Goode Glass FINAL (6-26-23) - Flipbook - Page 20
Claire Falkenstein
B
ORN IN OREGON, the American sculptor Claire Falkenstein (1908-1997) moved at
age twelve with her family to Berkeley, California, where she received her B.A. at the
University of California in 1930. Continuing her studies at Mills College in Oakland
with Ukrainian expatriate sculptor and painter Alexander Archipenko (1887-1964), she
created abstract forms in clay and wood inspired by the Russian avant-garde. Public recognition
at an early age led to an appointment at the California School of Fine Arts in 1947, where she
began experimenting with nontraditional materials such as metal scraps, wire, and found objects.
A move to Paris in 1950 became pivotal for her career. There, she taught herself to fabricate
jewelry, small-scale wearable metal sculptures enclosing jewel-like shards of colored glass, and
raw, semi-precious stone chunks held in place by the tension of wires. While she continued to
create jewelry as functional art for the remainder of her life, her early experiments also included
larger forms made from inexpensive stovepipe wire, lead bars, scrap metal, and wooden logs.
During a visit to Rome in 1954, she learned to fuse found pieces of glass into her metal constructs,
using both a kiln and a torch. Among her most prominent European commissions, incorporating
partially melted and fused glass pieces, are the gates to the Venetian Palazzo Venier dei Leoni,
home of American art patron and collector Peggy Guggenheim, created in 1961.
Claire Falkenstein’s airy, gestural metal forms with wedged-in and melted colorful glass chunks
have often been compared to the work of her contemporaries Jackson Pollock (1912-1956) and
Willem de Kooning (1904-1997). More recently, however, her unique creations are reconsidered
in the context of European post-World War II art, owing to the cultural shift following the war
during her formative years in France. Decisive and early support came from the French art
critic and collector Michel Tapié de Céleyran (1909-1987), author of the influential book Un art
autre (Art of Another Kind) of 1952. Tapié de Céleyran saw her work as exemplary for a new
approach to art, informal and unprecedented, and as such embodying a vital break from the
calcified traditions of European academic pre-war art. It represented the authentic individualism
he claimed was essential, reflecting a new sensibility and a fresh mindset toward sculptural
expression. Claire Falkenstein’s free-formed dense metal volumes, punctuated by light-catching
nodules of colorful glass, thoroughly resisted the lure of tradition.
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