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A deserted Paris house holds the mystery of a brilliant Viennese modernist who worked alongside Le Corbusier and Adolf Loos before vanishing.
Wyeth takes readers on a deeply personal and revelatory journey. This research process, which readers experience vicariously, makes Wyeth’s prose exhilarating as tiny details become breakthroughs of grand proportions. […] For late architect and painter Jean Welz, designs should reflect one’s aesthetic and political commitments. This narrative will resonate with anyone interested in the politics of architecture, or the pursuit of knowledge at large.
—Hyperallergic "BEST ART BOOKS OF 2022"
Welz’s having been “lost” is indeed a travesty of architectural history to which the book serves as a welcome antidote.
—Artforum
A leading painter still highly regarded in South Africa, Jean Welz's prior architectural career has been virtually unknown until a string of discoveries unfolded for author and filmmaker Peter Wyeth, allowing him to narrate this amazing true tale of genius. Trained in ultra-sophisticated, but conservative Vienna, Welz was sent to Paris for the 1925 Art Deco exhibition by his influential employer, renowned architect Josef Hoffmann. There he met preeminent modern architects Le Corbusier and Adolf Loos. The latter employed him to assist in building a house for the founder of Dada, Tristan Tzara. They all mixed in avant-garde circles at the Dôme Café in Montparnasse along with Welz’s classmate from Vienna, later Chicago-based architect Gabriel Guevrekian; Welz’s future employer Raymond Fischer, whose archive was mostly destroyed by Nazis; and photographer André Kertész.
Through Welz’s South African family archive, author Wyeth retrieves stories, letters, portfolios, and photographs generations after Welz’s death that unravel his heroic designs, his stunning built critique of Corbusier’s “Five Points of Architecture,” a gravestone for Marx’s daughter, and the many ways that Welz disappeared amongst his collaborators, intentionally and not. This account of why Jean Welz did not become a famous name in architecture takes us through his brother’s Nazi-art-dealings, illness, betrayal, emigration, and an uncompromising artist’s vision at the same time sifting through significant, literally-concrete evidence of Welz’s built projects and visionary designs.
Peter Wyeth has masterfully charted architect Jean Welz’s work and trajectory from Vienna to Paris and South Africa, as well as his contacts with remarkable clients, colleagues, artists and photographers. He has at last paid homage to his striking designs, such as the Zilveli villa built in Paris in 1933, which deserves to be inscribed in the narrative of European Modernism. —Jean-Louis Cohen, Sheldon H. Solow Professor in the History of Architecture, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University
Known, if at all, as a much-admired painter in South Africa in the mid-twentieth century, Jean Welz's complex architecture career is now marvelously pieced together for the first time. —Robin Middleton, professor Emeritus, Department of Art History and Archaeology, Columbia University
Peter Wyeth's really marvelous book uncovers a highly gifted modernist unknown to the public, whose architecture absorbed the most important ideas of Loos and Le Corbusier. As a filmmaker, Wyeth combines a sharp analysis of Europe's artistic movements between the two wars with refreshing personal insights to create a fascinating portrait that is both fluid and easy to read. —Burkhardt Rukschcio, author of Adolf Loos: Leben und Werk
One of the last testimonies of modernism in intramural Paris is the the Maison Zilveli by the Viennese architect Jean Welz, near Adolf Loos and the Roche du Corbusier house. […] British filmmaker Peter Wyeth, very involved in the preservation of the house, explains that “it is very rare to have a modernist house that has remained unchanged: it is a real case study.” —Le Journal des Arts
Jean Welz and his architecture do exist! Let's hope his architecture survives and defies ignorance. — Richard Klein, architect, professor, chair of docomomo France
Peter Wyeth is to be commended not only for rediscovering Jean Welz and his work but also for reconstructing the network of interactions, innovations and transmission of ideas that constitute the real history of architecture. —Tim Benton, professor and author of The Villas of Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret 1920–1930
This vivid and remarkable excavation of the life and work of the Viennese-born architect Jean Welz is a splendid contribution to the history of modernism. Welz was closely connected with two of the titans of the age, Le Corbusier and Adolf Loos, but, even more, he was an excellent architect, whose work was sensitive, beautiful, and inventive. Wyeth tells his story well, bringing known aspects of the tale of modern architecture into sharper focus, while adding much that is new. —Christopher Long, professor, University of Texas at Austin and author of The New Space: Movement and Experience in Viennese Modern Architecture
Peter Wyeth has been making films since the 1970s, including several with the Arts Council of Great Britain, one of which about a modernist block of flats in London, inspired by Hokusai (“12 Views of Kensal House”) was runner-up for best documentary. He started a forgotten film-mag North by North West, and in 1994 directed “The Diary of Arthur Crew Inman,” based on the 17-million-word and longest diary in America and named a London Times “Film of the Week.” From 1999–2003, Wyeth was head of the film school at University of the Arts London, where he taught for ten years and set up the student-run channel Xplore.tv. His short film “Pane” won a Turner Classic Movies award in 2003. His book The Matter of Vision: Effective Neurobiology and Cinema was published by Indiana University Press in 2015 (in the UK by John Libbey Media) and over the past twelve years he has written dozens of articles on architecture and design for The Modernist. He continues to direct, including for television. He lives between Paris and London.
The Mystery of Jean Welz
Part I: Invisible
Jean Welz Does Not Exist
Le Château Moche — Paris, Christmas Day 2012
The Tradouw Pass — 1940
Part II: Vienna
Finis Austriae — Vienna, October 1918
Josef Hoffmann and The First Wave
Adolf Loos and the Second Wave
Hans Welz Architect
Part III: Paris
Art Deco — Paris, 1925
The Guevrekian Letter
The Third Man Mallet-Stevens / Le Corbusier / Jean Welz
Raymond Fischer
Le Chemin Aérien / The Aerial Way
“Un Nègre Viennois”
Part IV: Oeuvre
The Portfolio
House for an Artist
Inondation — Montauban, 1931
Maison Landau A Minimum House
Villa Darmstadter —1932
Oswald Haerdtl — 1932
Maison Zilveli — 1933
Mont D’Or and Pavillon D’Autriche The Unbuilt
Part V: Tales
A Tale of Two Balconies
A Tale of Two Brothers The Dealer and the Artist
Corbusier’s Note
The Martienssen Affair
A Tale of Three Monuments
Part VI: Jean
House on the Lake
The Dialogues of Jean Welz
Pains and Pleasures of Anonymity
A Solitary Adventure The Character of Jean Welz
Christensen Gallery Inger Welz
Zilveli Destroyed
Appendices
After Architecture South Africa Addendum
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
Plates