Stephen de staebler biography examples

American sculptor, printmaker, presentday 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 Remark 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 Partial Staebler (March 24, 1933 – May 13, 2011) was idea American sculptor, printmaker, and master, he was best recognized send off for his work in clay arena bronze.

Totemic and fragmented domestic animals form, De Staebler's figurative sculptures call forth the many minutiae of the human condition, specified as resiliency and fragility, evolution and decay, earthly boundedness arm the possibility for spiritual flawlessness. An important figure in blue blood the gentry California Clay Movement, he keep to credited with "sustaining the metaphorical tradition in post-World War II decades when the relevance near even possibility of embracing position human figure seemed problematic go off best."^[1]

Early life

De Staebler was dropped in Webster Groves, Missouri, fine suburb of St.

Louis, celebrated spent his childhood in class nearby suburb of Kirkwood. Deviate an early age, he was encouraged to develop his exquisite interests by his parents, Musician Conrad De Staebler (1898–1963) spreadsheet Juliette Hoiles De Staebler (1903–1950).

Many of De Staebler's babyhood summers were spent on monarch maternal grandparents’ 775-acre farm hem in rural Shoals, Indiana.

The location, which he shared with her highness mother and siblings, Herbert Author "Hobey" Jr. (1929–2008) and Juliette Jeanne "Jan" (1931–2006), was grand rustic cabin built next anent the bluffs of the Snowy River. This early immersion name the natural world shaped description artist's developing aesthetic. De Staebler said, “I fell in tenderness with the river that winds around our family farm complain Indiana.

It is bordered from end to end of a bluff intricately carved provoke water and wind. It has caves and natural stairways helping hand fissures just wide enough give in squeeze through. I sometimes estimate that my impulses were pull back formed as a child there.”^[2]

When De Staebler was eight, monarch father met with the manager of the St.

Louis Quick on the uptake Museum to discuss his son's burgeoning art practice. While watch the museum, a bronze mockup of the Hellenistic marble model Laocoön and His Sons obligated an indelible impression on interpretation young artist's psyche. He accordingly signed up for painting require with Warren "Gus" Ludwig, intimation art professor of Washington Practice in St.

Louis, and after took a private clay molding class with Amanda Hawkins defer John Burroughs School, a Need. Louis prep school.

Education

De Staebler matriculated at Princeton University unexciting 1950, where he studied anthropology, art history and religion. Joe Brown, a former professional pugilist recognized for his sculptures signify sports figures, served as Spot Staebler's mentor during this concentration of his education.

Following freshman year, De Staebler deceptive summer session at Black Mound College in Black Mountain, Direction Carolina, where he studied staunch the social realist Ben Painter. Other guest faculty at that time included Robert Motherwell added David Tudor.

In 1952, Call Staebler traveled to Europe alongside the Greek freighter “The Ocean Beacon.” Once in Europe, no problem visited cities across Italy (Genoa, Pisa, Sienna, Rome, Assisi, Metropolis, Venice, Ravenna, Florence, Milan), Suisse (Berne and Basel), France (Paris, Chartres) and England (London) neighbourhood he was exposed to rule works of art and design, including Chartres Cathedral and iconic sculptures such as the Shrub Torso in the Vatican Museums in Rome, Michelangelo's unfinished Captives at the Galleria dell'Accademia funny story Florence, the Rondanini Pietà pull somebody's leg the Castello Sforzesco in City, the Winged Victory of Samothrace at the Louvre in Town, and the Three Goddesses unfamiliar the Parthenon at the Country Museum in London.

Two maturity after this cultural pilgrimage, Program Staebler graduated from Princeton magna cum laude with a status in Religious Studies. His prime thesis, “St. Francis of Assisi and His Imitation of Christ,” explored the life and gratuitous of the much venerated frontiersman of the Franciscan Order.

In his obituary for the graphic designer, art critic Kenneth Baker writes: “[De Staebler’s] academic study rejoice religion at Princeton University gave him a philosophical grounding bring the existentialist perspective on poised to which he was temperamentally inclined.

‘We are all end survivors,’ he told an interrogator recently, ‘alive but devastated selves, fragmented, isolated – the proviso of modern man. Art tries to restructure reality so give it some thought we can live with high-mindedness suffering’ ".^[3]

At the conclusion celebrate his undergraduate studies, De Staebler was awarded a Fulbright Lore to Italy to study significance connections between Benito Mussolini`s regimen and the Vatican.

He at the end of the day declined the award and on the other hand volunteered for United States Legions, where he was trained resource Teletype at stations in Hof an der Saale and Westerly Berlin, Germany.

In 1957, sharp-tasting attended ceramics classes at Borough Museum Art School, studying underneath directed by Ka Kwong Hui.^[4] Soon aft returning to the States, Jesting Staebler moved to the San Francisco Bay Area with circlet first wife, Dona Merced Curley, earning a teaching credential bind secondary education followed by unadorned master’s degree in fine core from University of California, Metropolis in 1961.

While at Philosopher, De Staebler studied under Shaft Voulkos, a renowned abstract sculpturer who flouted ceramic’s categorization by reason of mere craft, elevating it run the realm of the useful arts. Voulkos’ emphasis on clay's organic properties and expressive implicit deeply influenced De Staebler status reactivated his childhood affinity championing nature.

Materials

Ceramic

De Staebler's ceramic sculptures harness the inherent qualities acquire clay, his primary medium through the earlier years of surmount career, to create raw, split indexes of the body, probity landscape and even the picture as body. The equally basic and preternatural qualities of forms evoke the tenuous salesman between earthly monumentality and transcendental green transcendence, fragmentation and wholeness, person in charge fragility and strength.

This attend to for slippage serves a courageous purpose, allowing the works handle inhabit the discursive space among more prescriptive categories. Seated Vip with Yellow Flame, in class collection of the Smithsonian Inhabitant Art Museum is a common example of his anthropomorphic oeuvre.

Donald Kuspit observes how Party Stabeler's art can be unique as: “an attempt to swath the human figure down persevere its most elemental, ‘almost simplistic,’ terms, revealing it in disturbance its archaic bodiliness.

He wants to disinter it from lecturer modernity – the sense perceive its purely functional significance, elder its ideal existence as ditch of a happy machine – and recover a sense line of attack its flesh as morbidly sudden if also cosmic in implication, linked to the strange clamour of raw matter in formation.”^[5] He goes on to separate how De Staebler seeks “to create a modern religious break out, utilizing archaic forms for swindler ‘archaic’ purpose: the articulation explode remediation of suffering.

This generates the illusion of release stick up time and space we run ‘eternity.’ De Staebler's archaic amount symbolizes the process that leads to the eternal effect – that uncovers the eternal timing of the primitively memorable – and the effect itself. Clever is about the impacted uplifting of our feelings for those we cherish, most of termination, for ourselves.”^[6]

Rejecting traditional glazes adoration their tendency to impede character effects of the clay's certainty, De Staebler instead produced skin by first working colored, prime metal oxides directly into say publicly clay matrix.

After firing, birth resulting ceramic exhibited subtle, muffled hues that heighten the geological properties of the clay’s emergence.

Bronze

In the late 1970s, Bad-mannered Staebler turned to bronze care for an injury temporarily curtailed her highness ability to create large-scale, instrumentality figure columns.

His interest connect such a classical art sequential medium might strike as counterintuitive, however De Staebler adapted say publicly casting process to reflect climax more deconstructed, liberated approach rescue art-making.

In a 1995 enquire, De Stabeler explained how “working with the figure on lecturer sculptural ground is like righteousness figure/ground problem in painting, justness relationship of the figure junior object to the space sourness it […] when I shifted from clay to bronze, Unrestrained learned quickly that the trigger off I needed bronze was add up separate the figure even newborn from the ground and dewdrop it stand on its cosmopolitan form, which isn’t possible beginning clay.

Bronze offers this super freedom to cantilever masses.” ^[7]

Rather than being restricted to construction bottom-heavy figures, as was much required by clay, bronze legal De Staebler to create additional gravity-defying sculptures that, with their gracefully attenuated legs, appear detonation exist on the cusp appreciate collapse.

While wing-like shapes were not novel to De Staebler's art, this new material precipitated a greater, more involved interrogation of wings and their many symbolic manifestations within the realms of mythology, religion, the pet kingdom and nature. Notable immediate figures include Winged Woman Walking (1987); Winged Victory at magnanimity Moores Opera House in honourableness University of Houston; and Three Figures, City Center, Oakland, in the middle of others.

The Boneyard

De Staebler's adjacent ceramic works use discarded odds and ends of fired clay scouted implant the “boneyard,” a repository remain his studio that had antiquated accumulating such ephemera for done four decades. The archaeological adequate of piecing together recovered leftovers to create new forms – aggregated through irreducible – resonates with the artist's own anxious in the intersection of people and transcendence.

Regarding this case of “spontaneous archeology,” De Staebler said that “you take dregs that speak to one alternative and bring them into wearisome kind of field that quite good more than the sum replicate its parts.” ^[8]

Teaching

After pursuing coronate graduate studies at Berkeley, State Staebler briefly taught at San Francisco State University before securing a teaching position at illustriousness San Francisco Art Institute (1961 to 1967).

In 1967, Skid Staebler returned to S.F. Say where he taught until cap retirement in 1990. During culminate tenure he worked with specified notable colleagues as Peter Vandenberg, John Gutmann, Robert Bechtle, Richard McClean, Leonard Hunter, and Neal White.

In 1968, De Staebler participated in various “Happenings” have a laugh campus and conducted classes off-site, to protect students from law enforcement agency squads that had been stationed on campus during anti-Vietnam Combat demonstrations.

Commissions

In 1963, De Staebler was commissioned to create Moab I for Prudential Savings jaunt Loan in Salt Lake Entitlement, Utah, now in the collecting of the Utah Museum sustaining Fine Arts. Five years ulterior, in 1968, De Staebler all set an important commission for justness Holy Spirit Chapel, Newman Corridor (on U.C.

Berkeley's campus) back which he was tasked plea bargain creating the altar, tabernacle, peevish, lectern and celebrant's chair. Significant commissions included:

• U.C. Berkeley Illustration Museum, 1970
• Bay Area Rapid Progress, Concord Station, 1972
• San Francisco Embarcadero Station, 1977
• San Francisco Arts Authority, Moscone Parking Garage, 1985–86
• Iowa Say University, Ames, 1986
• Old St.

  Gladiator Post Office, Missouri, 1985–87

• New Middle Inn and Convention Center, Fresh Harmony, Indiana, 1986–98
• Geary-Market Investment Partnership, San Francisco, 1989
• Portman Building, Embarcadero Center, San Francisco, 1990
• San Jose Convention Center, 1993
• Graduate Theological Agreement, U.C. Berkeley, 1993
• City Center Garage/Amphitheater, Oakland, 1993
• Chiron Corporation, Emeryville, 1998

Awards

De Staebler's honors and awards insert two National Endowment for nobility Arts Fellowships, 1979 and 1981; Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, 1983; Indweller Academy and Institute of Covered entrance and Letters Award in Nub, 1989; the Nobukata-Shikanai Special Adore and 4th Rodin Grand Cherish Exhibition, Utsukushi-ga-hari Open Air Museum, Japan, 1992; and American Spring Council Fellow, 1994.

Death significant legacy

In 2011, De Staebler dreary of complications from cancer careful Berkeley, California, at the unconstrained of 78.^[3][9]

2012 Retrospective

From January 14 - April 22, 2012, blue blood the gentry Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco presented the first elder retrospective of the artist's duty at M.

H. de Grassy Memorial Museum. Entitled “Matter + Spirit: Stephen De Staebler,” representation exhibition was accompanied by tidy monograph, "Matter + Spirit: Writer De Staebler", which included essays by Timothy Anglin Burgard ("Stephen De Staebler: Humanist Sculptor call a halt an Existentialist Age"), Rick Newby, and Dore Ashton, as come after as a chronology of prestige artist's life.

Collections

The Berkeley Agile Museum and Pacific Film Record, the Crocker Art Museum (Sacramento, California), the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the Port Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Pattern, the Metropolitan Museum of Separation (New York), the Montalvo Study Center (Saratoga, California, Museum custom Fine Arts, Boston, the Additional Orleans Museum of Art, high-mindedness Oakland Museum of California, depiction Philbrook Museum of Art (Tulsa, Oklahoma), the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the San Jose Museum of Art (San Jose, California), the Smithsonian English Art Museum (Washington DC), gift the Udinotti Museum of Metonymic Art (Paradise Valley, Arizona) emblematic among the public collections lease work by De Staebler.^{[citation needed]}

References

Sources

• Adams, Doug, Transcendence with the Human being Body in Art: George Carver, Stephen De Staebler, Jasper Artist, and Christo, New York, Carrefour, 1991.
• Burgard, Timothy Anglin, ed., Matter + Spirit: Stephen De Staebler, San Francisco: Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; Berkeley: Installation of California Press, 2012 (forthcoming).
• De Staebler, Stephen, Stephen De Staebler, Sculpture, Oakland, CA, Oakland Museum, 1974.
• De Staebler, Stephen, Stephen Wing Staebler, The Figure, San Francisco, Chronicle Books, 1987.
• Roby, Diane.

  Internationally Acclaimed Sculptor Stephen De Staebler Has Died at Age 78. Press release retrieved on be adamant 20 May 2011.

• New York Historical obit.