BY JOHN SANFORD

Global Death and Destruction, by Robert Arneson, arouses a pathos that is immediate and chilling.

Completed at the height of the Cold War in the early 1980s, the 6-foot-tall ceramic sculpture recently was acquired by the Cantor Center for Visual Arts, thanks to a gift from Bay Area collectors Ross and Paula Turk and the center's Modern and Contemporary Art Fund. The work is comparable to Picasso's painting Guernica in both its vision of horror and perfectly balanced aesthetic.

"WAR MEMORIAL" is inscribed on the front of the sculpture's rectangular base, but what war is it memorializing? Engravings of a mushroom cloud, a skull and a missile decorate the sides of the base and suggest a future nuclear catastrophe. Yet the sculpture also is suggestive of wartime brutality past and present. The decapitated, mutilated head that sits atop a globe of the world could have been found beneath a linden tree in Kosovo, in a shallow grave alongside a dirt road in Rwanda, amid the detritus of an explosion in downtown Jerusalem or an Afghan village. It's gruesomely easy to see the face of Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter who recently was murdered by Islamic extremists in Pakistan.

Arneson entered the ceramic-art scene at the outset of its revolution in the late 1950s. During a demonstration of pottery techniques at the 1961 California State Fair, he decided to throw a slim-necked bottle as opposed to a more traditional bowl or vase. He then crafted a clay cap and affixed it to the top of the bottle, which he marked with the words "No Return."

Arneson had transformed a utilitarian art object into something purely aesthetic, and it was a seminal moment for what would become the Bay Area "funk" movement of the 1960s. It also pointed to the punning humor and irreverence that would characterize Arneson's work for the next three decades (he died of cancer in 1992). Combining elements of Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art with often biting satire, Arneson began by modeling his work on everyday objects ­ bricks, a typewriter, toilets. His stoneware six-pack of Diet Coke was filled with skinny clay bottles. His self-portraits also generally aimed for comic or satiric effect, e.g., an oversized ceramic bust of himself with his tongue sticking out like a lunatic.

During the last 15 years of his life, however, Arneson began gravitating toward subjects that reflected more political, social and personal concerns, including his battle with cancer and, as in the case of Global Death, the prospect of nuclear war. He created paintings and sculptures that responded to what he viewed as the twisted and delusional attempts to rationalize the use of weapons of mass destruction.

When the first pictures of Earth were taken from deep space, the effect was one of marvelous unity. In the sculpture, Earth supports a lifeless head, in which what appears to be a bullet hole and turns out to be missile crater (it is both, really) billows smoke. Below is scrawled "DIRECT HIT." On the back of the broken head is written "VICTORY." This is art for our time.

Global Death is on view through June 2 in the Cantor Center's Lynn Krywick Gibbons Gallery. Sharing the gallery is Arneson's Colonel Hyena, a painting in which the imaginary subject could be a demonic incarnation of Dr. Strangelove's Brig. Gen. Jack D. Ripper.

Meanwhile, the Palo Alto Art Center is showing Big Idea: The Maquettes of Robert Arneson through April 28. It is the first exhibition to draw from the artist's own collection of more than 100 maquettes in terra cotta and glazed ceramic. For more information, visit the web at www.city.palo-alto.ca.us/artcenter or call (650) 329-2366.

• Cantor Center for Visual Arts