The Work of Denise Lassaw

Research and Fact Checking

Denise Lassaw is the only child of the sculptor Ibram Lassaw. She grew up in his studio and participated in her parents’ world. This included learning to work in clay, plaster, and plexiglass, and by age eight her father taught her to weld. In the studio she learned about metals, tools, and cleaning and repairing sculpture.

Although she went off on her own years-long adventures, she always returned to the family home. Beginning in the mid-1980s, Denise began organizing the studio. One of her self-appointed jobs was sorting out the boxes of photographs of sculpture, slides, and stereo slides, and making sure they were correctly labeled. Since then, she has catalogued all museum, gallery, and personal correspondence and created FileMaker databases for these archival materials. She has both scanned and transcribed her father’s fifty years of Day Books, in which he recorded his ideas on sculpture and philosophy as well as daily events. Her mother’s more social seventy years of Day Books are nearly finished. She is working on scans of the family collection of photographs and slides of artist friends.

With hands-on access to the Lassaw archives, as well as personal experience in the events of her family’s history in the New York art world, she is an expert on the work and philosophy of her father.

Denise has contributed essays on her father’s work for catalogs and books, and copy-edited for scholars writing about him. She has also created a database of factual mistakes and misunderstandings of Ibram Lassaw’s sculpture techniques, materials, and biography. This is essentially a study of what art historians have written about Ibram Lassaw. There is a bibliography of over a thousand entries and an exhibition list of over 680 entries.

In 2018 she published a book about Lassaw’s Projection Paintings. She is currently working on a Catalogue Raisonné of her father’s sculpture and a collage memoir about life in the loft from 1944 to 1960.

The “NOT Lassaw” Files is a collection of works from the internet and auctions that were attributed to Ibram Lassaw but were not by him. Auction houses can request this pdf.

She welcomes questions from art writers and scholars. For a description of her work over the last forty years, you can request the What I Have Done So Far pdf.