Stephen de staebler biography sample

Stephen De Staebler (March 24, 1933 – May 13, 2011) was an internationally celebrated American sculptor, best recognized for his work in clay and bronze. Totemic and fragmented in form, De Staebler's figurative sculptures call forth the many contingencies of the human condition, such as resiliency and fragility, growth and decay, earthly boundedness and the possibility for spiritual transcendence. An important figure in the California Clay Movement, he is credited with "sustaining the figurative tradition in post-World War II decades when the relevance and even possibility of embracing the human figure seemed problematic at best.

De Staebler’s ceramic sculptures harness the inherent qualities of clay, his primary medium during the earlier years of his career, to create raw, fragmented indexes of the body, the landscape and even the landscape as body. The equally organic and preternatural qualities of his forms evoke the tenuous relationships between earthly monumentality and spiritual transcendence, fragmentation and wholeness, and fragility and strength. This tendency for slippage serves a productive purpose, allowing the works to inhabit the discursive space between more prescriptive categories. Seated Figure with Yellow Flame, in the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum is a typical example of his anthropomorphic works.
Donald Kuspit observes how De Stabeler’s art can be seen as: “an attempt to strip the human figure down to its most elemental, ‘almost simplistic,’ terms, revealing it in all its archaic bodiliness. He wants to disinter it from its modernity – the sense of its purely functional significance, of its ideal existence as that of a happy machine – and recover a sense of its flesh as morbidly immediate if also cosmic in import, linked to the strange tumult of raw matter in formation.”[4] He goes on to describe how De Staebler seeks “to create a modern religious art,

"Clay can be a metaphor for many things. I made it a metaphor for flesh and earth.” - Stephen De Staebler

The Crocker Art Museum is delighted to announce Stephen De Staebler: Masks and Monumental Figures, an exhibition of clay and bronze masks and sculptures, on view from November 21, 2021, through April 3, 2022.

The exhibition will utilize both the Crocker’s gallery and outdoor courtyard spaces. A series of rugged, haunting masks, heads, and torsos that suggest mummification and mortality will be installed indoors on the Museum’s third floor, overlooking a mix of winged and totemic figures placed outside in the 7,000 square foot main courtyard. The collection of more than 70 works created by the artist over 45 years are examples of three-dimensional poetry speaking to the human condition.

“De Staebler’s art is one of high originality: he forged his own unconventional techniques, ‘no tools no rules’ was his mantra and he used anything including his body as an instrument for the sake of his art,” said Rachel Gotlieb, Ph.D., a leading ceramics specialist and the Crocker’s inaugural Ruth Rippon Curator of Ceramics. “His work is deeply connected to history, the materiality of clay, and above all the meaning of life.”

De Staebler was inspired by Greek, African, and Asian antiquity, tribal artworks, and Indigenous peoples of the Northwest. His work explores the use of masks in rituals and ceremonies, and the resulting pieces can be playful and transcendent, but also unnerving and chilling. Seven sculptures included in the exhibition, some of which are cast from unearthed clay body fragments that he had made earlier in his career and which he buried in what he called the ‘boneyard’, a landscape installation behind his studio.

“We are delighted to present this focused survey of work by Stephen De Staebler,” says Mort and Marcy Friedman Director and CEO, Lial A. Jones. “The indoor installation of over 60 masks will explore his fascination with the human face

American sculptor, printmaker, and educator (1933 - 2011)

Stephen De Staebler (March 24, 1933 – May 13, 2011) was an American sculptor, printmaker, and educator, he was best recognized for his work in clay and bronze. Totemic and fragmented in form, De Staebler's figurative sculptures call forth the many contingencies of the human condition, such as resiliency and fragility, growth and decay, earthly boundedness and the possibility for spiritual transcendence. An important figure in the California Clay Movement, he is credited with "sustaining the figurative tradition in post-World War II decades when the relevance and even possibility of embracing the human figure seemed problematic at best."

Early life

De Staebler was born in Webster Groves, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis, and spent his childhood in the nearby suburb of Kirkwood. From an early age, he was encouraged to develop his artistic interests by his parents, Herbert Conrad De Staebler (1898–1963) and Juliette Hoiles De Staebler (1903–1950).

Many of De Staebler's childhood summers were spent on his maternal grandparents’ 775-acre farm in rural Shoals, Indiana. The lodging, which he shared with his mother and siblings, Herbert Conrad "Hobey" Jr. (1929–2008) and Juliette Jeanne "Jan" (

by Rob Marks

I once walked into a small gallery under the roof of the Musée Maillol in Paris and found myself surrounded by a dozen of the French artist’s nude women in bronze. The iconic broad-shouldered figures startled me, arrested my movement. It is common in American museums to see one or two Maillols in a room—to be intrigued by their beauty, the power and grace of their form, the intensity of their gaze—but it is rare to be cornered by a posse of them.

Stephen De Staebler’s work is as far from Aristide Maillol’s as Berkeley—De Staebler’s home until his death in 2011—is from the French artist’s Roussillon. Yet the experience of walking into the de Young Museum’s retrospective of De Staebler ceramic figures brought back that startling moment in Paris. They crowd around the viewer, evoking an amalgam of the stillness of a graveyard, the gravity of a procession, the grace of a dance, and, most magically, the sentience of a living thing. Curator Timothy Anglin Burgard writes that De Staebler’s sculptures “focus instead on the transitional or metamorphic states that lie between nature and culture, life and death, integration and disintegration, and matter and spirit." This is a fair statement, but I was aware as much of their persistence and repose as I was of their transitional nature. They are, like the Maillol nudes, self-possessed, self-reliant, and whole.

“Everyone...in one way or another, feels incomplete,” De Staebler proposed. “You could almost say civilization is the attempt to camouflage the fact that we’re incomplete human beings.” Perhaps this is why De Staebler’s incomplete sculptures function as complete. They represent the experience of being embodied in their fragmentation, unfamiliarity, and unknowableness. When De Staebler said, “There is something about the fallibility of the human body that you have to come to terms with,” he meant that his sculptures come