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The contrasting themes and traditions in Classical and Baroque Sculpture

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Biography

Robert Turner was born in 1913 in Port Washington, New York. After a very productive life as an artist/potter and teacher in Alfred, New York, he died on July 26, 2005. He received a B.A. degree in 1936 from Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, PA. In 1949 he earned an M.F.A. degree from the State University of New York College of Ceramics, Alfred University, New York. Between degrees, Turner studied painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia. He taught for two years at Black Mountain College, North Carolina (1949-1951) and at intervals at the Penland School of Crafts, Penland, North Carolina (1969-1974). For more than twenty years (1958-1979) he was professor of ceramic art in the department of Art and Design at Alfred University. Turner’s early works in the 1950s were utilitarian vessels. Gradually his interest shifted away from function to the abstract shapes of sculptural form.

Robert Chapman Turner (1913-2005)