Читать книгу The Private Adolf Loos - Claire Beck Loos - Страница 10

INTRODUCTION TO THE PRIVATE ADOLF LOOS

Adolf Loos Privat was first published in 1936, three years after Loos died. Since its publication, this short biography has been hailed as a small jewel of literature composed of snapshot-like vignettes, a portrait of a man and mentor as seen by his young wife and caretaker, interpreter, secretary, and often proxy.

Loos had suffered long-standing health complications, which rendered him ultimately mute and deaf. During Loos’ particularly serious bout of illness in 1931, Claire recorded his wishes for tombstone. A year after his death, he was conferred a “grave of honor” when his body was moved to the Zentralfriedhof in Vienna to rest amongst the city’s finest writers, composers, and cultural icons; but it was not until 1956, however, that the grey granite block he had specified would be installed. Claire seems to have imagined this short book to become a memorial in its own right, especially as the architectural monument he had desired did not seem to be forthcoming.

Correspondence from the 1930s between Claire and the Loos expert and collector Dr. Ludwig Münz document the lengths to which the Beck family went in order to raise funds for Loos’ self-specified grave marker (cf. letter between Münz and Max Beck, page 218). When funds from initial book sales were not enough, Claire also solicited Loos’ friends and admirers for the remaining balance, calling on those like Loos’ former student Kurt Unger (as Claire once wrote, “Loos’ warrior”), who had provided for Loos financially toward the end of his life, and possibly notable figures like Czechoslovakia’s national poet, Josef Svatopluk Machar, as well as the country’s first president, Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk (cf. letter between Claire and Machar, page 219). How successful she was in this endeavor is still unclear.

At Loos’ gravesite on August 25, 1933 — where Claire’s passport details suggest that she was in attendance — Karl Kraus, Loos’ friend and comrade-in-arms as a cultural reformer, addressed his departed friend in his eulogy:

You were forever committed to the future. […] Your genius, through the removal of ornate obstacles to beauty, emancipated life from bondage to the commonplace, and diverted it from the circuitous. […] You have garnered — as does every person who leaves a legacy to future generations — considerable ingratitude from those living all too much in the present: a resistance which stems from the nebulous perception that a larger-than-life figure has emerged — one who will outlive them — a disruptor of disorder.

As with so many of Loos’ friends, Kraus held deep admiration for the man, which continues to translate through generations.

Through Claire it is possible to hear the words of this Loos, a more intimate account than the one recorded by experts and historians. To this point, Adolf Opel writes in Adolf Loos — Der Mensch [Adolf Loos — The Man],

[Claire’s] portrait of Loos is completely uncritical, and she omits almost entirely any exact dates and facts regarding Adolf Loos’ work. Still, her book exudes an air of authenticity, no doubt due to the fact that such a short period of time had passed between the recounted events and her recording of them. By the end of 1935, Claire Loos had already published short excerpts from her book in [two Viennese newspapers,] the Neue Freie Presse and Wiener Tag. Adolf Loos Privat appeared following them in early 1936, published by Johannes-Presse in Vienna — a publisher affiliated with the Neue Galerie of Otto Nirenstein (Kallir), [who was] a Schiele collector.

During Claire and Loos’ time together she heard his affection, his scorn, his aphorisms and stories, and transcribed his dictations, which bordered on histrionics when he was ill. With his manner of speaking quite clearly ingrained, Claire leaves the reader with a sense of living with the man, and makes it possible to hear some semblance of the way Loos talked — to friends, clients, wives, students, craftsmen, artists, and society.

But one can also read in Claire Beck Loos’ work a mirroring of the last collection of Loos’ writings, Trotzdem, published in 1931; her similar spare style is what so vividly reenacts his personality, creating a bricolage of images, narrative, and dialogue. While her memory of him is flattering at times, it is not at others. But regardless, hers is a welcome and humanizing counter-balance to the reification of “the great God Loos” as he was called by his admirers and friends in his lifetime and postmortem. When the Neue Freie Presse published excerpts on the second anniversary of Loos’ death, the newspaper praised Adolf Loos Privat as “valuable” and “a document humain,” and a positive review was published by composer Ernst Krenek.

Readers of this book today will need to keep in mind that Claire’s retrospective memoir captures not only the personal and social transformative power of Loos’ work, but also figures the contradictions of the man as a sign of the times. On July 4, 1929, Loos wrote to Claire that he liked the Jews “better than people from Vienna,” barely a compliment. Separately, with some irony, he called himself an “anti-Semite” and made no secret of having had several Jewish wives. A short chapter reveals Claire’s emphasis on such statements and lays bare Loos’ internal logic, which was convoluted and perhaps reactionary, but which at the same time places him within larger trends toward anti-Semitism in public discourse that was already apparent in the 1930s.

Claire shows these insidious effects in certain discomfiting instances by flipping between the first and third person, as if she is both inhabiting the frame, but at the same time watching herself like a character in it. This dissociative process may reflect her outsider status, a feeling of abjectness both privately as a woman and in the larger social narrative as a Jew (though she had been baptised when she was a child, presumably to remove stigma). Yet a love story it is, and no matter how abject she feels, she portrays herself always redeemed in the eyes of her husband, Adolf Loos.

While Claire and Loos’ marriage lasted only a few years, she lived nearly her whole life under the unifying coherence of his architecture. As Opel describes more fully in Adolf Loos — Der Mensch, informed by interviews with Claire’s brother Max Beck,

An association between Claire’s [parents], Otto [and Olga Feigl] Beck — who had made [their] fortune in the iron [wire] and commercial hops industries — and Adolf Loos began prior to World War I. In 1907, Otto Beck had commissioned Loos to furnish his apartment in Pilsen. In 1928, Loos relocated the apartment to a different site in Pilsen to which the Beck family had moved. It was during this period that the almost 60-year-old Loos decided to marry the 24-year-old Claire Beck. She, a professional photographer, had already developed — along with her artistic vocation — a Bohemian penchant for independence, a lifestyle she chose in defiance of her family and eschewing the brewery city of Pilsen. She departed for Paris, where she hoped to join its Bohemian culture. It was there that she also became reacquainted with Adolf Loos, who had taken up residence in Paris in the late 1920s, and who was struggling to procure commissions. Claire’s parents were against a marriage of the two for several reasons, not the least of which was the age difference of 34 years. Moreover, there had been a colossal scandal involving Loos in 1928 — a case involving moral impropriety, which was mercilessly exploited by the tabloids. Allegations made against him by three minor girls led to a trial and sentencing with probation.

The “scandal” related here has been discussed in other publications, including Christopher Long’s dramatic and well researched account, Adolf Loos on Trial (Kant, 2017), which shows how the proceedings became in some ways a referendum on the avant-garde and its perceived immorality. Claire has little to say about this episode, but she does comment, with some sarcasm, on Loos’ humane response to prostitutes: that he and his close friend, Oskar Kokoschka would try to “save” them (author’s emphasis); that Loos would invite them to his house for lunch or parties along with anyone: carpenters, clients, the demimonde, students, etc.; and that Loos was, if anything, an idealist and great social equalizer.

Claire didn’t have an easy marriage to Loos, though by all accounts, including her own, she knew what she was getting into. They married on July 18, 1929. As Opel tells it,

Before the year was out, Loos became extremely ill and had to be transported to the Cottage Sanatorium in serious condition. In the following two years — and thus for the entire duration of this short marriage — Adolf Loos repeatedly required treatment at health resorts and sanatoriums. Aside from the two focal points of Pilsen and Prague, where he completed his last projects, one finds traces of Adolf Loos during these years in Karlsbad and Baden near Vienna. The Loos [couple] also returned frequently to Vienna, where the pair stayed in hotels and boardinghouses as Loos had become too frail to climb the stairs to his sixth-story apartment. In addition, he had been forced to sublet his apartment on several occasions in order to keep up with pressing debts.

In 1931, between March and July, Loos and Claire traveled through Germany, Switzerland, and Italy on their way to the Riviera, before heading back to Paris. They stopped on their way through, or stayed at, Nürnberg, Frankfurt, Mannheim, Heidelberg, Darmstadt, Stuttgart, Zürich, Milan, Nice, Cap d’Antibes, Juan les Pins, Cannes, and on their way to Paris, went through the mountains between the Riviera and Lyon. They arrived in Paris at the Café du Dôme, which had been known since the turn of the century as a gathering place for intellectuals and artists.

It was a fantastic voyage, but it was doomed. Loos and Claire separated in Paris, in 1931. A brief missive Loos wrote to his student Kurt Unger on October 29, 1931, contains rumors of Claire being romantically involved with others, one named simply as “Bauer.” By January 1932 Claire had requested formal divorce papers through a client of Loos in Vienna, the lawyer Dr. Gustav Scheu. After this, Claire may have attended another art school; but she never remarried, and she kept “Loos” as her last name.

As for the fates of the Beck family, Claire’s father Otto Beck died in 1934 and was buried in Pilsen. Claire and her mother, Olga, remained in Czechoslovakia through the Nazi invasion and had every intention to emigrate to join their surviving family in England or New York. However, in the end they could not obtain visas — neither to Cuba nor Ecuador, the two last hopes they had before they were called up for deportation on Nazi-requisitioned trains to “the East.” In one of her last letters, she writes about trying to send her books out of Europe to her brother-in-law in New York — could those have been versions of the book you hold in your hand?

Through her photography and her book, and because of Loos, something of Claire survives. The traces of her work that we can see suggest there was more, that she accomplished more, but in the brevity of her life and manner of her death, this remains only supposition about an unrealized potential.

What we do know is that Adolf Loos Privat distinguishes itself through its literary experimentation and use of language. Akin to a work of modern architecture, it uses an efficient, precise, and spare vocabulary, with little ornamentation. Unlike traditional German, often an unwieldy, clause-bloated language, Claire writes in short sentences and chooses words that are straightforward and which punctuate space with a consistent measure. It’s as if she imagines having to parse her phrases to the nearly-deaf Loos. Perhaps her first vignette is even an indication for the reader of the approach one might take with the book — that it could be read out loud — and thus Claire’s stories about Loos might be enjoyed much as his own writings were in the coffeehouses, in dialogue with other people.

Part performance, part memorial, Claire brings her own voice alive in concert and contraposto with Loos. Claire is referred to by Loos as “Klara,” “Kläre,” “Lerle,” and “Lärle;” she called him “Dolf” and “Dolfi.” Comedic timing relates Claire’s sense of humor about the ludicrous situations in which she finds herself. The madcap adventures with Loos feel tangible. And no matter its strange or unlikely context, a love story at heart still it is.

Cues from Loos’ letters fill out these impressions. Loos misses her “sweet saxophone voice” (April 8, 1929); when he proposes to her, the response is “a great poem in prose” (June 25, 1929). After he finishes a serial novel in the newspaper he imagines she could have written it (July 4, 1929). They agree to wed, and he sends her “thousands of kisses everywhere, your husband Dolf.” Further elements from Loos’ letters to Claire can be found in an appendix here. However, the content of what she expressed to him in her letters will remain for us unfortunately a mystery, as a fire destroyed many of the Loos papers.

At the end of Claire’s book we are left with the distinct impression that even after their divorce, their love continued. She has elided certain details, nevertheless, which we learn about in the journal of Loos’ builder in Pilsen from 1928 onward, Bořivoj Kriegerbeck (1891–1975). Namely, there is one episode right before the divorce of a jealous spat between Claire and Loos’ nursemaid, Annie (“a Prague beauty”), who Loos expressed interest to marry in a letter to his right-hand man, Heinrich Kulka, despite being extremely ill at the end of his life. Kriegerbeck’s journal reveals Annie’s misimpression that Loos was “very rich.” When Claire sees Annie with Loos at the sanatorium, according to Kriegerbeck, “They hurled themselves at each other and fought, pulling each other’s hair. Loos, when he saw it, took his [walking] stick … and attacked his former wife,” trying to separate them. But then they all went to lunch as “an orderly family group,” though no doubt Claire’s ego suffered and, Kriegerbeck reports, her body was also bruised.

What we can tell is that nearly everyone who came into contact with Loos became fanatically attached to him, devoted each for their own reasons and to their own ends. This remains true of his legacy: and so, dear reader, once you know the man in your own private capacity, you too may find him unforgettable.