Her fanciful and surreal drawings were widely exhibited. She began making art books after Rizzoli in 1988 published what had been her master’s thesis, “Green Architecture and the Agrarian Garden,” which became a touchstone for a generation of landscape architects and artists; it includes photographs of storied European gardens taken at dawn, when she and her daughter Nellie, an architect and artist, would sneak in, before the gatekeepers and the tourists arrived.
“My mother always bucked authority,” Ms. King Solomon said. “She was raised to question.”
Barbara Ethel Levé was born on Dec. 5, 1928, in San Francisco. Her mother, Lilian Reinhertz Levé, known as Lil, and her father, Fred Levé, a lawyer who represented anarchists,separated when Bobbie was 4. Lil Levé was hard on her only daughter, who had a talent for ballet and art and in whom she saw much revenue potential. The family lived close to the bone, and Bobbie’s mother paid for her dance lessons by playing the piano at the various studios she attended.
At 14, Bobbie earned a scholarship to the California School of Fine Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute). So that she could attend ballet school and college while still in high school, her mother wrote a note to her principal saying that she was going blind and that Bobbie needed to work to support her and therefore required long absences from school. The high school mailed her a diploma. By 16, she was performing Spanish dances in nightclubs in her hometown as well as in New York City, Montreal and the Poconos.
Bobbie was 17 when she met Frank Stauffacher, a handsome 30-year-old experimental filmmaker who had brought foreign films like “The Blue Angel” and “Nosferatu” to the Bay Area with his celebrated Art in Cinema series, which ran weekly for nearly a decade at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Their social life was heady: Frank had friends like Man Ray, Hans Richter and Marcel Duchamp, whose films he screened.
Six years later, when their daughter Chloe was 3, Frank died from a brain tumor. Bobbie, Lil and Chloe flew to Switzerland, where the dollar was strong and education was subsidized by the state, so Bobbie could train as a graphic designer and make a living back home. At the Basel School of Design, she studied under Armin Hofmann, the renowned graphic designer and fomenter of the Swiss style. She was the only American there. She returned to the United States in 1961.
