Unknown, Vintage Silver Gelatin Photo of Ibram Lassaw Modernist Sculpture (Photograph)

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Space Densities
This is for the original vintage photograph. I believe the inscription is in the hand of Ibram Lassaw … Read more Space Densities
This is for the original vintage photograph. I believe the inscription is in the hand of Ibram Lassaw some also bear the photographers stamp.
Lassaw was born in Alexandria, Egypt, of Russian Jewish émigré parents, he went to the U.S. in 1921. His family settled in Brooklyn, New York. He became a US citizen in 1928. He first studied sculpture in 1926 at the Clay Club and later at the Beaux-Arts Institute of Design in New York. He made abstract paintings and drawings influenced by Kandinsky, Sophie Tauber Arp, and other artists. He also attended the City College of New York.
Lassaw’s encounter with avant-garde art in the International Exhibition of Modern Art (1926), organized by the Société Anonyme at the Brooklyn Museum, made a powerful impression on him.

In the early 1930s he explored new materials and notions of open-space sculpture. The ideas of László Moholy-Nagy and Buckminster Fuller were important to him, and he knew the work of Julio González, Pablo Picasso, and the Russian Constructivists. A pioneer of abstract sculpture in the United States, in 1936 Lassaw was a founding member of the organization American Abstract Artists. Between 1933 and 1942 he worked for various federal arts projects: the Public Works of Art Project, Civil Works Authority, and WPA, the Works Progress Administration Federal Art Project. In 1938 he produced his first welded work. He served with the U.S. Army, where he learned direct welding techniques. During the 1940s he experimented with cage constructions and with acrylic plastics, adding color to his sculptures by applying dye directly to their surfaces. In 1949 Lassaw was a founder of the Club, an informal discussion group of avant-garde artists that had developed from gatherings at his studio, on Eighth Street.
Influenced by his study of art history and readings in European art magazines, Lassaw began to make sculpture in the late 1920s. He was among the "small group of artists committed themselves to abstract art during the 1930s." In his work, Ibram Lassaw "replaced the monolithic solidity of cast metal with open-space constructions obtained by welding."

During the mid-1930s, Lassaw worked briefly for the Public Works of Art Project cleaning sculptural monuments around New York City. He subsequently joined the WPA as a teacher and sculptor until he was drafted into the army in 1942. Lassaw's contribution to the advancement of sculptural abstraction went beyond mere formal innovation; his promotion of modernist styles during the 1930s did much to insure the growth of abstract art in the United States. He was one of the founding members of the American Abstract Artists group, and served as president of the American Abstract Artists organization from 1946 to 1949.

Lassaw is a sculptor who was a part of the New York School of Abstract expressionism during the 1940s and 1950s. Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, James Brooks, Willem de Kooning, and several other artists like Lassaw spent summers on the Southern Shore of Long Island. Lassaw spent summers on Long Island from 1955 until he moved there permanently in 1963. See less