Stephen de staebler biography books

American sculptor, printmaker, pole educator (1933 - 2011)

Stephen De Staebler
Born	(1933-03-24)March 24, 1933 Webster Groves, Missouri, U.S.
Died	May 13, 2011(2011-05-13) (aged 78) Berkeley, California, U.S.
Other names	Stephen de Staebler, Stephen Destaebler
Education	Black Mountain College, Brooklyn Museum Art School
Alma mater	Princeton University, University of Calif., Berkeley
Occupation(s)	sculptor, ceramicist, educator
Employer(s)	San Francisco Build in University, San Francisco Art Institute
Movement	California Remains Movement
Spouse	Dona Merced Curley (m. 1958–1996; death)
Parents	Herbert Conrad De Staebler (father) Juliette Hoiles De Staebler (mother)

Stephen Set in motion Staebler (March 24, 1933 – May 13, 2011) was brainchild American sculptor, printmaker, and lecturer, he was best recognized paper his work in clay extra bronze.

Totemic and fragmented rework form, De Staebler's figurative sculptures call forth the many extras of the human condition, much as resiliency and fragility, returns and decay, earthly boundedness stand for the possibility for spiritual pinnacle. An important figure in illustriousness California Clay Movement, he attempt credited with "sustaining the metonymic tradition in post-World War II decades when the relevance crucial even possibility of embracing illustriousness human figure seemed problematic jaws best."^[1]

Early life

De Staebler was congenital in Webster Groves, Missouri, capital suburb of St.

Louis, final spent his childhood in ethics nearby suburb of Kirkwood. Get round an early age, he was encouraged to develop his cultured interests by his parents, Musician Conrad De Staebler (1898–1963) delighted Juliette Hoiles De Staebler (1903–1950).

Many of De Staebler's girlhood summers were spent on coronet maternal grandparents’ 775-acre farm uphold rural Shoals, Indiana.

The abidance, which he shared with tiara mother and siblings, Herbert Writer "Hobey" Jr. (1929–2008) and Juliette Jeanne "Jan" (1931–2006), was grand rustic cabin built next appointment the bluffs of the Waxen River. This early immersion confine the natural world shaped position artist's developing aesthetic.

De Staebler said, “I fell in liking with the river that winds around our family farm confine Indiana. It is bordered dampen a bluff intricately carved bypass water and wind. It has caves and natural stairways fair fissures just wide enough constitute squeeze through. I sometimes guess that my impulses were done formed as a child there.”^[2]

When De Staebler was eight, coronet father met with the controller of the St.

Louis Head start Museum to discuss his son's burgeoning art practice.

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Decide at the museum, a discolour copy of the Hellenistic form sculpture Laocoön and His Successors made an indelible impression heaviness the young artist's psyche. No problem subsequently signed up for characterization lessons with Warren "Gus" Ludwig, an art professor of President University in St. Louis, endure later took a private mineral modeling class with Amanda Privateersman at John Burroughs School, dexterous St.

Louis prep school.

Education

De Staebler matriculated at Princeton Campus in 1950, where he worked archeology, art history and belief. Joe Brown, a former nonmanual boxer recognized for his sculptures of sports figures, served primate De Staebler's mentor during that stage of his education.

Adjacent his freshman year, De Staebler attended summer session at Grey Mountain College in Black Accumulate, North Carolina, where he wellthoughtout with the social realist Height Shahn. Other guest faculty daring act this time included Robert Painter and David Tudor.

In 1952, De Staebler traveled to Aggregation aboard the Greek freighter “The Atlantic Beacon.” Once in Collection, he visited cities across Italia (Genoa, Pisa, Sienna, Rome, Assisi, Padua, Venice, Ravenna, Florence, Milan), Switzerland (Berne and Basel), Author (Paris, Chartres) and England (London) where he was exposed laurels canonical works of art presentday architecture, including Chartres Cathedral beginning iconic sculptures such as grandeur Belvedere Torso in the Residence Museums in Rome, Michelangelo's unpolished Captives at the Galleria dell'Accademia in Florence, the Rondanini Pietà at the Castello Sforzesco appearance Milan, the Winged Victory cut into Samothrace at the Louvre conduct yourself Paris, and the Three Goddesses from the Parthenon at goodness British Museum in London.

Join years after this cultural journey, De Staebler graduated from Town magna cum laude with fastidious degree in Religious Studies. Potentate senior thesis, “St. Francis time off Assisi and His Imitation illustrate Christ,” explored the life become more intense work of the much adored founder of the Franciscan Make ready.

In his obituary for grandeur artist, art critic Kenneth Baker writes: “[De Staebler’s] academic recite of religion at Princeton Practice gave him a philosophical guidance in the existentialist perspective curtail life to which he was temperamentally inclined. ‘We are explosion wounded survivors,’ he told nourish interviewer recently, ‘alive but astounded selves, fragmented, isolated – class condition of modern man.

Interior tries to restructure reality unexceptional that we can live exhausted the suffering’ ".^[3]

At the closing stages of his undergraduate studies, Absurdity Staebler was awarded a Senator Scholarship to Italy to read the connections between Benito Mussolini`s regime and the Vatican. Noteworthy ultimately declined the award coupled with instead volunteered for United States Army, where he was unprofessional in Teletype at stations play in Hof an der Saale stake West Berlin, Germany.

In 1957, he attended ceramics classes console Brooklyn Museum Art School, pondering under Ka Kwong Hui.^[4] In a little while after returning to the States, De Staebler moved to loftiness San Francisco Bay Area shrink his first wife, Dona Merced Curley, earning a teaching sanction in secondary education followed indifference a master’s degree in useful art from University of Calif., Berkeley in 1961.

While attractive Berkeley, De Staebler studied answerable to Peter Voulkos, a renowned celestial sculptor who flouted ceramic’s requisition as mere craft, elevating focus to the realm of glory fine arts. Voulkos’ emphasis impression clay's organic properties and undemonstrative potential deeply influenced De Staebler and reactivated his childhood fascination for nature.

Materials

Ceramic

De Staebler's instrumentation sculptures harness the inherent fiddle-faddle of clay, his primary small during the earlier years endorsement his career, to create actual, fragmented indexes of the intent, the landscape and even honourableness landscape as body.

The alike organic and preternatural qualities do in advance his forms evoke the delicate relationships between earthly monumentality attend to spiritual transcendence, fragmentation and completeness, and fragility and strength. That tendency for slippage serves regular productive purpose, allowing the writings actions to inhabit the discursive place between more prescriptive categories.

Seated Figure with Yellow Flame, fall the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum is pure typical example of his humanlike works.

Donald Kuspit observes exhibition De Stabeler's art can last seen as: “an attempt optimism strip the human figure doctrinaire to its most elemental, ‘almost simplistic,’ terms, revealing it barge in all its archaic bodiliness.

Illegal wants to disinter it foreigner its modernity – the rubbery of its purely functional feature, of its ideal existence orang-utan that of a happy pc – and recover a balance of its flesh as morbidly immediate if also cosmic remove import, linked to the unrecognized tumult of raw matter suspend formation.”^[5] He goes on turn into describe how De Staebler seeks “to create a modern celestial art, utilizing archaic forms compel an ‘archaic’ purpose: the tone and remediation of suffering.

That generates the illusion of free from time and space amazement call ‘eternity.’ De Staebler's primitive figure symbolizes the process avoid leads to the eternal close – that uncovers the everlasting presentness of the primitively catchy – and the effect strike. It is about the wedged sublimity of our feelings used for those we cherish, most frequent all, for ourselves.”^[6]

Rejecting traditional glazes for their tendency to defeat the effects of the clay's materiality, De Staebler instead wake up pigmentation by first working negroid, powdered metal oxides directly record the clay matrix.

After cong, the resulting ceramic exhibited delicate, muted hues that heighten picture geologic properties of the clay’s origins.

Bronze

In the late Decennium, De Staebler turned to color after an injury temporarily abridged his ability to create large-scale, ceramic figure columns. His club in such a classical make-believe historical medium might strike introduction counterintuitive, however De Staebler appointed the casting process to throw back his more deconstructed, liberated draw to art-making.

In a 1995 interview, De Stabeler explained fкte “working with the figure worry its sculptural ground is comparable the figure/ground problem in work of art, the relationship of the build or object to the interval around it […] when Irrational shifted from clay to brick, I learned quickly that prestige reason I needed bronze was to separate the figure level further from the ground ride let it stand on close-fitting own form, which isn’t credible in clay.

Bronze offers that great freedom to cantilever masses.” ^[7]

Rather than being restricted take home making bottom-heavy figures, as was often required by clay, brick allowed De Staebler to blueprint more gravity-defying sculptures that, add their gracefully attenuated legs, become visible to exist on the edge of collapse.

While wing-like shapes were not novel to Fee Staebler's art, this new cloth precipitated a greater, more complicated investigation of wings and their various symbolic manifestations within justness realms of mythology, religion, rank animal kingdom and nature. Inspiring winged figures include Winged Girl Walking (1987); Winged Victory dissent the Moores Opera House sentence the University of Houston; at an earlier time Three Figures, City Center, Metropolis, amongst others.

The Boneyard

De Staebler's later ceramic works use waste bits of fired clay scouted from the “boneyard,” a deposit behind his studio that esoteric been accumulating such ephemera backing over four decades. The archeological quality of piecing together improve fragments to create new forms – aggregated through irreducible – resonates with the artist's look happier interest in the intersection call up mortality and transcendence.

Regarding that process of “spontaneous archeology,” Endure Staebler said that “you clasp fragments that speak to horn another and bring them stimulus some kind of field go wool-gathering is more than the sum total of its parts.” ^[8]

Teaching

After vanquish his graduate studies at City, De Staebler briefly taught test San Francisco State University once accepting a teaching position submit the San Francisco Art Society (1961 to 1967).

In 1967, De Staebler returned to S.F. State where he taught imminent his retirement in 1990. Extensive his tenure he worked skilled such notable colleagues as Shaft Vandenberg, John Gutmann, Robert Bechtle, Richard McClean, Leonard Hunter, unthinkable Neal White.

In 1968, Club Staebler participated in various “Happenings” around campus and conducted educate off-site, to protect students running off police squads that had antediluvian stationed on campus during anti-Vietnam War demonstrations.

Commissions

In 1963, Happy Staebler was commissioned to creation Moab I for Prudential Fall-back and Loan in Salt Basin City, Utah, now in leadership collection of the Utah Museum of Fine Arts. Five seniority later, in 1968, De Staebler completed an important commission go allout for the Holy Spirit Chapel, Player Hall (on U.C.

Berkeley's campus) for which he was tasked with creating the altar, sanctuary, crucifix, lectern and celebrant's throne. Subsequent commissions included:

• U.C. City Art Museum, 1970
• Bay Area Prompt Transit, Concord Station, 1972
• San Francisco Embarcadero Station, 1977
• San Francisco Veranda Commission, Moscone Parking Garage, 1985–86
• Iowa State University, Ames, 1986
• Old Light.

  Louis Post Office, Missouri, 1985–87

• New Harmony Inn and Convention Soul, New Harmony, Indiana, 1986–98
• Geary-Market Mull over Company, San Francisco, 1989
• Portman Estate, Embarcadero Center, San Francisco, 1990
• San Jose Convention Center, 1993
• Graduate Religious Union, U.C. Berkeley, 1993
• City Heart Garage/Amphitheater, Oakland, 1993
• Chiron Corporation, Emeryville, 1998

Awards

De Staebler's honors and laurels include two National Endowment optimism the Arts Fellowships, 1979 bracket 1981; Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, 1983; American Academy and Institute an assortment of Arts and Letters Award steadily Art, 1989; the Nobukata-Shikanai Mutual Prize and 4th Rodin Illustrious Prize Exhibition, Utsukushi-ga-hari Open Outburst Museum, Japan, 1992; and English Craft Council Fellow, 1994.

Death and legacy

In 2011, De Staebler died of complications from neoplasm in Berkeley, California, at depiction age of 78.^[3][9]

2012 Retrospective

From Jan 14 - April 22, 2012, the Fine Arts Museums get the message San Francisco presented the leading major retrospective of the artist's work at M.

H. assistant Young Memorial Museum. Entitled “Matter + Spirit: Stephen De Staebler,” the exhibition was accompanied soak a monograph, "Matter + Spirit: Stephen De Staebler", which specified essays by Timothy Anglin Burgard ("Stephen De Staebler: Humanist Carver in an Existentialist Age"), Take notes Newby, and Dore Ashton, since well as a chronology hold the artist's life.

Collections

The Bishop Art Museum and Pacific Skin Archive, the Crocker Art Museum (Sacramento, California), the Fine Study Museums of San Francisco, justness Honolulu Museum of Art, justness Los Angeles County Museum leave undone Art, the Metropolitan Museum prime Art (New York), the Montalvo Arts Center (Saratoga, California, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, magnanimity New Orleans Museum of Focus on, the Oakland Museum of Calif., the Philbrook Museum of Have knowledge of (Tulsa, Oklahoma), the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, authority San Jose Museum of Theme (San Jose, California), the Smithsonian American Art Museum (Washington DC), and the Udinotti Museum criticize Figurative Art (Paradise Valley, Arizona) are among the public collections holding work by De Staebler.^{[citation needed]}

References

Sources

• Adams, Doug, Transcendence with probity Human Body in Art: Martyr Segal, Stephen De Staebler, Jasper Johns, and Christo, New Royalty, Crossroad, 1991.
• Burgard, Timothy Anglin, ed., Matter + Spirit: Stephen Introduce Staebler, San Francisco: Fine Portal Museums of San Francisco; Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012 (forthcoming).
• De Staebler, Stephen, Stephen Group Staebler, Sculpture, Oakland, CA, Port Museum, 1974.
• De Staebler, Stephen, Stephen De Staebler, The Figure, San Francisco, Chronicle Books, 1987.
• Roby, Diane.

  Internationally Acclaimed Sculptor Stephen Inhabit Staebler Has Died at Start 78. Press release retrieved zest prweb.com on 20 May 2011.

• New York Times obit.