Henry Moore Institute Online Papers and Proceedings

Jürgen Partenheimer Carola Giedion Welcker at Doldertal – A personal encounter between literature and art 9 June 2006

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Jürgen Partenheimer Carola Giedion Welcker at Doldertal – A personal encounter between literature and art

A glimpse rather than a profile.

Let me begin this short article with a quote from a letter, which Carola Giedion-Welcker wrote to me from Zurich on the 7th of October 1975:

‘Just now I have received Les Lauriers sont coupe’ by E. Dujardin from a local antiquarian. Quelle chance. These emotional outbreaks in their expression and formlessness were only able to flourish in this era of psychology. The nearness of Freud for Schnitzler´s ‘Lieutenant Gustel’(1901) and for Dujardin´s work the libertinism in the more independent language of the music of the symbolists – le vèrs libre – Mallarmé etc. have initiated and encouraged the process in poetry. Also the ‘automatisme’ of the surrealists did swing along at the edge…

And as a present topic take Samuel Beckett’s anti-rational view of the world. A dark, contemplative clown of soul with steady ‘kicks’ against ratio – intellectuality and the external world in order to be able to brood in the microcosm of the psyche! How much more profound is all of that than the sociological over-interpretation and new- interpretation of art.

Eh bien: finissons. Travaillez bien, cordial salutes C.W.’

This passage typically and unmistakably characterises Carola Giedion-Welcker for the élan vital, the esprit in this letter, portrays the spur of a moment. It reflects the beauty of momentary joy, an impression conveyed, and it remains written between the lines of this letter like an inner monologue and an exclamation at the same time. As an independent statement and a quick reading for the young man to whom this letter was addressed, these lines capture a mind of swift, instant reflection, sharp and passionate.

At that time I was 28 and she was 82 – and if you believe in the symmetry of numbers, it was a perfect match.

This article has been downloaded from the Henry Moore Institute’s collection of Online Papers and Proceedings at www.henry-moore.org/hmi. Copyright remains with the author. Any reproduction must be authorised by the author. Contact: [email protected]

The kind invitation to take part in this conference on Carola Giedion-Welcker instantly stimulated my recollection of a time long passed yet vividly remembered. It is the inconspicuous vividness of involuntary recollection, which claims a particular susceptibility of the senses, a recollection Samuel Beckett so precisely described and demonstrated in his essay on Marcel Proust.1

It all comes to the fore. By chance I had come upon CW’s book on Constantin Brancusi where I had read the remarkable opening quote by James Joyce on Brancusi´s work when I was a student in Munich (in 1972). CW’s book had taken me by surprise and I re-discovered two great artists at the same time, the writer and the sculptor.

I still cherish the book with all its fervently underlined passages of her text, filled with exclamation marks, interrogation marks, crosses and handwritten comments. I remember her splendid introduction on the confrontation and dialogue between Auguste Rodin and the young Brancusi, culminating in the dramatically proclaimed self-confidence of the young Romanian artist declining the master’s offer of an assistantship in the elder’s studio with the words: ‘Sous les grandes arbres rien ne peut pousser’ – ‘Nothing grows under big trees’. This sentence I had immediately underlined twice.

The text of the book was illustrated with astonishing photographs of Brancusi´s sculpture, different from anything I had previously seen and which to my great surprise turned out to be the artist’s own photographs of his work, hitherto completely unnoticed.2 It went without saying that I had to meet the person who had written this book and so I addressed a letter to the famous Doldertal residence in Zurich.

In 1974 I stood in front of the house for the first time and when the door opened a tall woman with short, full, white undulating hair and a penetrating gaze in a firm, striking, almost masculine face, strict and dominating, greeted me with an unexpectedly calm yet clear voice and with a mildly reserved friendliness. I recall, without sentimentality, that my first impression was that of a grandchild meeting his grandmother and at first sight we made friends without saying anything while she led me into the living room.

III

In his text ‘the poetics of space’ Gaston Bachelard refers to the notion of intimate immensity, which he sees as ‘a philosophical category of daydream’ between memory and imagination where the object of attention seems ‘far off, elsewhere, in the space of elsewhere. When this elsewhere is in natural surroundings, that is, when it is not lodged in the house of the past, it is immense.’ 3

This very immensity reigns in my visual memory of the house at Doldertal, a memory, which I still carry within me like the impression of a blissful experience.

The ‘intimate immensity’ and its lasting impression was mainly ascribable to the atmosphere of extraordinarily ‘good company’ CW used to refer to when speaking about the artists whose works she and her husband had collected and which had created spaces of unfamiliar yet limpid quality in their home. The works and the artists who had become her friends were to be a constant part of her life and an everlasting inspiration to her work.

The collection was stupendous, unsurpassed in the way it had come into existence and even more amazing in the way it was displayed or should I say not displayed at all: for it was lived with in the most casual way imaginable, yet with full awareness of its presence.

When one entered the house, the corridor divided the entrance to the living room and the dining room on the left side while the staircase on the right lead up to the second floor. In this corridor, immediately adjacent to the entrance to the living room hung a small inconspicuous painting, oil on copper, tightly framed by a thin wooden moulding: Robert Delaunay’s iridescent Saint-Séverein from 1909 depicting the Gothic vaulting of the church as if seen through a camera obscura, the architecture shaped in a slightly cubistic oval. 4

Dancing on the wall that supported the staircase to the right, irregularly hung, were a wooden relief and a rope-relief by Hans Arp: ‘Nach dem Gesetz des Zufalls geordnet’ (‘arranged by the law of chance’) from 1929 and ‘Komposition mit Kreisen’ (‘composition with circles’) from 1928. Hanging right above Arp's dominating sculptural imagery were two paintings by Mondrian, among them ‘Komposition Nr.11’(1930), in stepped arrangement on the wall, leading up the stairs one after the other! This remarkable overture, mind you, took place in the least privileged of all spaces, a narrow hallway in semi darkness.

The living room was flanked by bookshelves partly covered with drawings and gouaches, which hung on nails casually hammered into the shelf-boards. Here a large watercolour by Le Corbusier, ‘Ozon’ (1940) dedicated by the artist/architect to his friend Siegfried Giedion hung next to a stark and colourful gouache by Fernand Legér. On the opposite wall a small painting on cardboard by Max Ernst stood on the shelf, a surreal frottaged fern-like forest and majestically hovering between the shelf and the high ceiling was one of Max Ernst´s masterpieces from 1939, ‘Europe après la pluie’ – ‘Europe after the rain’. This peculiar map of Europe contrasted with the central wall of the living room where an impressive canvas of one of Kandinsky’s major ‘improvisations’ took control of the room in an indirect rapport with a large painting by Juan Gris, which continued the dialogue with its meditative green cubist composition on the corresponding wall of Carola Giedion-Welcker´s bedroom on the first floor.

Back in the living room, on the windowsill near the coffee table a bronze figure by Alexander Archipenko with its impeccable black patina stood in perfect harmony with Max Ernst’s frottage painting rounding off the composition of the room.

The living room led into the dining room through a large sliding door. The dining room was always kept in a gentle twilight where the exceptionally large wooden relief painting by Hans Arp, the ‘Unendliche Amphora’ – ‘The infinite amphora’ (1929) radiated an unfathomable field of blue, diagonally separated by an undulating white ribbon which flowed into the grey high relief of an abstract amphora in the centre of the painting.

On a dark corner wall opposite Hans Arp´s painting Carlo Carra’s pittura metafisica ‘Einsamkeit’- ‘Loneliness’ (1917) created a double interior: a torso on a pedestal looking at a blackboard showing two geometrical lines and standing in the middle of an otherwise empty room.

All these works represented but a few of the main characters who walked the stage of CW´s world at Doldertal, not to mention Naum Gabo, Constantin Brancusi, the splendid Kurt Schwitters or Paul Klee who were among a number of other prominent members of the superb collection.

It is quite important, however, to understand that the collection represented an active part of the world in which Carola Giedion-Welcker lived. It enacted a splendidly revealed choreography of

open pages of a diary and equally it was a mirror of her own biography in which she reflected herself and was reflected by the constant murmur of the images that surrounded her. Like the voices from Dylan Thomas’s ‘under the milkwood’ the voices of her collection talked to her from distant memories, engaged her in an imaginary conversation, which kept her mind astute and alive. These memories again led to conversations in which she eloquently conjured up the spirits of her time, which made it so beguiling.

Within this company friends became an integral part of the tale-telling world whereas visitors were confronted with it as a kind of rite de passage, which they had to go through in order to prove that they had earned the admittance to the circle. Quite often, after one of these invitations where curators or museum directors would come to discuss a loan or even permanent loans for their museum collections, CW would judge them mercilessly if they hadn’t paid due attention to the presence of the collection and had instead remained politely silent or in her words ignorant to what they saw.

‘Every telling has a tailing’ 5 and most of the pieces of the collection had their very personal histories. The Mondrian paintings for example were purchased in the artist’s studio in Paris where Carola and Siegfried Giedion had travelled on the recommendation of Hans Arp to visit Mondrian – and since the artist was ill at that time, poor and desperate, they decided to support the Dutchman and bought three paintings instead of just one. Siegfried Giedion’s colleague, the architect Roth, who taught at the ETH in Zurich, saw the paintings upon their return to Doldertal and being an architect, liked Mondrian’s sparse geometric compositions. He asked CW for his address and then wrote a letter to Mondrian telling him about his own favourite colours and kindly asked him for a painting with less red, no blue and a little more yellow than usual if possible. A few weeks later the commissioned painting arrived. It was still in Roth’s possession in 1975 and he proudly showed me the notorious letter to Mondrian during a visit to CW´s house.

The most remarkable story for CW, however, was the miraculous way the Juan Gris painting entered her collection. CW and others had persuaded James Joyce to escape the highly insecure situation in Vichy around 1940 and take political refuge in Zurich. Prof. Löffler the director of the medical centre of Zurich University proved to be highly instrumental in this difficult mission. Many a meeting had to be arranged by CW before the operation was eventually successful. Meanwhile Löffler who had gained an interest in art through Carola Giedion-Welcker often sought her advice. One day CW urged him to purchase a marvellous Juan Gris painting which had been offered on the market and which she, as she had told me, was unfortunately unable to afford.

CW had convinced Löffler to buy the painting of this Spanish artist, who was unknown to him and he was very grateful for he became extraordinarily fond of the work. Many years later, shortly after Löffler’s death a painting was delivered to Doldertal. It was the very work by Juan Gris, which Löffler in his will had simply declared a ‘permanent loan’ generously granted by Carola Giedion-Welcker and which now thankfully was to be returned to its true owner!

CW was very protective about her collection, particularly when a visit to Amden was planned, her favourite place for a short holiday, 70km away from Zurich, situated in the beautiful countryside of the Swiss Alps surrounding Lake Walen. She was always afraid of ‘gangsters’ the term she used for possible intruders, who might break in and, if only by accident, might vandalize or steal part of her beloved collection. Consequently the Kandinsky was always hidden under the carpet and the Juan Gris had to go under her bed in order to be safe since, after all, none of the collection was properly insured.

This singular private collection at Doldertal never grew into a sanctuary of ‘high art’, on the contrary it was a memento vitae, a personal and dedicated reflection of the here and now. It represented ‘lived contemporaneity’ as an individual archive of art and literature as well and as such it witnessed reflected Zeitgeist, a strong personal belief, and an individual choice of contemporary art as an expression of shared spiritual, emotional and intellectual awareness. By this token the liking for a work of art or literature or poetry is marked by conviction, by passion and knowledge, thus gaining strength, independence and self-assurance. These inherent qualities yield to the described truly private and unconventional terms in view of the work and its appearance, its presentation. The collection seemed to have conquered the space of the house gradually and all by itself through a natural and inner necessity: desired presence. The art occupied the space in the house at the same level as the books in the bookshelves because the true collector has the mind of a librarian who passionately stores in order to ensure the omnipresence of his obsessive interests.

This independently subjective yet labyrinthine and open-ended approach made the most unexpected and surprising personal encounters possible for both CW and her husband, enabling them to make their remarkable first hand decisions.

Such an individual approach towards building a collection has since undergone a drastic change of attitude. The once subjectively vested interest of the private collector à la Carola Giedion- Welcker has now turned aberrantly public through second-hand mediation. Today’s private collections strive for publicity through a strategic appropriation of social prestige, whereby the

acquisition of art reflects general lifestyle and trends overtly guided by commercial interests backed by financial strength. These collections signify accumulation of quantity for public ‘show’ in contrast to selective quality for personal experience and individual appreciation. Presentation as status, competitive public vanity succumbing to a contextually exploited Zeitgeist created and offered by mediating consultants – art exchange instead of stock exchange.

Carola Giedion-Welcker was the true opposite of all of that. No ‘sociological over- interpretation’, no forced ‘new-interpretation’ neither of art nor of literature but rather a true contemporary awareness. This attitude afforded her access to the essential ‘zones of uncertainty’ as Maurice Blanchot had decribed them: ‘The more the world asserts itself as the future and the 'high-noon', where everything has a value, a meaning, where everything is consummated under the rule of humanity and for its use and sake, the more it seems that art must climb down to that point where nothing yet makes sense.’ 6 Carola Giedion-Welcker always took part in that ‘climb’ and she never grew tired in her interest to learn more, to listen, to see and discover.

Even though her first and pioneering texts on Joyce were written between 1928 and 1938 (a fact which remains underestimated given the time frame of Joyce’s work of that period) she took great pleasure in the new and stimulating approach to Joyce by Fritz Senn, the founder of the James Joyce Foundation in Zurich (1985) who had begun the activity of the future foundation with his known readings from Ulysses twice a week in Zurich during the 1970s.

CW was still genuinely interested in and completely excited by Senn’s stupendous knowledge when reading the text and pointing to innumerous hidden allusions, sublimely deciphering the riddles with great humour and without demystifying or dissecting the composition of the work.

When I was at Doldertal during that time, CW and I used to attend Senn’s readings, and once even with Stephen Joyce, who had come from Paris to Zurich, where I had met Joyce’s somewhat aloof grandson. Joyce (by the way) had written a cunning story about a cat and the devil for his grandson Stephen in 1936. The story, as CW had told me was later published as Joyce’s only children’s book which, by the way, ended on a beautiful Joycean note about the devil: ‚The devil mostly speaks a language of his own called Bellsybabble which he makes up himself as he goes along but when he is very angry he can speak quite bad French very well though some who have

heard him say that he has a strong Dublin accent.’ 7

During the same period in the mid-seventies the German author and translator Hans Wollschläger worked on his new translation of Joyce’s Ulysses into German and I remember that CW was very curious about the outcome and quite impressed by the seriousness with which he attempted a new interpretation of the old translation by Georg Goyert from 1966 to which she had contributed an elucidating introduction. Joyce played an important role in Carola Giedion-Welcker’s life. During his time in Zurich he used to come to Doldertal for many a memorable dinner as she had told me and smilingly she added that Joyce before becoming a writer had dreamed about becomimg an opera singer and therefore sometimes after dinner at Doldertal rejoiced in performing on the pianoforte in the dining room with his impressive voice. The house at Doldertal witnessed memorable nights not only with Joyce but with Hans Arp as well who told many a good Dada tale, which CW was often reminded of during our dinners and with a pensive smile would point out to me that I was going to sleep in the same room and in the same bed where Joyce and Arp had slept when they had stayed overnight.

The following lines by Seamus Heaney on the poet Elisabeth Bishop may stand as an apt commentary on Carola Giedion-Welcker as well: ‘Her intelligence was both strict and passionate, her whole character equally averse to self-pity and to self-aggrandisement. Anything too solemn or too obvious (especially concerning herself) discomfited her, so even praise could be risky’.

The unpathetic intuition of intuition in her work was apparent both in her speech and in her writing when, for example, she would draw a brilliant comparison between Joyce’s universal space-time spirit and the multidimensional time-space of the visual arts of the same generation as related energies. She saw Joyce’s new emanating strength of the synergy of content and emotion as a new symbolism of the word equal to the new symbolism of form in contemporary art.8 ‘Like Klee in his painting, Joyce humanizes the world of the factual and the creative through his language’ 9, she wrote in 1941, shortly after Klee´s death.

It was the same affection in her attitude as a writer as in her approach towards art as a collector. It was the same caring nature touched by a genuine imaginative spirit. A spirit, Shakespeare characterized in his Midsummer-Night’s Dream: ‘The lunatic, the lover and the poet, are of

imagination all compact: and, as imagination bodies forth the forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing a local habitation and a name.’10

Seen in this light CW’s writing was more than an observant writing, it gave itself entirely to what it discovered until a lucid conclusion could evolve and be given a name. Although her sense of reality was ‘more earthbound than angelic’11, Carola Giedion-Welcker stood on firm ground with an ‘airy’ mind.

Only today have I become fully aware that she was indeed over 80 years old during the time of our encounter and friendship in the 1970s. As a young man I never actually realized her true age since it did not seem to matter at all.

In retrospect examplary in a very particular way was the jour fixe CW attended every Wednesday at the cafeteria of the Kunsthaus in Zurich. Here she and her friends Marietta von Mayenburg and Lucia Moholy met every week to have coffee and a chat. Marietta a former ballerina who had danced under Diaghilev in Paris and Lucia a photographer, first wife of Lázló Moholy Nagy, who had moved to Switzerland after her husband’s death. The meetings of these ‘three graces’, whose ages together added up to almost 250 years, were absolutely amazing. There was a gleefulness in this circle and once their attention lighted on a subject, it immediately grew lambent and carried them away like high-spirited teenagers. They were always in the best of moods and always joking and CW had taken great pleasure in introducing me, the youngster, to her lady´s club. I do not remember what topics we touched upon in our conversations on things past and present, but there was always a noticeable merriment in the air.

My encounter with Carola Giedion-Welcker seemed the most natural and yet luckiest coincidence in my life as a young scholar and artist during the time between 1974 and 1978. It was a gift and a lasting example.

During that time CW had most generously supported and challenged my thesis on Brancusi´s photographs, which was to become the first ever documentation of this hitherto unknown and believed to be lost material.

VII

Let me end my brief reflections and memories with a poem by the contemporary Spanish poet Clara Janés. It is a poem CW would have particularly liked since in a peculiar way it alludes to the hidden spirituality of Hans Arp, to the genuine ‘seismographic sensitivity’ 12 which CW had first discovered in Arp´s writing. The poem proclaims a strong credo, a conviction which so rightly bridges the artist’s mind with that of his interpreter, for it is the imagination they share, the belief in presence which brings them together unites them and takes them away forever into the future.

Only the dark remains measured by the stars. Only the longing remains and the riddle. There is no boat that crosses to the other side: To be here is everything. The flight lifts the horizon of our dreams. 13

1 Samuel Beckett, Proust, Grove Press, New York 1931. 2 Jürgen Partenheimer, Die Skulptur Brancusis in der Deutung seiner Fotographie / Constantin Brancusi. Der Künstler als Fotograf seiner Skulptur, Munich /Zurich, 1976. 3 Gaston Bachelard, The poetics of space. Boston, 1969, p. 183f. 4 Carola Giedion Welcker mentions the series St-Séverin in a text on Delaunay (1946), in: Carola Giedion Welcker, Schriften 1926-1971, Cologne,1973, p.121. 5 James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, London 1939, p. 213. 6 Maurice Blanchot. Das Unzerstörbare, Munich/Vienna, 1991, p. 78. 7 James Joyce, The cat and the devil. London, 1965. 8 Carola Giedion Welcker. Introduction to Ulysses. In: James Joyce, Ulysses, translated into German by Georg Goyert. Zürich, 1956, p. 834f . 9 Carola Giedion Welcker, Schriften 1926-1971, Cologne 1973, p.68. 10 William Shakespeare, The complete works, London, 1964, p.187. 11 Seamus Heany, Finders Keepers, New York, 2002, p.361ff . 12 Carola Giedion Welcker, Hans Arp, Dichter und Maler (1930), in Schriften 1926-1971, Cologne 1973, p.248. 13 Clara Janés, El libro des los pájaros (The book of the birds), Valencia 1999, p.53. Y queda el negro / medido por los astros. / Y queda el ansia / y el enigma . / No hay barca / que cruce a la otra orilla: / Estar aquí es todo. / El vuelo se llevó / el horizonte de nuestros sueños. Translation Jürgen Partenheimer/Clara Janes.