Art Brokerage: (1908-1997) Claire Falkenstein was an American sculptor known for both abstract and functional works. Claire Falkenstein was born in 1908 in Coos Bay, Ore., and graduated in 1930 from the University of California at Berkeley, where she studied philosophy and anthropology. During the early 1930's she took a master class at Mills College with the Russian-born modernist sculptor Alexander Archipenko and also met such Bauhaus emigres as Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and Gyorgy Kepes. These contacts seem to have instilled in her a growing commitment to abstract principles, combined with a conviction that functionality did not reduce a work's esthetic impact and an interest in experimenting with a broad variety of new techniques and materials. Over her career, Ms. Falkenstein would make sculptures in wood and stone, but also in laminated plastic, Cor-Ten steel, glass and aluminum. She designed furniture, fountains, architectural elements, screens, wallpaper and jewelry. Claire Falkenstein died on Oct. 23 at her home in Venice, Calif. She was 89 and had lived in Venice since 1963, after spending more than a decade in Europe.