IBRAM LASSAW (1913-2003)

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BIOGRAPHY
Born in Alexandria, Egypt in 1913, Ibram Lassaw came to the U.S. in 1921. At age thirteen he joined a sculpture class at the Brooklyn Children’s Museum, taught by Dorothea Denslow who with her students, formed the Clay Club, and later The Sculpture Center. Lassaw also studied classical sculpture at the Beaux Arts Institute of Design, 1930-31, and attended City College of New York. He began experimenting with abstraction in both two and three dimensional forms around 1928. He worked for several years on the Federal Arts Project of the Public Works Administration, before being drafted into the army during WW2. Lassaw was one of the founders of the American Abstract Artist in 1936 and president of that organization from 1946 to 1949. He was also one of the charter members of the artist's “Club” in 1949. In the mid 40's he pioneered Projection Paintings, intensely colored abstract paintings on glass slides that could be projected to cover a whole wall. From 1951 until 1965 he was represented by the Kootz Gallery in New York City and since then by various galleries around the country. Although he is best known for his  open space welded sculptures in bronze, nickel silver, phos-copper, silicon bronze, steel and other alloys, he has simultaneously worked in other media  such as works on paper and canvas with inks and acrylic, lithographs, and his one-of-a-kind “bosom sculptures”, welded bronze-gold plated jewelry.

Lassaw was the Benjamin N. Duke Professor at Duke University 1962-63; taught at the University of California, Berkeley in 1965-66; Southampton College from 1966 to the mid 70's and spent a year as a visiting professor at Mount Holyoke College.

Lassaw's work is in the permanent collections of museums on four continents, including The Museum of Modern Art, NY; The Israel Museum, Jerusalem; The Albright Knox Gallery; Museum of Modern Art, Rio de Janero, Brazil; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; The Guggenheim Museum and many others. Lassaw continued to create in his studio on Long Island until the day before he died.

Sam Hunter, art critic, wrote:
“Few artist have made more personal and poetic statements in sculpture out of the collective impulse of abstract expressionism than Ibram Lassaw.

Yet of the major figures who emerged during the heroic post-war years of the American avant-garde, he has maintained the most consistent theoretical basis for his art, drawing on such intellectual sources as Taoist and Zen teachings, the psychology of Jung, and other esoteric sources that generally throw light on non-rational mysteries and the creative potencies in man.

The ideal calm which Lassaw's personal presence radiates is an achieved and mastered serenity, which never fails to make a striking impression; in his daily life it is disrupted only by regular bouts of energetic creation, and by continuous sense of astonishment and delight at the inexhaustible spectacle of the world, or more accurately the cosmos... his art has become a simulacrum of that revealed order and purpose, which he can argue in verbal discourse with an almost professional philosophical detachment."

In a 1968 interview Herbert Ferber said:
Lassaw was really the first abstract artist in America in a way. He preceded David Smith. He never did anything which was vaguely representational in his life. And he was outstanding in that regard.

Archives of American Art. Irving Sandler interview with Ferber April 22, 1968