Adolf Loos A Private Portrait

ISBN: 0983254001

Author: Loos, Claire Beck

Condition: New

Adolf Loos-A Private Portrait is an unusual, literary biography featuring lively, often humorous, snapshots of Viennese-Czechoslovak architect Adolf Loos."A valuable fine-grained portrait The English translation of her book is fluent and accurate, conveying well the tone of Claire Loos original (which, in turn, to some extent mimics Loos own writing style). Richly informative."-Christopher Long, West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture"Claire Beck Loos, a gifted photographer and writer, reveals much about her ex-husbands mercurial persona in a series of conversationally-toned vignettes . Claire died tragically at 38, at the Riga concentration camp; her memoir thus becomes a haunting tribute not only to Loos's talents, but to her own.."-Judy Pollan, Modernism MagazineAn intimate collection of vignettes reveals Loos personality, temperament and philosophy during the last years of his life (1929-1933) and the ways in which he helped shape Modern architecture. This translation, by Constance C. Pontasch and Nicholas Saunders, is the first English edition, the book having enjoyed several reprints in German.The author, Claire Beck Loos, was a photographer and Adolf Loos last wife. She was born in 1904 in Czechoslovakia; her family were Jewish industrialists and important early clients of Loos, commissioning several apartments in Pilsen and works by the architects friend Oskar Kokoschka. In addition to being a biography of her husband, Adolf Loos-A Private Portrait also serves as a self-portrait of Claire, a vibrant young artist who died a tragic and untimely death at Riga, a Nazi concentration camp, in 1942. The book includes supplemental texts by Claires niece Janet Beck Wilson, biographical materials and previously unpublished artistic photographs by the author.