Guy Wolff: Master Potter in the Garden

3. Early Years & Influences

Chapter three How do we become the people we become? Why does one person take up carpentry with a passion and another watercolors or botany? Why did Guy Wolff, the son of a well-connected abstract expressionist artist, become a rural potter? Was it the family artist-gene gone its own way? The result of the external influences that swirled around his childhood? The times? Staubach_GW_Finalpgs.indd 29 4/26/13 10:55 AM 30 Guy Wolff Social scientists and neuroscientists ask the same questions about each of us, but so far the answers elude them. In Wolff ’s case, it is probably all and none of these. By the time Wolff was born, his father, Robert Jay Wolff (1905–1977), had won prizes for his sculpture,was an important abstract expressionist artist, and was an intimate within a close circle of ground-breaking and well-known artists and architects. “I was almost born at the [Alexander] Calder house,”Wolff says of the close friendshipbetweenhisparentsandtheCalders.“Mymomwaspregnantwithme the summer of 1950.Sandy and Louisa went off to Provence for the summer and needed a family to stay near‘Granma Calder’ (being in her 80s at the time). So my parents had a nice summer in the country staying at the Calder house ...and I came along on September second, being born in the New Milford hospital.”1 The Calder residence was an eighteenth-century farmhouse on Painter Hill Road in Roxbury, Connecticut. After living in France for years, the Calders returned to the U.S. in 1933 amid rumors of war and purchased the old rundown house and the eighteen acres that surrounded it, plus an icehouse and fire-damaged barn,for $3,500.They painted the exterior of the house black after a fire, a perfect foil for the outdoor sculptures (it is still the only black colonial in the Litchfield Hills), turned the icehouse into a studio, and filled the place with Calder’s art.2 On Thanksgiving Day two years after Wolff was born, the Calder’s younger daughter andWolff ’s father found a house for theWolff family in nearbyWashington , Connecticut.Alas,Wolff says, to everyone’s surprise,“It turned out the house was in the middle of the road!”The house hunters had neglected to walk the land and so they saw only that the house was set on a hill, facing a quiet country road.What they didn’t notice was that, slicing close behind the house, almost parallel to the road in front of the house, was the new and improved Route 202, a busy state road. Nevertheless, his father built a studio there and the family moved in. “My father was the son of a very wealthy guy, the first person to do wholesale drugs for American Pharmacy,” Wolff says. “He went to Yale where his roommates were Andrew Goodman, Gardiner Stern, and M. Spiegel. He was supposed to run a store.He went to London to study about tweeds and tailoring, but he ran away to Paris to learn sculpture and painting.My father’s father said that he‘gave up his job for his work.’” After three years of college,Robert JayWolff dropped out and began a promising career in the men’s clothing business at Hart, Schaffner and Marx, under Staubach_GW_Finalpgs.indd 30 4/26/13 10:55 AM 31 Early Years & Influences the stewardship of his “foster uncle,” Uncle Al Levy (Alexander M. Levy), a close friend of his father.3 He did very well, contributed some highly original and commercially successful ideas, designed men’s clothing and came up with a winning advertising campaign, but writing and drawing all the while; he left the safety of the firm, and, radically for his family, decided to become an artist. Robert Jay Wolff left Paris and moved to Chicago with his first wife. In 1933 and 1934 he won awards for his sculpture in juried shows at the Chicago Art Institute and had a one-man show of his sculpture. Then, once again embracing dramatic change, he turned his concentration to abstract expressionist painting in 1936. The following year, he joined the American Abstract Artists. This artist-run group was formed in 1936 in NewYork City“to promote and foster understanding of abstract and non-objective art.”4 At the time the then-radical notions of abstract art were poorly received in establishment art circles. Despite the criticism, the...