While sculpture was Claire Falkenstein’s most constant pursuit, throughout her long life (1908-1997) she also created prints, furniture, fountains, architectural elements, screens, wallpaper, costume designs, props, and short films as well as an important body of jewelry. Devoted to experimentation, she worked with a wide array of materials -- laminated plastic, Cor-Ten steel, iron, clay, wood, copper, resin, glass, aluminum and found objects among them. Unrelenting curiosity led Falkenstein to aggressively explore the technical aspect of process, and she reveled in pushing the limits of materials as far as possible simply for the discovery of what would be realized. She embraced chance and the fortuitous accident, describing her work as “unpredictable process.” Indeed, her finished pieces often bear the tactile marks of the solder, the hammer and whatever other tools happen to be in her hands. Born in Coos Bay, Oregon, Falkenstein studied in California with the modernist sculptor Alexander Archipenko and met the Bauhaus artists Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and Gyorgy Kepes. From 1950 until 1963 Falkenstein lived in Paris where she was part of a circle of European artists including Jean Arp, Alberto Giacometti, Karel Appel, Georges Mathieu and Antoni Tàpies. She worked and exhibited at the Stadler Gallery in Paris and the Gallery Spazio in Rome. When she returned to California in 1963 to work and teach, her friends and colleagues included the artists Clyfford Still, David Park, Hassell Smith, Richard Diebenkorn, Edward Corbett and Clay Spoon. While some had an impact on her work, Falkenstein kept a professional distance; she did not follow a specific teacher or have a particular mentor and she, herself, did not have a group of followers. An independent spirit, her unconventional methods were her own.Without any formal training, Falkenstein began producing jewelry in 1946 and continued for the rest of her life. In the late 1940s, artist jewelry was a burgeoning market, but for Falkenstein it was inseparably linked to her work in sculpture. The limited scale made the creation of jewelry, in her small Paris studio, an economical way to experiment with unorthodox techniques. Working with metal, Falkenstein began with hatpins but quickly expanded to a wide range of items including brooches, rings, necklaces, cufflinks, buttons and larger pieces described as “body Jewelry” and even a “harness.” Sculptural works of art unto themselves, some of her pieces were more comfortable to wear than others, and her necklaces with stunning pendants were among her most impressive pieces. Glass often played an important role in Falkenstein’s sculpture and jewelry. While working in Italy on a number of projects (from 1954-1961) she visited Murano to consult with glass experts and was captivated by the smooth rounded accidental shapes of the rejected glass that she found lying around the studio - chunks cut off from the blowing process. Welding, melting and soldering, using a gasoline torch among other tools (she recalls nearly burning down her Paris studio building) Falkenstein devised various techniques including a method for fusing two materials. Widely recognized for numerous large private and public commissions, notably the webbed steel and glass gates she designed for Peggy Guggenheim’s Venice Museum (1962) and the doors, rectory gates and grills and stained-glass windows for Saint Basil’s Church on Wiltshire Boulevard in Los Angeles (1969) Falkenstein’s sculpture and other artwork can be found in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Tate Gallery, among others. In this country she was represented by Martha Jackson Gallery in New York and Esther Robles Gallery in Los Angeles. The owner of the welded copper sculpture first met Falkenstein in the early 1960s when she was working on a monumental outdoor sculpture for the City of Fresno, and, in 1970, purchased the present pieces from an exhibition in Fresno, CA.

CLAIRE FALKENSTEIN (1908-1997)

UNTITLED (FUSION), CIRCA 1970

Details

CLAIRE FALKENSTEIN (1908-1997)
UNTITLED (FUSION), CIRCA 1970
patinated tubular copper, glass
18 7/8 in. (50.5 cm.) high, 37 ¾ in. (96 cm.) wide, 18 in. (45.8 cm.) deep

Lot Essay

cf. M. Henderson, exhibition catalogue, Claire Falkenstein Structure and Flow Works from 1950-1980, West Hollywood, CA, Louis Stern Fine Arts, 2006, p. 89 for an example of a similar sculpture.

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