Frederick John Kiesler
Encyclopedia
Frederick John Kiesler. Austria
n-American
theater designer, artist, theoretician and architect.
Kiesler spelled his forename "Frederick," not "Friederick" or "Frederich" as found in various publications (see References below).
Beginning in 1908–09, Kiesler studied at the Technische Hochschule
and, from 1910–12, attended painting and printmaking classes at the Akademie der bildenden Künste, both in Vienna
. He did not finish the architecture curriculum at the Technische Hochschule, a circumstance which was to become a distinct disadvantage. Kiesler was productive as a theater and art-exhibition designer in the 1920s in Vienna and Berlin
. In 1920, he started a brief collaboration with architect Adolf Loos
and, in 1923, became a member of the De Stijl
group in 1923. Kiesler was friendly with many of the major figures of the European avant-garde
, which may have influenced his heretical, if bizarre, approach to artistic theories and practices.
Kiesler arranged the world premiere in Vienna on September 24, 1924, of the 16-minute film Ballet mécanique
, directed by Dudley Murphy
and Fernand Léger
, with Man Ray
. In November 1975, Lillian Kiesler, Frederick's second wife, found Léger's original spliced 35mm, 16-minute version of the film in the closet of their week-end house in the Hamptons
on Long Island
, near New York City. This version, restored by Anthology Film Archives
, has since been included in the documentary film compilation Unseen Cinema: Early American Avant-Garde Film 1893-1941 (released as a seven-disc DVD set by Image Entertainment, October 2005). The music for the film was originally composed by George Antheil
, who used it to create a separate concert piece, also named Ballet mécanique, which premiered in Paris in 1926.
Numerous critics claim that he was far in advance of his contemporaries; detractors have labeled him an oddball. Nevertheless, scholars have only recently seriously studied Kiesler, who, like the eclectic Carlo Mollino
and another member of De Stijl, László Moholy-Nagy
, has been difficult to categorize. Kiesler did not help his cause by falsifying his birth year and claiming that Vienna was his birthplace. Had Kiesler been successful as an architect, he might not have had to be as active teaching, writing and designing window displays to earn a living. His only built architectural work was the Film Guild Cinema
(1929) in New York City and, with Armand Phillip Bartos
, the Shrine of the Book
(1965) in Jerusalem.
He married Stefanie (Stefi) Frischer (1896–1963) in 1920, and they moved to New York City in 1926, where he lived until his death. Kiesler collaborated there early on with the Surrealists, including Marcel Duchamp
. His writing was extensive, and his theoretical work embraced two lengthy manifestos, the article "Pseudo-Functionalism in Modern Architecture" (Partisan Review, July 1949) and the book Contemporary Art Applied to the Store and Its Display (New York: Brentano, 1930).
From 1937 to 1943, Kiesler was the director of the Laboratory for Design Correlation within the Department of Architecture at Columbia University
, where the study program was more pragmatic and commercially oriented than his deep, theoretical concepts and ideas, such as those about "correalism" or "continuity," which concern the relationship among space, people, objects and concepts (Creighton: 1961).
Little of which Kiesler espoused was simple. For his object designs, such as the biomorphic furniture in his Abstract Gallery room of Peggy Guggenheim
’s The Art of This Century Gallery
art salon (1942), for example. For it, he sought to dissolve the visual, real, image, and environment into a free-flowing space. He likewise pursued this approach with his “Endless House,” exhibited in maquette form in 1958–59 at The Museum of Modern Art. The project stemmed from his shop-window displays of the 1920s and his Film Guild Cinema
in New York City, mentioned above. Pursuing display and art-gallery work, he was a window designer for Saks Fifth Avenue from 1928 to 1930. Earlier in his career in Europe, Kiesler invented the 1924 L+T (Leger und Trager) radical hanging system for galleries and museums.
His unorthodox architectural drawings and plans that he called "polydimensional" were somewhat akin to Surrealist automatic drawings.
He designed some intriguing furniture, a few pieces of which were featured in the yearbook of the short-lived American Union of Decorative Artists (AUDAC); he was a founding member of the organization in 1930. Some models of the furniture — none of which was reproduced in numbers as intended — have been posthumously manufactured in limited quantities by various firms in Europe since 1990. The most popular has been the cast-aluminum "Two-Part Nesting Table" (1935).
Kiesler was often shunned by his peers, even though he was chosen in 1952 as one of "the 15 leading artists at mid-century" by The Museum of Modern Art
and in 1957 became a fellow of the Graham Foundation in Chicago. Israel
i architects disapproved of his and Bartos's serving as the architects for the Shrine of the Book
(1957–65) because they were not Israelis, even though they were Jews
. Further objections to Kiesler were that he had not completed his architecture studies and had built no structures, despite having been a licensed architect in New York State
since 1930. One of his colleagues at Columbia University joked: "If Kiesler wants to hold two pieces of wood together, he pretends he's never heard of nails or screws. He tests the tensile strengths of various metal alloys, experiments with different methods and shapes, and after six months comes up with a very expensive device that holds two pieces of wood together almost as well as a screw" (Architectural Forum, vol. 86, no. 2, 1947, p. 140).
In 1964, the year before his death, Kiesler married Lillian Olinsey, his longtime secretary. In May 1965, he traveled to Jerusalem for the inauguration of the Shine of the Book; seven months later he died in New York City.
The Austrian Frederick and Lillian Kiesler Private Foundation was established in 1997 in Vienna and annually grants the Kiesler Prize for Architecture and the Arts.
Austria
Austria , officially the Republic of Austria , is a landlocked country of roughly 8.4 million people in Central Europe. It is bordered by the Czech Republic and Germany to the north, Slovakia and Hungary to the east, Slovenia and Italy to the south, and Switzerland and Liechtenstein to the...
n-American
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
theater designer, artist, theoretician and architect.
Kiesler spelled his forename "Frederick," not "Friederick" or "Frederich" as found in various publications (see References below).
Beginning in 1908–09, Kiesler studied at the Technische Hochschule
Vienna University of Technology
Vienna University of Technology is one of the major universities in Vienna, the capital of Austria. Founded in 1815 as the "Imperial-Royal Polytechnic Institute" , it currently has about 26,200 students , 8 faculties and about 4,000 staff members...
and, from 1910–12, attended painting and printmaking classes at the Akademie der bildenden Künste, both in Vienna
Vienna
Vienna is the capital and largest city of the Republic of Austria and one of the nine states of Austria. Vienna is Austria's primary city, with a population of about 1.723 million , and is by far the largest city in Austria, as well as its cultural, economic, and political centre...
. He did not finish the architecture curriculum at the Technische Hochschule, a circumstance which was to become a distinct disadvantage. Kiesler was productive as a theater and art-exhibition designer in the 1920s in Vienna and Berlin
Berlin
Berlin is the capital city of Germany and is one of the 16 states of Germany. With a population of 3.45 million people, Berlin is Germany's largest city. It is the second most populous city proper and the seventh most populous urban area in the European Union...
. In 1920, he started a brief collaboration with architect Adolf Loos
Adolf Loos
Adolf Franz Karl Viktor Maria Loos was a Moravian-born Austro-Hungarian architect. He was influential in European Modern architecture, and in his essay Ornament and Crime he repudiated the florid style of the Vienna Secession, the Austrian version of Art Nouveau...
and, in 1923, became a member of the De Stijl
De Stijl
De Stijl , propagating the group's theories. Next to van Doesburg, the group's principal members were the painters Piet Mondrian , Vilmos Huszár , and Bart van der Leck , and the architects Gerrit Rietveld , Robert van 't Hoff , and J.J.P. Oud...
group in 1923. Kiesler was friendly with many of the major figures of the European avant-garde
Avant-garde
Avant-garde means "advance guard" or "vanguard". The adjective form is used in English to refer to people or works that are experimental or innovative, particularly with respect to art, culture, and politics....
, which may have influenced his heretical, if bizarre, approach to artistic theories and practices.
Kiesler arranged the world premiere in Vienna on September 24, 1924, of the 16-minute film Ballet mécanique
Ballet mécanique
Ballet Mécanique was a project by the American composer George Antheil and the filmmaker/artists Fernand Léger and Dudley Murphy. Although the film was intended to use Antheil's score as a soundtrack, the two parts were not brought together until the 1990s. As a composition, Ballet Mécanique is...
, directed by Dudley Murphy
Dudley Murphy
Dudley Murphy was an American film director. Murphy was born on July 10, 1897 in Winchester, Massachusetts...
and Fernand Léger
Fernand Léger
Joseph Fernand Henri Léger was a French painter, sculptor, and filmmaker. In his early works he created a personal form of Cubism which he gradually modified into a more figurative, populist style...
, with Man Ray
Man Ray
Man Ray , born Emmanuel Radnitzky, was an American artist who spent most of his career in Paris, France. Perhaps best described simply as a modernist, he was a significant contributor to both the Dada and Surrealist movements, although his ties to each were informal...
. In November 1975, Lillian Kiesler, Frederick's second wife, found Léger's original spliced 35mm, 16-minute version of the film in the closet of their week-end house in the Hamptons
Hamptons
The Hamptons may refer to several villages and hamlets in the towns of Southampton and East Hampton on the far east end of Suffolk County in Long Island, New York. These townships occupy the South Fork of Long Island, stretching into the Atlantic Ocean. The Hamptons form a popular seaside resort,...
on Long Island
Long Island
Long Island is an island located in the southeast part of the U.S. state of New York, just east of Manhattan. Stretching northeast into the Atlantic Ocean, Long Island contains four counties, two of which are boroughs of New York City , and two of which are mainly suburban...
, near New York City. This version, restored by Anthology Film Archives
Anthology Film Archives
__notoc__Anthology Film Archives is a film archive and theater located at 32 Second Avenue on the corner of East Second Street in the East Village neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City devoted to the preservation and exhibition of experimental film. It is the only non-profit organization of its...
, has since been included in the documentary film compilation Unseen Cinema: Early American Avant-Garde Film 1893-1941 (released as a seven-disc DVD set by Image Entertainment, October 2005). The music for the film was originally composed by George Antheil
George Antheil
George Antheil was an American avant-garde composer, pianist, author and inventor. A self-described "Bad Boy of Music", his modernist compositions amazed and appalled listeners in Europe and the US during the 1920s with their cacophonous celebration of mechanical devices.Returning permanently to...
, who used it to create a separate concert piece, also named Ballet mécanique, which premiered in Paris in 1926.
Numerous critics claim that he was far in advance of his contemporaries; detractors have labeled him an oddball. Nevertheless, scholars have only recently seriously studied Kiesler, who, like the eclectic Carlo Mollino
Carlo Mollino
- Biography :Born in Turin, Piedmont, Carlo Mollino was the son of Eugenio Mollino, an engineer. As he grew up, Carlo Mollino became interested in a variety of topics that were as outrageous as his art, such as design, architecture, the occult, and race cars....
and another member of De Stijl, László Moholy-Nagy
László Moholy-Nagy
László Moholy-Nagy was a Hungarian painter and photographer as well as professor in the Bauhaus school. He was highly influenced by constructivism and a strong advocate of the integration of technology and industry into the arts.-Early life:...
, has been difficult to categorize. Kiesler did not help his cause by falsifying his birth year and claiming that Vienna was his birthplace. Had Kiesler been successful as an architect, he might not have had to be as active teaching, writing and designing window displays to earn a living. His only built architectural work was the Film Guild Cinema
Film Guild Cinema
The Film Guild Cinema was a movie house designed by notable architectural theoretician and De Stijl member, Frederick Kiesler. It was located at 52 W. 8th St. in Greenwich Village, New York City. It was built in 1929....
(1929) in New York City and, with Armand Phillip Bartos
Armand Phillip Bartos
Armand Phillip Bartos was an American architect and philanthropist.Though highly active as a philanthropist, Bartos became primarily known as the co-designer of Shrine of the Book that houses the Dead Sea Scrolls in western Jerusalem.Bartos's various and diverse activities, primarily not...
, the Shrine of the Book
Shrine of the Book
The Shrine of the Book , a wing of the Israel Museum near Givat Ram in Jerusalem, houses the Dead Sea Scrolls—discovered 1947–56 in 11 caves in and around the Wadi Qumran...
(1965) in Jerusalem.
He married Stefanie (Stefi) Frischer (1896–1963) in 1920, and they moved to New York City in 1926, where he lived until his death. Kiesler collaborated there early on with the Surrealists, including Marcel Duchamp
Marcel Duchamp
Marcel Duchamp was a French artist whose work is most often associated with the Dadaist and Surrealist movements. Considered by some to be one of the most important artists of the 20th century, Duchamp's output influenced the development of post-World War I Western art...
. His writing was extensive, and his theoretical work embraced two lengthy manifestos, the article "Pseudo-Functionalism in Modern Architecture" (Partisan Review, July 1949) and the book Contemporary Art Applied to the Store and Its Display (New York: Brentano, 1930).
From 1937 to 1943, Kiesler was the director of the Laboratory for Design Correlation within the Department of Architecture at Columbia University
Columbia University
Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...
, where the study program was more pragmatic and commercially oriented than his deep, theoretical concepts and ideas, such as those about "correalism" or "continuity," which concern the relationship among space, people, objects and concepts (Creighton: 1961).
Little of which Kiesler espoused was simple. For his object designs, such as the biomorphic furniture in his Abstract Gallery room of Peggy Guggenheim
Peggy Guggenheim
Marguerite "Peggy" Guggenheim was an American art collector. Born to a wealthy New York City family, she was the daughter of Benjamin Guggenheim, who went down with the Titanic in 1912 and the niece of Solomon R. Guggenheim, who would establish the Solomon R...
’s The Art of This Century Gallery
The Art of This Century Gallery
The Art of This Century gallery was opened by Peggy Guggenheim at 30 W. 57th Street in New York City on October 20, 1942. The gallery occupied two commercial spaces on the seventh floor of a building that was part of the midtown arts district including the Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of...
art salon (1942), for example. For it, he sought to dissolve the visual, real, image, and environment into a free-flowing space. He likewise pursued this approach with his “Endless House,” exhibited in maquette form in 1958–59 at The Museum of Modern Art. The project stemmed from his shop-window displays of the 1920s and his Film Guild Cinema
Film Guild Cinema
The Film Guild Cinema was a movie house designed by notable architectural theoretician and De Stijl member, Frederick Kiesler. It was located at 52 W. 8th St. in Greenwich Village, New York City. It was built in 1929....
in New York City, mentioned above. Pursuing display and art-gallery work, he was a window designer for Saks Fifth Avenue from 1928 to 1930. Earlier in his career in Europe, Kiesler invented the 1924 L+T (Leger und Trager) radical hanging system for galleries and museums.
His unorthodox architectural drawings and plans that he called "polydimensional" were somewhat akin to Surrealist automatic drawings.
He designed some intriguing furniture, a few pieces of which were featured in the yearbook of the short-lived American Union of Decorative Artists (AUDAC); he was a founding member of the organization in 1930. Some models of the furniture — none of which was reproduced in numbers as intended — have been posthumously manufactured in limited quantities by various firms in Europe since 1990. The most popular has been the cast-aluminum "Two-Part Nesting Table" (1935).
Kiesler was often shunned by his peers, even though he was chosen in 1952 as one of "the 15 leading artists at mid-century" by The Museum of Modern Art
Museum of Modern Art
The Museum of Modern Art is an art museum in Midtown Manhattan in New York City, on 53rd Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It has been important in developing and collecting modernist art, and is often identified as the most influential museum of modern art in the world...
and in 1957 became a fellow of the Graham Foundation in Chicago. Israel
Israel
The State of Israel is a parliamentary republic located in the Middle East, along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea...
i architects disapproved of his and Bartos's serving as the architects for the Shrine of the Book
Shrine of the Book
The Shrine of the Book , a wing of the Israel Museum near Givat Ram in Jerusalem, houses the Dead Sea Scrolls—discovered 1947–56 in 11 caves in and around the Wadi Qumran...
(1957–65) because they were not Israelis, even though they were Jews
Jews
The Jews , also known as the Jewish people, are a nation and ethnoreligious group originating in the Israelites or Hebrews of the Ancient Near East. The Jewish ethnicity, nationality, and religion are strongly interrelated, as Judaism is the traditional faith of the Jewish nation...
. Further objections to Kiesler were that he had not completed his architecture studies and had built no structures, despite having been a licensed architect in New York State
New York
New York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...
since 1930. One of his colleagues at Columbia University joked: "If Kiesler wants to hold two pieces of wood together, he pretends he's never heard of nails or screws. He tests the tensile strengths of various metal alloys, experiments with different methods and shapes, and after six months comes up with a very expensive device that holds two pieces of wood together almost as well as a screw" (Architectural Forum, vol. 86, no. 2, 1947, p. 140).
In 1964, the year before his death, Kiesler married Lillian Olinsey, his longtime secretary. In May 1965, he traveled to Jerusalem for the inauguration of the Shine of the Book; seven months later he died in New York City.
The Austrian Frederick and Lillian Kiesler Private Foundation was established in 1997 in Vienna and annually grants the Kiesler Prize for Architecture and the Arts.
Exhibitions
- "Frederick Kiesler", Hochschule für angewandte Kunst, Vienna, 1975
- "Friedrich [sic] Kiesler—Visionär, 1890–1965", Museum moderner Kunst, Vienna, and touring, from 1988
- "Friedrick [sic] Kiesler", Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City, 1989
- Kiesler drawings and reproduction furniture, Jason McCoy Gallery, New York City, 1990–91
- "Frederick Kiesler: arte, architettura, ambiente", Milan, Italy, 1995
- "Friederick [sic] Kiesler: artiste-architecte", Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, July 3-October 21, 1996
- "Frederick Kiesler: Endless", Jason McCoy Gallery, New York City, 2008
- "Frederick Kiesler: Co-Realities", Drawing Center, New York City, 2008