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. She was involved with art groups as radical as the

Gutai Group The was a Japanese avant-garde artist group founded in the Hanshin region by young artists under the leadership of the painter Jirō Yoshihara in Ashiya, Japan, in 1954. It operated until shortly after Yoshihara's death in 1972. The group, tod ...

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.

Early life and education

Claire Falkenstein was born on July 22, 1908, in

Coos Bay, Oregon Coos Bay () is a city located in Coos County, Oregon, United States, where the Coos River enters Coos Bay on the Pacific Ocean. It shares Coos Bay with the adjacent city of North Bend, Oregon, North Bend. Together, they are often referred to as ...

. Her father managed a lumber mill. Claire attended Anna Head School in the

Oakland Oakland is a city in the East Bay region of the San Francisco Bay Area in the U.S. state of California. It is the county seat and most populous city in Alameda County, with a population of 440,646 in 2020. A major West Coast port, Oakland is ...

–

Berkeley, California Berkeley ( ) is a city on the eastern shore of San Francisco Bay in northern Alameda County, California, United States. It is named after the 18th-century Anglo-Irish bishop and philosopher George Berkeley. It borders the cities of Oakland, Cali ...

, area after her family moved there. Falkenstein was ethnically German. Her grandfather, Valentine von Falkenstein, a medical student of noble birth from

Frankfurt Frankfurt am Main () is the most populous city in the States of Germany, German state of Hesse. Its 773,068 inhabitants as of 2022 make it the List of cities in Germany by population, fifth-most populous city in Germany. Located in the forela ...

, emigrated to the United States after the German Revolutions of 1848-49 as a political refugee and became a pioneer in

Siskiyou County, California Siskiyou County ( ) is a county (United States), county located in the northwestern portion of the U.S. state of California. As of the 2020 United States census, 2020 census, the population was 44,076. Its county seat is Yreka, California, Yre ...

. On her mother's side, Falkenstein may be the great-great niece of

George Armstrong Custer George Armstrong Custer (December 5, 1839 – June 25, 1876) was a United States Army officer and cavalry commander in the American Civil War and the American Indian Wars. Custer graduated from the United States Military Academy at West Point ...

, 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. Falkenstein attended the

University of California at Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California), is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California, United States. Founded in 1868 and named after the Anglo-Irish philosopher George Berkele ...

, 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 Mills College at Northeastern University in Oakland, California is part of Northeastern University's global university system. Mills College was founded as the Young Ladies Seminary in 1852 in Benicia, California; it was relocated to Oakland in ...

, where she took a

master class ''Master Class'' is a 1995 play by American playwright Terrence McNally, presented as a fictional master class by opera singer Maria Callas near the end of her life, in the 1970s. The play features incidental vocal music by Giuseppe Verdi, Giac ...

with

Alexander Archipenko Alexander Porfyrovych Archipenko (February 25, 1964) was a Ukrainian-American avant-garde artist, sculpture, sculptor, and graphic designer, graphic artist, active in France and the United States. He was one of the first to apply the principles o ...

, and met

László Moholy-Nagy László Moholy-Nagy (; ; born László Weisz; July 20, 1895 – November 24, 1946) was a Kingdom of Hungary, Hungarian painter and photographer as well as a professor in the Bauhaus school. He was highly influenced by Constructivism (art), con ...

and

György Kepes György Kepes (; October 4, 1906 – December 29, 2001) was a Hungarian-born painter, photographer, designer, educator, and art theorist. After immigrating to the U.S. in 1937, he taught design at the New Bauhaus (later the School of Design, t ...

Style

Topology

Claire Falkenstein used the term “

topology Topology (from the Greek language, Greek words , and ) is the branch of mathematics concerned with the properties of a Mathematical object, geometric object that are preserved under Continuous function, continuous Deformation theory, deformat ...

” to describe how she creates art.

Topology Topology (from the Greek language, Greek words , and ) is the branch of mathematics concerned with the properties of a Mathematical object, geometric object that are preserved under Continuous function, continuous Deformation theory, deformat ...

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 “

” to describe how her sculptures are relative to the space around them.Trimble, Brian and Maria Coltharp. Far-Sited: California International Sculpture Symposium. University Art Museum, California State University, Long Beach, 2018. Falkenstein not only uses

in terms of the math around her sculptures but specifically the form of a “u” to create many of her sculptures. In many of her pieces, one being ''“U '' as a Set'' at the California International Sculpture Symposium held at

California State University, Long Beach California State University, Long Beach (CSULB), also known in athletics as Long Beach State University (LBSU), is a public teaching-focused institution in Long Beach, California, United States. The 322-acre campus is the second largest in the ...

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.Trimble, Brian and Maria Coltharp. Far-Sited: California International Sculpture Symposium. University Art Museum, California State University, Long Beach, 2018. Tying back to

, 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

, 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.

Life and work

San Francisco

Falkenstein's experience with those artists reinforced her interest in

abstraction Abstraction is a process where general rules and concepts are derived from the use and classifying of specific examples, literal (reality, real or Abstract and concrete, concrete) signifiers, first principles, or other methods. "An 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 The California Labor School (until 1945 named the Tom Mooney Labor School) was an educational organization in San Francisco from 1942 to 1957. Like the contemporary Jefferson School of Social Science and the New York Workers School, it represent ...

. She also taught at the innovative

California School of Fine Arts San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI) was a private college of contemporary art in San Francisco, California. Founded in 1871, SFAI was one of the oldest art schools in the United States and the oldest west of the Mississippi River. Approximately ...

, alongside

abstract expressionists Abstract expressionism in the United States emerged as a distinct art movement in the aftermath of World War II and gained mainstream acceptance in the 1950s, a shift from the American social realism of the 1930s influenced by the Great Depressi ...

such as

Clyfford Still Clyfford Still (November 30, 1904 – June 23, 1980) was an American Painting, painter, and one of the leading figures in the first generation of Abstract Expressionists, who developed a new, powerful approach to painting in the years immediat ...

, who would become a close friend and artistic influence, and

Richard Diebenkorn Richard Diebenkorn (April 22, 1922 – March 30, 1993) was an American painter and printmaker. His early work is associated with abstract expressionism and the Bay Area Figurative Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. In the late 1960s he began ...

. In 1934, she created an abstract

fresco Fresco ( or frescoes) is a technique of mural painting executed upon freshly laid ("wet") lime plaster. Water is used as the vehicle for the dry-powder pigment to merge with the plaster, and with the setting of the plaster, the painting become ...

's Piedmont High School. This was part of the

Federal Art Project The Federal Art Project (1935–1943) was a New Deal program to fund the visual arts in the United States. Under national director Holger Cahill, it was one of five Federal Project Number One projects sponsored by the Works Progress Administratio ...

, which strongly preferred paintings depicting American scenes, but some abstracts such as this work by Falkenstein were tolerated. During the 1930s she created sculptures from clay ribbons formed into

Möbius strip In mathematics, a Möbius strip, Möbius band, or Möbius loop is a Surface (topology), surface that can be formed by attaching the ends of a strip of paper together with a half-twist. As a mathematical object, it was discovered by Johann Bened ...

s, woven together. These were some of the earliest American nonobjective sculptures. 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. Falkenstein married Irish-American lawyer Richard Francis McCarthy on July 14, 1934, in

Alameda, California Alameda ( ; ; Spanish for "Avenue (landscape), tree-lined path") is a city in Alameda County, California, United States, located in the East Bay (San Francisco Bay Area), East Bay region of the Bay Area. The city is built on an informal archipe ...

. They were married for 22 years. They had known each other in high school; they were divorced because he didn't join her in her desire to live in

Paris Paris () is the Capital city, capital and List of communes in France with over 20,000 inhabitants, largest city of France. With an estimated population of 2,048,472 residents in January 2025 in an area of more than , Paris is the List of ci ...

Paris

Falkenstein did move to Paris in 1950 and remained for thirteen years, maintaining a studio on the

Left Bank In geography, a bank is the land alongside a body of water. Different structures are referred to as ''banks'' in different fields of geography. In limnology (the study of inland waters), a stream bank or river bank is the terrain alongsid ...

. In Paris she met many artists, including

Jean Arp Hans Peter Wilhelm Arp (; ; 16 September 1886 – 7 June 1966), better known as Jean Arp in English, was a German-French sculptor, painter and poet. He was known as a Dadaist and an abstract artist. Early life Arp was born Hans Peter Wilhelm Ar ...

Alberto Giacometti Alberto Giacometti (, , ; 10 October 1901 – 11 January 1966) was a Swiss sculptor, painter, Drafter, draftsman and Printmaking, printmaker, who was one of the most important sculptors of the 20th century. His work was particularly influenced ...

Sam Francis Samuel Lewis Francis (June 25, 1923 – November 4, 1994) was an American painter and printmaker. Early life Sam Francis was born in San Mateo, California,

and Paul Jenkins, as well as art connoisseur

Michel Tapié Michel Tapié de Céleyran (; 26 February 1909 – 30 July 1987) was a French art critic, curator, and collector. He was an early and influential theorist and practitioner of "tachisme", a French style of abstract painting popular in the 1940s a ...

who acted as a sort of mentor and promoter for the Americans. In a 1995 interview, she said that "Paris was a remarkable experience, because the French allowed a kind of individual action. They have the quality of centuries of ... culture and of art and it sort of spills over." She explored what she referred to as "topology", a connection between matter and space, incorporating a concept of the continuous void in nature. She became associated with the free-form abstractions of

L'Art Informel Informalism or Art Informel () is a pictorial movement from the 1943–1950s, that includes all the abstract and gestural tendencies that developed in France and the rest of Europe during the World War II, similar to American abstract expressi ...

, the French counterpart of American

Abstract Expressionism Abstract expressionism in the United States emerged as a distinct art movement in the aftermath of World War II and gained mainstream acceptance in the 1950s, a shift from the American social realism of the 1930s influenced by the Great Depressi ...

. Out of economic necessity, Falkenstein inventively used inexpensive nontraditional materials for her artwork, including wooden logs, stovepipe wire, and lead bars. She used stovepipe wire, in particular, in innovative ways, and continued to do so even after she was able to afford other materials. The large, airy forms constructed of this material became part of her famous style. Rather than ''sculpture'', she preferred the use of the word ''structure'' to refer to her work. She applied the term to her paintings and prints as well. A critic compared Falkenstein's work of the 1950s to "a Jackson Pollock in three dimensions". Some of her work has a structure which appears as if it could grow, infinitely expanding, similar to the way

Pollock Pollock or pollack (pronounced ) is the common name used for either of the two species of North Atlantic ocean, marine fish in the genus ''Pollachius''. ''Pollachius pollachius'' is referred to as "pollock" in North America, Ireland and the Unit ...

's paintings may appear as if they could continue beyond the canvas. In 1954 the Galleria Montenapoleone in

Milan Milan ( , , ; ) is a city in northern Italy, regional capital of Lombardy, the largest city in Italy by urban area and the List of cities in Italy, second-most-populous city proper in Italy after Rome. The city proper has a population of nea ...

held a major solo exhibition of her work, and four years later, she was asked to make the railing of the Galleria Spazio in

Rome Rome (Italian language, Italian and , ) is the capital city and most populated (municipality) of Italy. It is also the administrative centre of the Lazio Regions of Italy, region and of the Metropolitan City of Rome. A special named with 2, ...

. On this occasion she inserted pieces of colored glass in an open, grid-like structure of soldered metal. One of her most well-known pieces is ''The New Gates of Paradise'', constructed of metal webbing with chunks of glass. Located on the Grand Canal at the

Guggenheim Museum The Guggenheim Museums are a group of museums in different parts of the world established (or proposed to be established) by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation. Museums in this group include: * The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, Ne ...

Venice, Italy Venice ( ; ; , formerly ) is a city in northeastern Italy and the capital of the Veneto region. It is built on a group of 118 islands that are separated by expanses of open water and by canals; portions of the city are linked by 438 bridge ...

, it had been commissioned in 1960 by her friend

Peggy Guggenheim Marguerite "Peggy" Guggenheim ( ; August 26, 1898 – December 23, 1979) was an American art collector, bohemianism, bohemian, and socialite. Born to the wealthy New York City Guggenheim family, she was the daughter of Benjamin Guggenheim, who we ...

. The gates, each of which was , marked the first time she created a never-ending screen with repeating modules attached in various directions, giving the impression that it could continue forever. Falkenstein was also commissioned to create welded gates for the sea villa of the Princess Luciana Pignatelli. Falkenstein's jewelry was the subject of her 1961 solo exhibition at the

Louvre The Louvre ( ), or the Louvre Museum ( ), is a national art museum in Paris, France, and one of the most famous museums in the world. It is located on the Rive Droite, Right Bank of the Seine in the city's 1st arrondissement of Paris, 1st arron ...

's Musée des Arts Decoratifs.

Los Angeles

By the late 1950s, Falkenstein was back in San Francisco, teaching at the

San Francisco Art Institute San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI) was a Private college, private art school, college of contemporary art in San Francisco, California. Founded in 1871, SFAI was one of the oldest art schools in the United States and the oldest west of the Mis ...

. Through a student, Helen Burke, she met composer

Terry Riley Terrence Mitchell Riley (born June 24, 1935) is an American composer and performing musician best known as a pioneer of the minimalist music, minimalist school of composition. Influenced by jazz and Indian classical music, his work became notab ...

, who produced with

Pauline Oliveros Pauline Oliveros (May 30, 1932 – November 24, 2016) was an American composer, accordionist and a central figure in the development of post-war experimental and electronic music. She was a founding member of the San Francisco Tape Music Center ...

and

Loren Rush Loren Rush (born August 23, 1935) is a U.S. composer. Biography His works include the drone piece ''Hard Music'' (1970) for three amplified pianos. The piece features no melodic figuration but rather clouds created by only one note, the low D a ...

an improvised soundtrack to her short film “Polyester Moon”. The film was already complete visually in 1957, but the musicians were brought in for postproduction in 1958. In 1963, Falkenstein moved to the

Venice Venice ( ; ; , formerly ) is a city in northeastern Italy and the capital of the Veneto Regions of Italy, region. It is built on a group of 118 islands that are separated by expanses of open water and by canals; portions of the city are li ...

district of Los Angeles, building an oceanfront home/studio. Falkenstein received many high-profile commissions for large public art pieces, including sculptures, fountains, and screens. In 1965, she create
''"U" as a Set''
for the

International Sculpture Symposium The International Sculpture Symposium movement was spearheaded by Karl Prantl in Austria in 1959. This initiative grew from the need to facilitate communication and exchange between members of the international sculpture community. It was also roo ...

held on the campus of

and in 1969 she created the doors, gates, and stained-glass windows for St. Basil Catholic Church on

Wilshire Boulevard Wilshire Boulevard ( wɪɫ.ʃɚ is a prominent boulevard in the Los Angeles area of Southern California, extending from Ocean Avenue (Santa Monica), Ocean Avenue in the city of Santa Monica, California, Santa Monica east to Grand Avenue (Lo ...

in Los Angeles. The three-dimensional windows are considered by some to be her finest achievements. She said of the windows: "To my knowledge, they're the only abstract windows for a Catholic church." Among the other southern California venues featuring her works are

Fresno Fresno (; ) is a city in the San Joaquin Valley of California, United States. It is the county seat of Fresno County, California, Fresno County and the largest city in the greater Central Valley (California), Central Valley region. It covers a ...

Fulton Mall Fulton Street is a long east–west street in northern Brooklyn, New York City. This street begins at the intersection of Adams Street and Joralemon Street in Brooklyn Heights, and runs eastward to East New York and Cypress Hills. At the bo ...

South Coast Plaza South Coast Plaza is a regional shopping mall in Costa Mesa, California. The largest shopping center on the West Coast of the United States, its pre-COVID sales of over $1.5 billion annually were the highest in the United States. Its 275 retai ...

, the Department of Motor Vehicles in downtown Los Angeles, and various college campuses including

California State University, Fullerton California State University, Fullerton (CSUF or Cal State Fullerton) is a public research university in Fullerton, California, United States. With a total enrollment of more than 41,000, it has the largest student body of the California State ...

(she described her sculpture there as "metallic joy – an activity of forces"),

California State University, Dominguez Hills California State University, Dominguez Hills (CSUDH, CSU Dominguez Hills, or Cal State Dominguez Hills) is a public university in Carson, California. It was founded in 1960 and is part of the California State University (CSU) system. In 2020, ...

University of California, Los Angeles The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Los Angeles, California, United States. Its academic roots were established in 1881 as a normal school the ...

University of Southern California The University of Southern California (USC, SC, or Southern Cal) is a Private university, private research university in Los Angeles, California, United States. Founded in 1880 by Robert M. Widney, it is the oldest private research university in ...

, and

. In 1969, the

Los Angeles Times The ''Los Angeles Times'' is an American Newspaper#Daily, daily newspaper that began publishing in Los Angeles, California, in 1881. Based in the Greater Los Angeles city of El Segundo, California, El Segundo since 2018, it is the List of new ...

distinguished Claire Falkenstein as "Woman of the Year." The

Long Beach Museum of Art The Long Beach Museum of Art is a museum located on Ocean Boulevard in the Bluff Park neighborhood of Long Beach, California, United States. The museum's permanent collection includes over 4,000 paintings, drawings, sculptures, works on paper, ...

named its restaurant "Claire's at the Museum" in honor of Falkenstein. The artist created ''Structure and Flow'', a fountain with twisting latticework, which was donated to the museum in 1972. This work of art, the restaurant's centerpiece, is another creation which many consider to be among her finest. In the 1970s, Claire Falkenstein also created sculptural glass objects in collaboration with the famous glass factory Salviati in

. In 1977, the film: "Claire Falkenstein, Sculptor" was created by Jae Carmichael. She was awarded a

Guggenheim Fellowship Guggenheim Fellowships are Grant (money), grants that have been awarded annually since by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, endowed by the late Simon Guggenheim, Simon and Olga Hirsh Guggenheim. These awards are bestowed upon indiv ...

for Fine Arts in

1978 Events January * January 1 – Air India Flight 855, a Boeing 747 passenger jet, crashes off the coast of Bombay, killing 213. * January 5 – Bülent Ecevit, of Republican People's Party, CHP, forms the new government of Turkey (42nd ...

. From about 1990 on, her work was concentrated on painting rather than sculpture. Falkenstein died at her Venice home on October 23, 1997, of

stomach cancer Stomach cancer, also known as gastric cancer, is a malignant tumor of the stomach. It is a cancer that develops in the Gastric mucosa, lining of the stomach. Most cases of stomach cancers are gastric carcinomas, which can be divided into a numb ...

, at the age of 89. Over the course of her long career as an artist she had produced over 4,000 sculptures, paintings and drawings.

Art work

Claire Falkenstein, contributed her sculpture “U” as a Set to the 1965 California International Sculpture Symposium (CISS). “U” as a Set measures 12’4”x 19’x12’10”made from 6,000 pounds of copper tubes and pipes that were bent and welded with each piece of material varied in diameter and length. The individual pieces of the sculpture resemble stylized versions of the letter U. Instead of the traditional shape of the letter U Falkenstein, using her expression method making the pipes form the way she wants it to. The pieces welded together create a form that can be seen as twisting the letter U. Originally, Falkenstain was going to use iron pipes instead of copper but copper pipes are less brittle which makes it easier to bend. It also doesn’t rust the same as iron and because of the oxidation process in copper it turns green over time. The sculpture is placed in front of the McIntosh Humanities building in a fountain pond at

. The sculpture, “U '' as a Set was made based on memories of Falkenstein childhood as the sculpture is said to mimic bramble bushes and birds'nests that she remembers. Falkenstein explores and manipulates three dimensional space using her topological structure. She describes her work as a

topological Topology (from the Greek words , and ) is the branch of mathematics concerned with the properties of a geometric object that are preserved under continuous deformations, such as stretching, twisting, crumpling, and bending; that is, wit ...

sculpture due to the curving pipes and tubes that embody the idea of penetration and surfacing. She combined her styles by using many signs representing small stylized letters “U” in copper. Shaped it in place together to create a large ensemble bigger than the person. During the process of creation Falkenstein had little assistance from the industry to help her with sculpture.

Louis Stern Fine Arts Louis Stern Fine Arts is an art gallery located at 9002 Melrose Avenue in West Hollywood, California, in the heart of the city’s Avenue of Art and Design. History and development Louis Stern Fine Arts was founded in 1988 by Louis Stern, a s ...

mounted a major show of her work in 2006. A 128-page catalogue was produced. In 2016 her biography was included in the exhibition catalogue ''Women of Abstract Expressionism'' organized by the

Denver Art Museum The Denver Art Museum (DAM) is an art museum located in the Civic Center of Denver, Colorado. With an encyclopedic collection of more than 70,000 diverse works from across the centuries and world, the DAM is one of the largest art museums betwe ...

. Her work was included in the 2021 exhibition ''

Women in Abstraction Women in Abstraction. Another History of Abstraction in the 20th Century or ''Elles font l'abstraction. Une autre histoire de l'abstraction au XXe siècle'' was a major exhibition of 20th century abstract art created by women. It was curated by ...

'' at the

Centre Pompidou The Centre Pompidou (), more fully the (), also known as the Pompidou Centre in English and colloquially as Beaubourg, is a building complex in Paris, France. It was designed in the style of high-tech architecture by the architectural team of ...

Exhibitions

A small selection of Falkenstein's exhibitions: * 1948

Salon des Réalités Nouvelles The Salon des Réalités Nouvelles is an association of artists and an art exhibition in Paris, focusing on abstract art. A first exhibition with the name was held in 1939 in Galerie Charpentier, organised by Robert Delaunay, Sonia Delaunay, Nell ...

* 1970 ''Drawing and Performance, E.A.T SHOW'',

Fisher Gallery * 1970 ''Art and Technology'',

Brooklyn Museum The Brooklyn Museum is an art museum in the New York City borough (New York City), borough of Brooklyn. At , the museum is New York City's second largest and contains an art collection with around 500,000 objects. Located near the Prospect Heig ...

* 1974

California Museum of Science and Industry California () is a state in the Western United States that lies on the Pacific Coast. It borders Oregon to the north, Nevada and Arizona to the east, and shares an international border with the Mexican state of Baja California to the sout ...

* 1975

Phoenix Art Museum The Phoenix Art Museum is the largest art museum, museum for visual art in the southwest United States. Located in Phoenix, Arizona, the museum is . It displays international exhibitions alongside its comprehensive collection of more than 18,0 ...

* 1977

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) is a modern art, modern and contemporary art museum and nonprofit organization located in San Francisco, California. SFMOMA was the first museum on the West Coast devoted solely to 20th-century art ...

* 1978

Tate Gallery Tate is an institution that houses, in a network of four art galleries, the United Kingdom's national collection of British art, and international modern and contemporary art. It is not a government institution, but its main sponsor is the UK ...

* 1979

Seattle Art Museum The Seattle Art Museum (commonly known as SAM) is an art museum located in Seattle, Washington (state), Washington, United States. The museum operates three major facilities: its main museum in downtown Seattle; the Seattle Asian Art Museum in ...

* 1980

Palm Springs Desert Museum The Palm Springs Art Museum (formerly the Palm Springs Desert Museum) is a visual and performing arts institution with several locations in the Coachella Valley, in Riverside County, California, United States, founded in 1938. PSAM has been focu ...

* 1981, 1985

Laguna Art Museum The Laguna Art Museum (LAM) is a museum located in Laguna Beach, California, on Pacific Coast Highway (California), Pacific Coast Highway. LAM exclusively features California art and is the oldest cultural institution in the area. It has been kno ...

* 1987 ''Peggy Guggenheim's Other Legacy'',

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, often referred to as The Guggenheim, is an art museum at 1071 Fifth Avenue between 88th and 89th Street (Manhattan), 89th Streets on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in New York City. It hosts a permanent coll ...

* 1992

Museum of Contemporary Art Museum of Contemporary Art (often abbreviated to MCA, MoCA or MOCA) may refer to: Africa * Museum of Contemporary Art (Tangier), Morocco, officially le Galerie d'Art Contemporain Mohamed Drissi Asia East Asia * Museum of Contemporary Art Shanghai ...

(Los Angeles) * 1994

Corcoran Gallery The Corcoran Gallery of Art is a former art museum in Washington, D.C., that is now the location of the Corcoran School of the Arts and Design, a part of the George Washington University. Founded in 1869 by philanthropist William Wilson Corcoran ...

* 1995 ''46th International Art Exhibition'',

Venice Biennale The Venice Biennale ( ; ) is an international cultural exhibition hosted annually in Venice, Italy. There are two main components of the festival, known as the Art Biennale () and the Venice Biennale of Architecture, Architecture Biennale (), ...

* 1997 ''Claire Falkenstein, Looking Within: A Point of Departure'',

Fresno Art Museum The Fresno Art Museum is an art museum in Fresno, California. The museum's collection includes contemporary art, modern art, Mexican and Mexican-American art, and Pre-Columbian sculpture. Mission statement "The Fresno Art Museum offers a dyna ...

* 2002 ''True Grit – Seven Female Visionaries Before Feminism'', Boise Art Museum (

Boise, Idaho Boise ( ) is the List of capitals in the United States, capital and List of cities in Idaho, most populous city of the U.S. state of Idaho. As of the 2020 United States census, 2020 census, there were 235,685 people residing in the city. Loca ...

) * 2006 ''Claire Falkenstein: Structure and Flow: Works from 1950-1980'',

* 2007 ''Be-Bomb: the Transatlantic War of Images and all that Jazz. 1946–1956'',

Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art The Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art (, , MACBA, ) is a contemporary art museum situated in the Plaça dels Àngels, in El Raval neighborhood, Ciutat Vella district, in Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain. The museum opened to the public on 28 Novem ...

* 2008 ''Modernism and the Wichner Collection'',

* 2009 ''Craft in America: Expanding Traditions'', Fuller Craft Museum (

Brockton, Massachusetts Brockton is a city in Plymouth County, Massachusetts, United States; the population was 105,643 at the 2020 United States census. Along with Plymouth, Massachusetts, Plymouth, it is one of the two county seats of Plymouth County, Massachusetts, ...

) * 2012 ''Claire Falkenstein: An Expansive Universe'', part of Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945 – 1980, Jack Rutberg Fine Arts (

Los Angeles, California Los Angeles, often referred to by its initials L.A., is the List of municipalities in California, most populous city in the U.S. state of California, and the commercial, Financial District, Los Angeles, financial, and Culture of Los Angeles, ...

) * 2012 Black And – -,

Anita Shapolsky Gallery The Anita Shapolsky Gallery is an art gallery that was founded in 1982 by Anita Shapolsky. It is currently located at 152 East 65th Street, on Manhattan's Upper East Side, in New York City. The gallery specializes in 1950s and 1960s abstract ...

, New York City, NY

Collections

Falkenstein's work is in many museum collections, including: *

Addison Gallery of American Art Addison may refer to: Places Canada * Addison, Ontario, a community United States * Addison, Alabama, a town * Addison, Illinois, a village * Addison, Kentucky, an unincorporated community * Addison, Maine, a town * Addison, Michigan, a vil ...

* University Art Museum at

Coos Art Museum Coos Art Museum is a museum in Coos Bay, operating on the southern coast of the U.S. state of Oregon since 1966. It offers exhibitions, art classes, lectures, and community events. Coos Art Museum is housed in a 1936 Art Deco former U.S. Post Of ...

Crocker Art Museum The Crocker Art Museum is the oldest art museum in the Western United States, located in Sacramento, California. Founded in 1885, the museum holds one of the premier collections of Californian art. The collection includes American works dating f ...

* Frauenau Glass Museum (Donation

Wolfgang Kermer Wolfgang Kermer (born 18 May 1935 in Neunkirchen, Saarland) is a German art historian, artist, art educator, author, editor, curator of exhibitions, art collector and professor. From 1971 to 1984 he was repeatedly elected Rector of the State Ac ...

) *

Hammer Museum The Hammer Museum, which is affiliated with the University of California, Los Angeles, is an art museum and cultural center known for its artist-centric and progressive array of exhibitions and public programs. Founded in 1990 by the entrepreneur- ...

Harvard Art Museums The Harvard Art Museums are part of Harvard University and comprise three museums: the Fogg Museum (established in 1895), the Busch-Reisinger Museum (established in 1903), and the Arthur M. Sackler Museum (established in 1985), and four research ...

Indianapolis Museum of Art The Indianapolis Museum of Art (IMA) is an encyclopedic art museum located at Newfields, a campus that also houses Lilly House, The Virginia B. Fairbanks Art & Nature Park, the Garden at Newfields and more. It is located at the corner of No ...

Los Angeles County Museum of Art The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) is an art museum located on Wilshire Boulevard in the Miracle Mile vicinity of Los Angeles. LACMA is on Museum Row, adjacent to the La Brea Tar Pits (George C. Page Museum). LACMA was founded in 1961 ...

Museum of Art and Archaeology The Museum of Art and Archaeology is the art museum of the University of Missouri. It is located in the Ellis Library in Columbia, Missouri Columbia is a city in Missouri, United States. It was founded in 1821 as the county seat of Boone C ...

(

University of Missouri The University of Missouri (Mizzou or MU) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Columbia, Missouri, United States. It is Missouri's largest university and the flagship of the four-campus Univers ...

) *

Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art The Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art (NEHMA) is an accredited academic art museum focused on modern and contemporary art, located at Utah State University in Logan, Utah, Logan, Utah. NEHMA was founded in 1982 with the ceramic collection of phil ...

Norton Simon Museum The Norton Simon Museum is an art museum located in Pasadena, California. It was previously known as the Pasadena Art Institute and the Pasadena Art Museum and displays numerous sculptures on its grounds. Overview The Norton Simon collections ...

Oakland Museum of California Oakland is a city in the East Bay region of the San Francisco Bay Area in the U.S. state of California. It is the county seat and most populous city in Alameda County, California, Alameda County, with a population of 440,646 in 2020. A major We ...

Peggy Guggenheim Collection The Peggy Guggenheim Collection is an art museum on the Grand Canal in the Dorsoduro ''sestiere'' of Venice, Italy. It is one of the most visited attractions in Venice. The collection is housed in the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, an 18th-century ...

Pompidou Centre The Centre Pompidou (), more fully the (), also known as the Pompidou Centre in English and colloquially as Beaubourg, is a building complex in Paris, France. It was designed in the style of high-tech architecture by the architectural team of ...

Portland Art Museum The Portland Art Museum (PAM) is an art museum in downtown Portland, Oregon, United States. The Portland Art Museum has 240,000 square feet (22,000 m2), with more than 112,000 square feet (10,400 m2) of gallery space. The museum’s permanent c ...

San Diego Museum of Art The San Diego Museum of Art is a fine art museum in Balboa Park in San Diego, California, that houses a broad collection with particular strength in Spanish art. It opened as the Fine Arts Gallery of San Diego on February 28, 1926, and changed ...

Smithsonian American Art Museum The Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM; formerly the National Museum of American Art) is a museum in Washington, D.C., part of the Smithsonian Institution. Together with its branch museum, the Renwick Gallery, SAAM holds one of the world's lar ...

Tate Britain Tate Britain, known from 1897 to 1932 as the National Gallery of British Art and from 1932 to 2000 as the Tate Gallery, is an art museum on Millbank in the City of Westminster in London, England. It is part of the Tate network of galleries in En ...

University of Michigan Museum of Art The University of Michigan Museum of Art (UMMA) is one of the largest university art museums in the United States, located in Ann Arbor, Michigan, with . Built as a war memorial in 1909 for the university's fallen alumni from the Civil War, Alu ...

References

Sources

* https://www.amazon.com/Structure-Flow-1950-1980-Louis-Stern/dp/0974942154 *

External links

Interview of Claire Falkenstein
part o
Los Angeles Art Community – Group Portrait
interview series, Center for Oral History Research, UCLA Library Special Collections, University of California, Los Angeles.
Claire Falkenstein
Collections Search Center,

Smithsonian Institution The Smithsonian Institution ( ), or simply the Smithsonian, is a group of museums, Education center, education and Research institute, research centers, created by the Federal government of the United States, U.S. government "for the increase a ...

Entry for Claire Falkenstein
on the

Union List of Artist Names The Union List of Artist Names (ULAN) is a free online database of the Getty Research Institute using a controlled vocabulary, which by 2018 contained over 300,000 artists and over 720,000 names for them, as well as other information about artist ...

''U as a Set'' on the campus of

{{DEFAULTSORT:Falkenstein, Claire American abstract sculptors American abstract painters Sculptors from California Sculptors from Oregon American women glass artists People from Coos Bay, Oregon Deaths from stomach cancer in California 1908 births 1997 deaths 20th-century American sculptors 20th-century American women artists Public Works of Art Project artists Federal Art Project artists American glass artists