Ibram Lassaw

American, born Egypt, 1913–2003

Death placeEast Hampton, New York, United States

Birth placeAlexandria, Egypt

BiographyObituaries - Obituary
Art in America, Feb, 2004

Ibram Lassaw, 90, sculptor, died in East Hampton, N.Y., on Dec. 30, 2003. He is best known for his web-like welded metal sculptures that are suggestive of organic systems and that sometimes reflect his interest in the cosmos. Born in Egypt to Russian emigres, he moved to New York with his family at age eight. As a struggling artist in the 1930s, he became friends with such figures as Arshile Corky, Joseph Campbell and, later, Pollock and de Kooning. In 1936, he helped found the American Abstract Artists, a group dedicated to nonrepresentational forms devoid of political or social content and independent of art of the past. He participated in the group's annual exhibitions from 1937 to 1951, and served as its president in 1946-49. In 1949, he became a founding member of the Club, which also included Ad Reinhardt and Franz Kline.

Lassaw's early pieces were in clay and plaster, but he discovered that the materials were too weak for the open-work forms he wanted to make. Using skills he'd picked up while in the Army, he made his first welded work in 1938. Fusing rods and metal pieces into architectonic structures, he often treated the surfaces with droplets of metal or with acids and alkaloids to achieve variations in color. In 1951, he made his first sale to Nelson Rockefeller, who would purchase another 10 works. That same year he had his first solo show at the Samuel Kootz Gallery. Retrospectives of his work were mounted at the Heckscher Museum in Huntington, N.Y. (1973), and Guild Hall Museum, East Hampton, N.Y., (1988). More recently he showed with Anita Shapolsky Gallery, where he was included in a group show at the time of his death.

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