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= Claire Falkenstein = Claire Falkenstein (1908-1997) was an American artist who, inspired by Cubism, experimented with Abstract Expressionism. She was generally known for her works in metal, glass, jewelry, printmaking, and sculpture across various cities such as San Francisco, Paris, and Los Angeles.

Background and Education
Claire Falkenstein was born in North Bend, Oregon in the small town to Coos Bay and became a prolific artist from the age of 20 to the age of 89. She studied and received her bachelor's degree in Letters and Science at the University of California at Berkeley. During her studies at Berkeley she, at first, had no intentions of becoming an artist. However, she grew to have a passion for art and eventually held a major in art with a double minor in anthropology and philosophy. During the summer of 1933, she also studied at Mills College in Oakland, California with avant-garde sculptor Alexander Archipenko, who introduced her to fundamental principles of sculpting. Later on, she taught at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco from 1948-1950. In 1950, she moved to Paris in order to pursue a professional career in the world or art. While in Europe, she joined a group of American expatriate community of artists such as Sam Francis, Paul Jenkins, and Michel Tapié. When World War II had broken out, she was barely able to make a living as an artist since housing and materials for artistic works were costly. Falkenstein also did not bother to exhibit as much during her stay in Paris. In 1960, she returned to America and settled in Los Angeles, pursuing the rest of her career as an artist until her death in 1997.

Career
As an unconventional artist, Falkenstein saw to it that art be able to transcend into an unbounded form of expression. Influenced by West Coast art, in which it was the hub of original artistic expression, she gave major emphasis to expressivity and saw it as essential to contemporary art. Her first solo exhibition was in 1930 at the East-West Gallery in San Francisco. Art critic Michel Tapié highly influenced Falkenstein's works, introducing her to the style term art autre, a term he coined frequently within his works of art. She was also the only non-German to actively exhibit in the 1952 showcasing at the Werkbund, actively opposed by Adolf Hitler.

Art Autre
Coined by Michel Tapié as the other in his book Un Art Autre, Art autre is used to describe art as an "Art of Another Kind", signifying that it is a predominant form of European art and rejecting prewar art forms. Art Autre would also be used to describe art forms in America and Europe dating after the events of World War II. Falkenstein, pursued creating art forms that are art autre as to develop a kind of art form that is capable of transcending boundaries that restrict structure and flow. In terms of abstract expression, sculpting, unlike painting, was difficult to master because of how limited the scopes of intangibility exist within sculptures. Nonetheless, Falkenstein did not see this as an issue due to attributing autre characteristics to her works.

Works
Claire Falkenstein was widely known for her metal work, in which she would widely experiment with various forms of materials. In 1953, Falkenstein had attempted to erect a large-scale metal sculpture through the use of metal rods. Using a three-quarter inch iron rod, Falkenstein sculpted a wire piece and named it the Sign of Leda. The Sign of Leda was exhibited at the Salon de Jeunes Sculptures in 1953. The Sign of Leda II, requested by Tapié to add to his collection, was also sculpted by Falkenstein using an iron "stove pipe" wire. From this, Falkenstein would eventually come to understand the compositional design for her lattice structure. While in Paris in 1951, Falkenstein would experiement with jewelry designs through the use of bronze metal. In the case of jewelry design, Falkenstein would interrelate her designs with her other works such as sculptures, prints, and paintings. Yet, despite having showcased her jewelry in art shows such as the 1948 Second National Exhibition of Contemporary Jewelry, the 1961 First International Exhibition of Modern Jewelry of Modern Jewelry, and the 1962 exhibition at the Musée des Arts Decoratifs, Falkenstein's work in jewelry design is little known to specialists in the field. In a 1953 commentary from Tapié regarding Falkenstein's works of jewelry and print designs showcased at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, he described her pursuit for different experimental materials as a way to decode their compositional structure and design. Throughout her career, Falkenstein experimented with printmaking in which she laminated metal plates with wires. These were originally intended for printing, but were called objets gravures since these were also considered as sculptures. One of her works showcased in Los Angeles, a welded tube and glass fountain, was one of her works that followed her ''Structure and Flow’’.

Structure and Flow
Mostly self-disciplined and self-taught, Falkenstein developed her own systematic form of structural analysis called Structure and Flow. Falkenstein was strict with maintaining the structure and texture of the artistic piece, yet she wanted to delve deeper into expressive freedom. One artistic composition, Fusions, depicts Falkenstein's application of her Structure and Flow by melding metal with glass. With an understanding of how heating and cooling works, Falkenstein composed Fusions, a mixture of dark iron with colorful glass, by cooling the glass, creating a fixed structure yet fluid when heated, collapsing the structure and creating an indeterminate form. Falkenstein centered her ideas on continuity, challenging the distinctions between space and form through mainly sculpting. Sculpting was a challenging approach to experimentation since weight, balance, and structural symmetry are key points in a sculpture. Falkenstein is also notorious for her work on the Sculptured Water, or “Cal Fed Fountain”, in which she attributed elements of instability to her amorphous sculptures. She hoped to further her mastery of sculpting by diverging from the traditional, which is to use water as a vessel of full expression and not as a setting. Furthermore, Falkenstein commented on the fluidity of the water as she wrote to the curator at the Guggenheim that it is "beautiful to the point that I can hardly stand it."

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