Biography from AskART:
| The following is excerpted from the NY Times.com, 9/19/2001
A Surrealist and the Widow Who Keeps the Flame
By HERBERT MUSCHAMP
BEFORE his death in 1965, the Austrian emigre architect Frederick Kiesler made his wife, Lillian, promise that she would try to prevent people from calling him a Surrealist. When I finally met Lillian Kiesler toward the end of her life, I assured her that I would naturally record Kiesler's wishes but probably not honor them. Not all of his work was Surrealist, but the term does not, in my view, misrepresent the projects that hold the greatest interest for architects today. She was agreeable about it. Now I've kept my part of the bargain.
Lillian Kiesler died in her sleep four weeks ago at the age of 91. She was living in the same Greenwich Village apartment where she and Kiesler met in 1934. She gave me this account of the meeting:
She was studying with the painter Hans Hoffman. Her date one night, a fellow student, Burgoyne Diller, told her that if she wanted to know about the art of the 20th century or the 23rd, 24th and 25th centuries there was one man she had to meet. Diller called up Kiesler and asked if they could drop by. Kiesler asked Diller to describe Lillian's appearance, from the head down. "She has apple cheeks and cornflower eyes . . . "
Before Diller could get any further, Kiesler asked him to send his date over alone. She was, he said, the woman of his dreams. Since his youth, he'd had a recurring dream in which he was traveling on a train, the train pulled into a station and a young girl came up to the window of his compartment, holding up a bowl of milk. Diller's description of Lillian matched the girl in Kiesler's dream. She went up to the apartment, a penthouse, and rang the bell. Kiesler opened the door, looked into her eyes and invited her inside. At this point in telling the no doubt oft-told tale, Lillian gestured behind the visitor's head. "And I came in that door, and I'm still here."
Lillian Kiesler was a keeper of the flame, a major league, big-time artist's widow. I mean no disrespect by calling her Lillian. Everyone called her that even me before I'd actually met her, just as Kiesler was, to her, always Kiesler, not Mr. Kiesler, Frederick or my husband. (They didn't marry, officially, until 1964, a year before Kiesler died.) Lillian deserves credit for much of Kiesler's enduring influence on architecture today. Just as she paid court to Kiesler, so we paid court to Lillian. (I am grateful to Lisa Phillips, director of the New Museum of Contemporary Art in Lower Manhattan, for enabling me to cross over Lillian's threshold.)
You don't have to be a Surrealist to understand the vital importance of being with someone you first met in a dream. But it probably helps. It also helps to be a Surrealist if you wish to practice architecture as an outsider. With the possible exception of Frank Lloyd Wright, outsiders have a hard time finding clients. Kiesler certainly did. That's why he is a model for those who wish to pursue architecture as an "alternative practice." Somehow, he made a go of it. Diller and Scofidio, Raimund Abraham, Greg Lynn, Wolf Prix and Eric Owen Moss are among many independent architects today who stand on Kiesler's shoulders.
Kiesler settled in the United States in 1926. Before then, he worked mainly in the field of stage design, often in the aesthetic associated with the Dutch de Stijl movement. In the United States, Kiesler specialized in installations of Surrealist and abstract painting. The best known of these was his 1942 design for Peggy Guggenheim's Art of This Century Gallery. Though Wallace Harrison and Philip Johnson were early supporters, Kiesler's reputation was more secure in art world circles. To the larger public, it rested chiefly on the bronze model of "The Endless House," which has been exhibited more or less continuously at the Museum of Modern Art since 1958.
It is tempting now to see this fascinating project as the precursor to the Blob architecture of Ben van Berkel, Caroline Bos and others who use animation software. To me, the house has always symbolized the collapse of dualisms between art and architecture, interior and exterior, and, above all, form and content. It is at once an abstract sculpture and the corniest image you can think of the human heart. Or (even cornier) the union of two hearts, with common chambers, circulation and emotions. Home is where the heart is, and the heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing.
Similarly, the beautiful metal nesting table that Kiesler designed for the graphics designer Alma Mergentine in 1935 isn't simply a composition of abstract shapes. Like work by Miro, Arp and Noguchi, the piece holds psychological content. This is Rorschach design. See what you like. I see an essay on an Eastern concept: "two but not two." The table is an aluminum ideogram on which a person might display an empty cover of "The Book of Tea."
I think of Kiesler's projects as architecture without exteriors.
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