A Hollow Gesture

Arneson, one of the foremost figures in the American art-clay movement during the second half of this century, was also an exceptional draftsman. He was an important teacher, and proponent of so-called "Bay Area Funk Art" (a strain of representational art based in the San Francisco area that also included William T. Wiley), a group whose work embraced corny kitsch and was characterized by visual and verbal puns often of a base nature.