This untitled color collagraph by Claire Falkenstein is plate VI from the 1963 portfolio Struttura Grafica. It is pencil signed by the artist and editioned XXIV/XXX. The portfolio consisted of eleven untitled relief prints (collagraphs) which were accompanied by a title page with text by Michel Tapié. The collagraphs were printed by Edizioni D'Arte Grafica Uno on ivory wove CM Fabriano paper in an edition of thirty and the portfolio was published by Giorgio Upiglio, Milan. The image area measures 20-9/16 by 15-3/16 inches and the paper measures 27-1/2 by 19-5/8 inches.
The portfolio was entitled Struttura Grafica because it was produced in Italy. Struttura translates to structure which relates to the very sculptural quality of each collagraph. These graphics were “structured” because they were given distinct shapes by the building up of objects or forms upon the matrixes. During printing, the raised areas of the matrix structured the collagraph into a three-dimensional sculptural work on paper.
Claire Falkenstein, sculptor, painter, printmaker, jewelry maker and teacher, was born in Coos Bay, Oregon on 22 July 1908. In 1920, her family moved to Berkeley, California where she eventually attended the University of California Berkeley. She studied anthropology, philosophy and art, and received her bachelor’s degree in 1930. That same year her first solo exhibition opened at the East-West Gallery in San Francisco.
Falkenstein’s only formal training in sculpture was in a summer class at Mills College in 1933 conducted by the sculptor, Alexander Archipenko. Throughout her career, she explored the possibilities of clay, wood, sheet metal, wire, plastic, glass and copper tubing. She made her first prints in 1940 during Stanley William Hayter’s summer course at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco.
Falkenstein taught drawing at Mills College from 1945 to 1948 and was appointed to the faculty of the California School of Fine Arts in the fall of 1947. During this time, she made friends with many of the Bay Area Abstract Expressionists. Falkenstein visited Paris in 1950 and decided to stay, opening her studio on the Left Bank. In Paris, she worked on her metal sculpture and developed experimental collagraphs at Atelier 17. While in Europe, Falkenstein created several large-scale commissions, including the railing of the Galleria Spazio in Rome and the New Gates of Paradise for the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni in Venice, which houses the Peggy Guggenheim Collection.
Returning to the United States in 1962, Falkenstein settled in Venice, California and focused her energies on large site sculptures, which included the monumental sculpture for the fountain of the California Federal Savings corporate headquarters in Los Angeles. Falkenstein was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1978.
Retrospective exhibitions of Claire Falkenstein’s work have been mounted at the Palm Springs Desert Museum and the Crocker Art Museum. Falkenstein’s Gates of Paradise were the focal point of an exhibition in her honor that was held at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice in 2016. Her work is represented in the collections of the Tate, London; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, California; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California; the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; and the Worcester Art Museum, Massachusetts.
Claire Falkenstein died in Venice, California on 23 October 1997.
