Claire Falkenstein

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Claire Falkenstein (July 22, 1908 – October 23, 1997) was an American sculptor, painter, jewelry designer, and educator best known for her often large-scale abstract metal and glass public sculptures.

Falkenstein was one of America's most experimental and prolific twentieth-century artists. Falkenstein pursued media, methods, and processes with a keen curiosity and intellectual rigor.

Despite being acknowledged in Europe and the United States as a leader of the postwar reconstruction of art, her refusal of the commodification of art, as well as her peripatetic travel from one art metropolis to another made her a elusive figure. Falkenstein began working in San Francisco Bay, then in Paris and New York, and finally in Los Angeles.

She was active with art collectives in Tokyo and art autre, and she landed a permanent position in the vanguard, which she held until her resignation in 1997. Falkenstein created sculptures from wire and fused glass that explored the idea of infinite space in Einstein's theories of the universe.

Falkenstein's current fame is based on her sculpture, and her work in three dimensions was often experimental and ahead of her time.

Early life and education

Claire Falkenstein was born in Coos Bay, Oregon, on July 22, 1908. Her father owned a lumber mill. After her family moved to Oakland, California, Claire attended Anna Head School in the Oakland-Berkeley area.

Falkenstein was ethnically German. Valentine von Falkenstein, a medical student of noble origins from Frankfurt, immigrated to the United States after the German Revolutions 1848-49 as a political immigrant and became a pioneer in Siskiyou County, California. Falkenstein may be George Armstrong Custer's great-great niece, but this has not been confirmed.

Falkenstein rode her horse in the dim on the beach to see the sun rise and spend time looking at the shells, rocks, seaweed, and driftwood, which inspired her sculpture.

Falkenstein attended the University of California in Berkeley, and graduated in 1930 with a major in art and minors in anthropology and philosophy. Even before graduation, she had her first one-woman exhibit at a San Francisco gallery. Her art education continued in the early 1930s at Mills College, where she took a master class with Alexander Archipenko and met László Moholy-Nagy and György Kepes, as well as László.

Life and work

Falkenstein's encounter with those artists fueled her enthusiasm for abstraction, as well as the realization that functional considerations did not distract from a work's aesthetic value, as well as the fact that she was free to experiment with a variety of new techniques and materials.

She taught art classes at several Bay Area universities, such as UC Berkeley Extension, Mills College, and the California Labor School. She taught at the renowned California School of Fine Arts, as well as abstract expressionists like Clyfford Still, who would be a close friend and artistic influence, and Richard Diebenkorn. In 1934, she created an abstract fresco at Oakland's Piedmont High School. This was part of the Federal Art Project, which strongly encouraged paintings portraying American scenes, but there were some abstracts like this one by Falkenstein that were not accepted. She created sculptures from clay ribbons that were converted into Möbius strips, which were tied together in the 1930s. These were some of the first American nonobjective sculptures. Exploded Volumes, her wooden sculptures, date from the first half of the 1940s. These were made of moveable parts that could be combined in various ways by the viewer.

Richard McCarthy, an Irish-American lawyer, married Falkenstein in Alameda, California, on July 14, 1934. They were married for 22 years. They had known each other in high school but were chucked out because he didn't agree with her in Paris's inability.

Falkenstein moved to Paris in 1950 and remained for thirteen years, owning a studio on the Left Bank. Jean Arp, Alberto Giacometti, Sam Francis, and Paul Jenkins, as well as art connoisseur Michel Tapié, who served as a kind of mentor and promoter for the Americans, were all present in Paris.

"Paris was a remarkable experience," she said in a 1995 interview because the French allowed a sort of individual action. They have the enduring quality of centuries of... history and of art, and it sort of spills over." She investigated what she described as "topology," a link between matter and space, as well as a notion of the continuous void in nature. She became associated with the free-form abstractions of L'Art Informel, the French counterpart to American Abstract Expressionism.

Falkenstein crafted her artwork with wood logs, stovepipe wire, and lead bars as a result of economic necessity. She used stovepipe wire, in particular, in new ways, and she continued to do so even after she was able to purchase other products. The large, airy forms of this material made became part of her famous style.

She preferred the word structure rather than sculpture for her work. She also applied the word to her paintings and prints. Falkenstein's work of the 1950s was compared to "a Jackson Pollock in three dimensions," a commentator. Any of Pollock's paintings has a structure that seems to be growing infinitely as if it does, as well as the way Pollock's paintings may appear as if they were to continue beyond the canvas.

Galleria Montenapoleone in Milan held a major solo exhibition of her art in 1954, and four years later, she was asked to assist the Galleria Spazio in Rome. On this occasion, she embedded pieces of colored glass in an open, grid-like building of soldered metal.

The New Gates of Paradise, one of her most popular pieces, is made of metal webbing with chunks of glass. It was installed on the Grand Canal at the Guggenheim Museum in Venice, Italy, by her friend Peggy Guggenheim in 1960. The gates, each of which was 12 by 4 feet (3.2 m 1.2 m), appeared to be the first time she created a never-ending screen with repeating modules attached in several directions, giving the appearance that it could continue indefinitely.

Falkenstein was also contracted to make welded gates for the Princess Luciana Pignatelli's sea villa.

Falkenstein's jewelry was on view at the Louvre's Musée des Arts Decoratifs in 1961.

Falkenstein moved to Los Angeles' Venice neighborhood in 1963, constructing an oceanfront home/studio. Falkenstein received numerous high-profile awards for large public art works, including sculptures, fountains, and televisions. "U" was created in 1965 as a Set for the International Sculpture Symposium, held on the campus of California State University, Long Beach, and in 1969 she made the doors, gates, and stained glass windows for St. Bruton. Basil Catholic Church on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles. Some believe the three-dimensional windows to be her best creations. "They're the only abstract windows for a Catholic church," she said of the windows. Fresno's Fulton Mall, South Coast Plaza, the Department of Motor Vehicles in downtown Los Angeles, and a number of UCLA campuses, including California State University, Long Beach, are among the other southern California venues exhibiting her works.

The Los Angeles Times named Claire Falkenstein as "Woman of the Year" in 1969.

In honor of Falkenstein, the Long Beach Museum of Art's restaurant "Claire's at the Museum" was named. The artist created Structure and Flow, a latticework fountain that was donated to the museum in 1972. This work of art, the restaurant's centerpiece, is another of her restaurant's finest creations, according to many.

Claire Falkenstein created sculptural glass objects in 1970 in Venice's collaboration with the famous glass factory Salviati.

Jae Carmichael produced "Claire Falkenstein, Sculptor" in 1977.

In 1978, she was given a Guggenheim Fellowship for Fine Arts. Her focus was more on painting than sculpture from about 1990 to sculpture. Falkenstein died of stomach cancer at her Venice home on October 23, 1997, at the age of 89. She had created over 4,000 sculptures, paintings, and drawings during her long career as an artist.

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