The Importance of Jean Welz.Pdf
The Importance of Jean Welz Jean Welz was important when he died, in 1975, as a painter. In South Africa. When he left Paris, in the autumn of 1936, he was almost completely unknown in the public sphere. In the private sphere he knew, for example, Gabriel Guevrekian, who’s Parisian entourage before the war included Le Corbusier & Pierre Jeanneret, Pierre Chareau, Adolf Loos, Henri Sauvage, Robert Mallet-Steves, Pierre Sorel, Georges-Henri Pingusson, Andre Lurcat, Rene Herbst, UAM, CIAM, Siegfried Giedeon, Robert & Sonia Delauney, Calder, Lipschitz, Poulenc, Therese Bonney, Morton Strand, Jacques Heim. Iris Meder said he regularly played football with Le Corbusier. Therese Bonney took the photos of his house in Paris. There would have been some overlap. Welz & Guevrekian were classmates in Vienna, alongside Elizabeth Schutte-Lihotsky, Oswald Haerdtl, Ernst Plischke, and Josef Hoffmann’s son, whose father was the head of the course. Welz was second-top student to Haerdtl, whom he disliked as better at sucking-up than architecture, and was taken on by Hoffmann from graduation to 1925, when he was sent to the Art Deco exhibition in Paris, and stayed, leaving behind a very glamorous wife and his bicycle at the Railway Station. Welz’s work in Paris was - I discovered - a constant dialogue between Le Corbusier and Adolf Loos. Both were friends, Loos rather more, he used to stay in Welz’s tiny flat on later visits to Paris, after 1928. Le Corbusier gave him a note of introduction when Welz took the cheapest boat he could find - to South Africa - from Hamburg, leaving behind his beloved (2nd) wife and child.
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