An art historian and curator, Peter Benson Miller is curator at the Fondazione Nicola Del Roscio in Rome. Recent exhibition projects include Paul Thek. Italian Hours, and Ellsworth Kelly: Line, Form, Color. From 2013 to 2019, he was the Andrew Heiskell Arts Director at the American Academy in Rome, where he organized exhibitions of work by Yto Barrada, Paolo Gioli, Prabhavathi Meppayil, Charles Ray and Cy Twombly, among other artists. In 2010, he curated the exhibition Philip Guston, Roma for the Museo Carlo Bilotti in Rome and the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. His book American Artists in Postwar Rome: Art and Cultural Exchange is forthcoming from Bloomsbury Visual Arts.
Abstract
Foregrounding exchanges between American and Italian artists in postwar Rome shaped by the ideological tensions and aesthetic debates in a Cold War “contact zone,” this paper explores aspects of Claire Falkenstein’s abstract direct metal sculpture. The model of entanglement – histories, trajectories, individuals, and objects intertwined together emphasizing a multiplicity of sources, numerous directions of influence and modalities of intercultural connectedness – underlines the international dialogue informing Falkenstein’s work. Falkenstein lived principally in Paris in the 1950s, she wrote to Betty Parsons “I’m so excited about Rome I don’t ever want to leave.” Her connections to Rome and its artistic community offer new insights about her sources, working methods, and critical reception.
Pioneering new abstract sculptural forms and methods of display, Falkenstein was championed by Michel Tapié as exemplary of Art Autre. Exhibited at the Rome-New York Art Foundation, the Galleria Il Segno, and Luigi Moretti’s Galleria Spazio, her sculptures emerged as lightning rods in politicized debates about abstraction, the synthesis of the arts, independent womanhood, and other American incursions in Italy. Focusing on Falkenstein’s work in a variety of media – the Suns, her Object-Gravures, a “stair screen” installed at Spazio, and a gate commissioned for a private villa outside Rome designed by Moretti – I explore how her affinities with ideas and forms engaged by other artistis working in Rome, including Carla Accardi, Mirko Basaldella, Lee Bontecou, Alberto Burri, Piero Dorazio, Bruno Munari, and Beverly Pepper. In the context of “Cold War cosmopolitanism,” Falkenstein’s work offers new insight into the hybrid forms generated by transnational artistic identity.
Image: Claire Falkenstein, Sun #10, 1957, nickel-plated steel. 34 x 56 x 13 in. Private Collection, New York © The Falkenstein Foundation, Courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY.
