Claire Falkenstein

Her grandfather, Valentine von Falkenstein, a medical student of noble birth from Frankfurt, emigrated to the United States after the German Revolutions of 1848-49 as a political refugee and became a pioneer in Siskiyou County, California.

On her mother's side, Falkenstein may be the great-great niece of George Armstrong Custer, but this has not been confirmed.

As a child, Falkenstein would ride her horse in the dark on the beach to see the sun come up and spend time looking at the shells, rocks, seaweed, and driftwood, and these nature forms inspired her sculpture.

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

Falkenstein was one of America's most experimental and productive 20th-century artists.

Falkenstein relentlessly explored media, techniques, and processes with uncommon daring and intellectual rigor.

Though she was respected among the burgeoning post–World War II art scene in Europe and the United States, her disregard for the commodification of art coupled with her peripatetic movement from one art metropolis to another made her an elusive figure.

Falkenstein first worked in the San Francisco Bay Area, then in Paris and New York, and finally in Los Angeles.

Claire Falkenstein was born on July 22, 1908, in Coos Bay, Oregon.

Her father managed a lumber mill.

Claire attended Anna Head School in the Oakland–Berkeley, California, area after her family moved there.

Falkenstein was ethnically German.

Falkenstein attended the University of California at Berkeley, and graduated in 1930 with a major in art and minors in anthropology and philosophy.

She had her first one-woman exhibition, at a San Francisco gallery, even before graduation.

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.

Claire Falkenstein used the term “topology” to describe how she creates art.

Topology itself is a term in mathematics when discussing the relations between objects and space, and in a non-mathematical sense it means how things interact with each other.

Now, Falkenstein adopted the mathematical term “Topology” to describe how her sculptures are relative to the space around them.

Falkenstein not only uses topology in terms of the math around her sculptures but specifically the form of a “u” to create many of her sculptures.

During the 1930s she created sculptures from clay ribbons formed into Möbius strips, woven together.

These were some of the earliest American nonobjective sculptures.

In 1934, she created an abstract fresco at Oakland's Piedmont High School.

This was part of the Federal Art Project, which strongly preferred paintings depicting American scenes, but some abstracts such as this work by Falkenstein were tolerated.

Falkenstein married Irish-American lawyer Richard Francis McCarthy on July 14, 1934, in Alameda, California.

They were married for 22 years.

Her series of wooden sculptures called Exploded Volumes date from the first half of the 1940s.

These were made of movable parts that could be combined in different ways by the viewer.

In many of her pieces, one being “U as a Set'' at the California International Sculpture Symposium held at California State University, Long Beach in 1965, she used the form of “u’s” in her pieces to create a larger form of a “u”.

“U” as a Set was created much like her other works by using copper pipes, though varying in length and diameter.

Tying back to topology, this piece creates a flowing and “airy” response that both interacts with its surroundings and contradicts it.

Two years after the symposium, the piece was moved in front of the Macintosh building at California State University, Long Beach, a modernist building made out of brick.

The conflicting simplicity of the building and the complexity/fluidity of the sculpture creates a blank red background to assess the work.

It also allows for the full effect of the topological style to take form, as you can see the working forces of the all the combined, abstract “u” forms of the copper pipes interact with each other and the air around it to create the feeling of dynamism, and the overall shape of another abstract “u”.

Similarly, this technique was used in all 41 pieces of her series Point as a Set, which also uses hollow copper tubes and fragments in the shape of abstract “u’s” to create pieces that suggest movement thus interacting with space around them.

Falkenstein's experience with those artists reinforced her interest in abstraction, as well as ideas that functional considerations do not detract from a work's aesthetic appeal, and that she was free to experiment with a wide variety of new techniques and materials.

She taught art classes at various Bay Area locations, such as UC Berkeley Extension, Mills College, and the California Labor School.

She also taught at the innovative California School of Fine Arts, alongside abstract expressionists such as Clyfford Still, who would become a close friend and artistic influence, and Richard Diebenkorn.

She was involved with art groups as radical as the Gutai Group in Japan and Un Art Autre in Paris and secured a lasting position in the vanguard, which she held until her death in 1997.

An interest in Einstein's theories of the universe inspired Falkenstein to create sculptures from wire and fused glass that explored the concept of infinite space.

Falkenstein's current reputation rests on her sculpture, and her work in three dimensions was often radical and ahead of her time.