Rudy Autio - Sources

Ceramicist, born in Butte, Montana, USA. He studied at Washington State University (MFA), and became professor of ceramics and sculpture at the University of Montana in Missoula (1957). While his early pots reflected abstract expressionism, he is best known for his later figurative work. On anthropomorphic clay forms he superimposed improvisational drawings of women, landscapes, and animals to pictorialize the vessels.

Autio was born Arne Rudolf Autio on October 8, 1926 in Butte, Montana, to a family of Finnish immigrants. After the war ended, he studied art at Montana State University (then Montana State College) in Bozeman, where he first met Peter Voulkos, who became a lifelong friend.

In 1952, Autio was a founding resident artist at the Archie Bray Foundation.

Autio's torso-shaped vessels are painted with figures and animals in a free linear style reminiscent of Matisse's drawings. They are found in permanent collections of museums around the world, including the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Brooklyn Museum, the Carnegie Museum, the Metropolitan Museum, the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution, the Applied Arts Museum in Helsinki, and the National Museum in Stockholm.

Sources

Smithsonian oral history interview of Rudy Autio, 1983-1984

Lackey, Louana.