingly, these copper areas somewhat resemble Andy Warhol’s later Oxidization Paintings (1977-78) – colloquially known as “piss paintings,” because they were made by urinating on to an untreated copper plate. This hilarious send-up of expressionist macho aesthetics looks a little different when we include Hultberg’s work as a precedent; in a less brazen way, he had already modulated the action painter’s gesture into a less ego-oriented key. The Hultbergs knew Warhol, too, associating with him at Max’s Kansas City, a jazz club called the Five Spot, and via their shared acquaintance with Rauschenberg and Cunningham.
The process can be seen in Ancona, Reflections. This ‘open-air’ firing raises the sheet to about 1500 degrees Fahrenheit, which also warps it. After firing Hultberg flattened it with a heavy rubber roller.
Hultberg’s day job was as a printmaking instructor at Rockland Community College, of which he proudly said: “This may be the best-equipped print shop of a school of this kind in the country.” Nora Kerr, “Etching A Place in Artists’ Hearts,” The Record [Rockland], January 25, 1968.
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