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CLAIRE BECK LOOSTHE FRACTURED LENS

Claire (Klara) Beck Loos (November 4, 1904 – January 15,* 1942) was an author and photographer, born to an affluent Jewish family of industrialists in Pilsen (Plzeň, Czech Republic), in what was then the Hapsburg Empire. She became the third wife of Adolf Loos in 1929 and three years after his death, memorialized him in this book intended to raise money for Loos’ tombstone.

Claire Beck was trained in photography and worked professionally in the atelier of Hede Pollak in Prague. For her formal studies, she had attended the Graphische Lehr- und Versuchsanstalt, an art school in Vienna with a well-respected photography program. She seems to have experimented with self-portraiture, as several of her surviving photographs show.

Though Claire took many images of Loos herself, she chose to use Pollak’s famous portrait of him on her book cover. This English language edition features many of Claire’s own portraits of Loos, including her most famous: Loos standing in front of his fireplace in Vienna with his ear horn, which for years has hung outside the preserved rooms of his Giselastraße apartment that are now installed at the Wien Museum.

Claire and Loos divorced in 1932, more about which is discussed in the following pages. After that, she lived an itinerant artist’s life. Documents indicate she stayed at various times in Pilsen, Prague, and Vienna; shortly after Nazi stamps appear in her passport, when she traveled to Vienna in August 1938, (at roughly the same time that her sister’s family fled to the Becks’ in Pilsen), it appears she got a Bulgarian transit visa.

During the two difficult years she spent in Prague between 1940 and 1941, living under Nazi occupation, she had a job as an unpaid assistant for another photographer. This fact is known through letters from Claire and her mother Olga Beck, which have been preserved since the war years by Claire’s surviving family. That photographer was making images in the style of the Bewegung, an art movement that had influenced Loos, and to which Claire had most likely been exposed during a time of artistic experimentation in Paris. After Loos died, Claire continued her associations with his friend Max Thun-Hohenstein, a movement researcher attached to the Bewegung; a surviving photograph of her sister Eva suggests Claire had also been interested in photographing modern dancers. By working for this unnamed photographer, we know that Claire was experimenting with a Leica camera. She did this among other odd jobs she could find, including being a baker’s assistant.

Outside of what has been preserved by her surviving family and by Loos collectors, little of Claire’s photographic record is known to remain. Her letters suggest she actively pursued her vocation until she was caught up in Nazi deportations and the Holocaust. She writes that the landlord of one of her apartments in Prague allowed her to set up a darkroom, a generous act, as she would have been very limited in her abilities to go out in public by curfews and the imposition of wearing the Jewish Star of David, much less having means to purchase necessary supplies. Claire’s last photographs from this period, and indeed any other photos she may have been taken of Loos and his circle, are lost, as much of the contents of her safety deposit box at the Escompte- und Creditbank in Prague that she opened in 1939 was looted as Jewish property after the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia.

One can only wonder what Claire kept of letters or mementos, and equally importantly, what her artistic output was or could have been had she lived beyond the war. Her memories and photographs that have survived her, meanwhile, continue to tell the story of Adolf Loos, her primary known subject outside of her family. For years, her anecdotes about Loos could be found peppering others’ texts but without attribution, and her photographs were used sometimes without credit. This began to change when Burkhardt Rukschcio met Claire’s brother Max Beck in England and included information about her in his authoritative monograph with Roland Schachel Adolf Loos: Leben und Werk (Vienna: Residenz Verlag, 1982) and again when editor and filmmaker Adolf Opel republished Adolf Loos Privat in German in 1985 with informative supplemental materials, including photographs and testimony from Max Beck given informally at a conference on Loos at the Warburg Institute.

Translations of Adolf Loos Privat have now appeared in English (2011), Czech (2013), and Italian (2014) and a work of historical fiction closely based on Claire’s life, Le Scarpe di Klara [Klara’s Shoes] by Wolftraude di Concini appeared in Italian in 2018 (Publistampa Edizioni). In 2012–2013, Claire’s photographs were included alongside her much more famous contemporaries like Trude Fleischmann and Madame d’Ora in an exhibition at the Jewish Museum entitled Vienna’s Shooting Girls: Jewish Women Photographers in Vienna, curated by Iris Meder. And starting in 2017, the West Bohemian Writers’ Association has presented exhibitions and literary symposia about Claire Beck Loos and her book at several locales in Pilsen. The exhibition has also traveled to Brno, Brussels, and Riga, with Liberec and other cities still planned. Since 2012, the organizer, David Růžička, has given public presentations, readings, and written several articles about Claire which have appeared in magazines with circulations of up to 100,000 in the Czech Republic, turning her into a minor local celebrity and inspiring artwork, radio readings, television features, and further research into her life.

In these ways, Claire Beck Loos’ observations of her husband have now — approaching one hundred years later — returned the gaze fittingly back toward her.

* Date of death unknown. Given is the departure date of Claire’s four-day transport, number P-785, from Theresienstadt (Terezín) to the Nazi extermination camp in Riga, Latvia (Gottwaldt, Alfred and Diana Schulle. Die “Judendeportationen” aus dem Deutschen Reich 1941–1945 [Wiesbaden: Marix Verlag, 2005] 132).