Claire Falkenstein—the American artist whose gates of tangled iron, set with chunks of Murano glass, have welcomed visitors to the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice since 1961—spent over six decades pursuing what she called the urge to "break up the volume." The gates distill that conviction, formed early and held through every change of place and material: to open the closed mass of sculpture and challenge the distinction between interior and exterior space.
That urge found its most concentrated expression in her Suns: dense lattices of twisted, brazed metal into which she increasingly worked colored glass, evoking not the look of celestial bodies but the energy, scale, and power of cosmic phenomena in an era transformed by relativity and spaceflight. Fusing glass and metal through heat became her signature, carried from jewelry and prints to monumental fountains and the windows of an entire church. She arrived at this vocabulary across three chapters: Oregon and the Bay Area, postwar Europe, and Los Angeles.
Born Claire von Falkenstein in 1908 in Coos Bay, a logging town on Oregon's rugged coast where her father managed a sawmill, she absorbed the timber country early; carved wood remained an important material throughout her career. Her family moved to Oakland in 1920, and she studied anthropology, philosophy, and art at the University of California, Berkeley, graduating in 1930, the year of her first solo exhibition in San Francisco. In the summer of 1933 she studied briefly with Alexander Archipenko at Mills College, her only formal training in sculpture.
Falkenstein came of age in the Bay Area art world of the 1930s and 1940s. Through the Works Progress Administration's Federal Art Project she painted the fresco Poppy Abstraction (1934) at Piedmont High School, and as president of the San Francisco Society of Women Artists she organized wartime workshops and murals for hospitals and USO centers. Her Set Structures (c. 1942–44), bandsaw-cut forms meant to be taken apart and rearranged by the viewer, modeled the mathematical concept of sets and marked the first stirring of her urge to break up the volume. Wartime rationing pushed her toward new media: painting on curved aluminum, drawing on X-ray film, carving plexiglass to be lit from within, and, in 1949, shooting the film Touching the Quick. In 1947 she joined the faculty of the California School of Fine Arts, teaching alongside Clyfford Still, who became a lifelong friend, and in the summer of 1949 she taught at Pond Farm, the utopian craft community run by the Bauhaus-trained potters Marguerite and Frans Wildenhain, her last significant undertaking before leaving for Europe.
In 1950, at forty-two, Falkenstein left an established career for Paris, moving among the American expatriates Sam Francis and Frank Lobdell as well as Alberto Giacometti, Jean Arp, and Constantin Brâncuși. From inexpensive stovepipe wire she twisted and welded porous, expanding lattices, work championed by the critic Michel Tapié, whose concept of art autre, "art of another kind," named the rupture with the past that she was pursuing in sculpture. The first Suns followed in 1954, the same year a stair rail for Luigi Moretti's Galleria Spazio in Rome led her to devise her method of fusing glass and metal in a kiln. In 1957 she forged the Pignatelli Gates for Moretti's Villa La Saracena over an open coal fire on the beach, pressure-setting chunks of Murano glass into hammered steel, and a 1958 stage commission from the dancer May O'Donnell, taken up while she recovered from a fall, turned her to copper tubing she could bend by hand, the material that would make her fountains possible. A 1960 visit to Peggy Guggenheim's palazzo yielded the commission for the Venice gates, for which she adapted her Never-Ending Screens, welded panels of angled rods whose open networks imply, theoretically, extension to infinity.
Two-dimensional invention ran alongside. At Atelier 17 she pressed small metal sculptures into damp paper to make her Object Gravures, forerunners of the Struttura grafica portfolio printed at Milan's Grafica Uno in 1962. In 1959 she reduced her drawn mark to a single repeated stroke, describing the Moving Point, "a very rigorous kind of discipline" whose accumulating fields occupied her painting and drawing for the rest of her life.
Her years abroad were artistically exhilarating but materially lean; she and her husband, the labor attorney Richard McCarthy, divorced amicably in 1957, and by the early 1960s a growing cluster of commissions drew her back to California. She settled in Los Angeles in 1963. A fountain for her gallerist Esther Robles, Structure and Flow #1 (1963–64), of copper tubing set with melted glass, named the principle that would define her mature work: continuity bound up with discontinuity. To build the monumental Structure and Flow #2 (1965) for the California Federal Savings building on Wilshire Boulevard, she purchased 719 Ocean Front on the Venice boardwalk, her home and studio for the rest of her life. The fountain drew immediate national attention (the Los Angeles Times dubbed it "Falkenstein Falls") before neglect led to its dismantling in 1989. Her largest commission, the windows and doors of St. Basil Catholic Church, comprised fifteen towering window-sculptures of Cor-Ten steel and colored glass, extending the Never-Ending Screen into sacred architecture. The Moving Point grew in scale as well: Orbit the Earth (Moving Point) (1963), a nine-panel painting nearly twenty feet wide in metallic silver, gold, and copper, registered her fascination with John Glenn's orbital flight, while other paintings took their titles from the city's thoroughfares: Figueroa, La Brea, Topanga.
Public commissions continued for decades: DNA Molecule (c. 1970–71), a kinetic sculpture of counter-rotating copper and glass for Hyland Laboratories; Sun Ribbon (1980), a wall of colored glass at the gateway to Isamu Noguchi's California Scenario; and The Forum (1987) at California State University, Dominguez Hills, a "socio-sculptural environment" of cedar logs from Port Orford, Oregon, the timber country of her childhood. Throughout this time she continued her Fusions of copper and melted glass. She also experimented with constructions of wood, bamboo, canvas, and copper that John Ashbery called “three-dimensional drawings,” and returned in her final years to painting, carrying the Moving Point into looser symbolic patterns and playful figuration.
Claire Falkenstein (b. 1908, Coos Bay, Oregon; d. 1997, Los Angeles) lived and worked in Venice, California, until her death. Her work has been the subject of numerous major solo exhibitions, including presentations at the Pasadena Museum of Art, Pasadena, California; the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, Italy; the Long Beach Museum of Art, Long Beach, California; and the Fresno Art Museum, Fresno, California. Her work frequently features in major institutional exhibitions worldwide, including forthcomign and recent presentations at the Menil Collection, Houston, Texas; the Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, Maryland; Centre Pompidou Malaga, Malaga, Spain; Whitechapel Gallery, London; Grey Art Gallery, New York; Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, Massachusetts; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Museo Guggenheim Bilbao, Bilbao, Spain; and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Her work is held in public collections worldwide, including the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago; the Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, Maryland; the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, California; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; the Palm Springs Art Museum, Palm Springs, California; the San Diego Museum of Art, San Diego, California; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Tate Modern, London; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among many others.
Falkenstein died at her Venice home on October 23, 1997; in accordance with her wishes, the Claire Falkenstein Foundation was established to preserve and promote her legacy.
Learn more about Claire Falkenstein and the Claire Falkenstein Foundation at their website.
