Claire Falkenstein 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 twentieth-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 in Japan and 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.
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. Her grandfather, Valentine von Falkenstein, a medical student from Frankfurt, emigrated to the United States after the German Revolutions of 1848-49 as a political refugee. 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.
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.
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. 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. During the 1930s she created sculptures from clay ribbons formed into Möbius strips, 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.
She married Richard Francis McCarthy, a lawyer, on July 14, 1934 in Alameda, California. They were married for twenty-two 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.
Falkenstein did move to Paris in 1950 and remained for thirteen years, maintaining a studio on the Left Bank. In Paris she met many artists, including Jean Arp, Alberto Giacometti, Sam Francis and Paul Jenkins, as well as art connoisseur Michel Tapié 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, the French counterpart of American Abstract Expressionism.
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.

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