Baseball Bat

Claire Falkenstein experimented with a wide variety of materials including reinforced concrete, copper tubing, wire, glass, and steel. In the early 1940s she made wooden sculptures that fragmented simple forms into pieces that could be taken apart and reassembled. Baseball Bat divides the narrow shape of a bat into several colored sections, and Fertility is composed of three painted axe handles. Both pieces disguise the original function of the objects and display Falkenstein’s interest in color and abstract form.