MODERNISM, MADNESS AND THE AMERICAN DREAM
When I found a stack of poems, in Hungarian, dating from the 1930s I hoped I had a trove that would yield the secrets of Paul Weidlinger’s teenage years. It turns out that most of them are drivel (sort of what you’d expect from a teenage boy) but there is a particularly dark one that […]
László Moholy-Nagy was an important person in my father’s life. Moholy-Nagy or just Moholy as he often called, was one of the key figures of the Bauhaus Movement and School, founded by German architect Walter Gropius. The Bauhaus ideal was to foster a culture in which ordinary, everyday utilitarian objects, buidings, furniture, textiles, utensils were designed […]
There is one machine that my father would have relished explaining to Madeleine Friedli, the woman who would become my mother: The lift that carried passengers from the ground to the second stage of the Eiffel Tower. During 1937 my parents met for romantic weekends in Paris when they could scrape together the train […]
Previously, in The Pavilion of New Times, Paul encountered the work and ideas of the great French architect, Le Corbusier at the 1937 Paris International Exposition. A few months later he is given the chance to apprentice to the master… In London Pál worked happily for Moholy-Nagy for a year, (as described in Beauty, Art, and The […]
While apprenticed to the famous architect Le Corbusier in Paris, Paul struggled to formulate his own ideas on architecture, amid the cacophony of theories and slogans being bandied about by Modernists. Scribbling in cafes and on park benches, on long summer evenings and weekends, he wrote a rambling manifesto. Its introduction is a […]
I visit a remote railroad station looking for clues regarding my parent’s immigration to Bolivia in 1939. The video at the end of the blog post documents the journey. My father never admitted to me that he was a Jew. This fact, as well as his denial, is important subtext in the story […]
My father was part of a group of thirteen Hungarians Jews who had been classmates at the German Technical institute in Brunn. They all immigrated to Bolivia in 1939 and 1940. They called themselves “The Gang of 13.” Arriving in La Paz they immediately put into practice their idea of a utopian communist community. They […]
I am in possession of two curious drawings made my by father in late 1939. They are cartoon sketches of Pouqui and Mouqui, the love names my parents gave each other. The drawing shows them settled into their apartment in La Paz, Bolivia. Furniture and personal effects are carefully labeled in French. By naming these […]
On August 15, 1967 – thousands attended the unveiling of Chicago’s most monumental work of public art. The Chicago Symphony Orchestra was on hand to perform George Gershwin’s symphonic poem, “An American in Paris.” On the sidelines pickets denounced the event on the grounds of incomprehensibility. Chicago Mayor Daley pulled on a white ribbon and […]
Among the boxes I received from my family upon my father’s passing there is one that contains several bulging folders of correspondence, both personal and professional, with the French artist Jean Dubuffet. The fact that these folders were in my father’s personal files, rather than in the archives of Weidlinger Associates, is significant. Dubuffet was […]