10/28/2016 - Modern Ceramics & Modern Art+Design: Live Salesroom Auction

 In 1965, in a search for new form and content, Arneson began to make “bricks”. Jonathan Fineberg writes of this in his book A Troublesome Subject: The Art of Robert Arneson (University of California Press, 2013 p.65), noting “The bricks were a burlesque of conventional ceramics; like the toilet it is an ordinary ceramic object that was not normally a subject for art”. The “brick” was the basis for one of his masterpieces and largest works, Fragment of Western Civilization (1972). He worked with this format on and off, sometimes using bricks as a plinth for larger figurative work, into the 1980’s.