MODERNISM, MADNESS AND THE AMERICAN DREAM
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 […]
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 […]
Early in 1961 Paul Weidlinger received an urgent call from the architect Marcel Breuer. Something had gone horribly wrong during the construction of the Abbey Church that Breuer had designed for the community of Benedictine Monks in Collegeville, Minnesota. Breuer, like my father, was Hungarian. Both were influenced by the Bauhaus Movement and they knew […]
When I went to interview Mira Nakashima, the daughter of the famous craftsman, George Nakashima, I had the sense of stepping into another world, completely removed from the bold urban sculptures and structures I had been documenting. A small woodland hamlet, informed by the Japanese aesthetic, is the site of the George Nakashima […]
This post concerns the year, 1937, in Paul’s life, just after he got his diploma in engineering and architecture from the Swiss Federal Technical University in Zurich. He went to London to look for a job. The chapter develops the seed of the story that was planted earlier in this blog, PAUL AND LÁSZLÓ MOHOLY-NAGY. […]
1937 and 2018. Two creative communities, then and now. In the next post Paul finds a creative home in the London atelier of the man who become his mentor, László Moholy Nagy. I discover one in Richmond, California. Back in the day when I completed the final cut of a documentary film, I took the […]
Imagine returning to the place of your childhood and, half a century later, finding it completely unchanged; the land, the house, the furniture, the light and the smells. Such was my experience in the summer of 2014, when I had just started working on the Restless Hungarian book and film. I had been given a […]