Sibyl Moholy-Nagy

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Sibyl Moholy-Nagy ( IPA : [ˈmohojˌnɒɟ] ) (born October 29, 1903 in Loschwitz , German Empire ; † January 8, 1971 in New York ), born Dorothea Maria Pauline Alice Sibylle Pietzsch , also Sibyl Peach , was a German-American dramaturge , Actress , architecture and art historian and university professor.

She was married to the Hungarian-American painter, photographer, typographer, set designer and Bauhaus teacher László Moholy-Nagy . After the National Socialists came to power in Germany , she emigrated with him to Chicago via London. After the early death of her husband, she established herself as an influential and important architecture critic of the 1950s and 1960s. She was an early critic of modern architecture and urban planning, and reinforced her doubts through research on native architecture and historic cities.

Life

Parents, childhood and education

Sibyl Moholy-Nagy was the youngest daughter of the Dresden architect Martin Pietzsch , who worked for the German Werkbund , and the teacher Fanny Pietzsch (1866–1945), née Clauss. Her mother came from a wealthy family of textile manufacturers and merchants from Chemnitz . She enjoyed a solid education and was fluent in English and French. Her father studied architecture in Dresden and was very successful as a freelance architect. After an extensive study trip to Italy, he designed many residential buildings, restaurants and specialized in movie theaters . His style was less influenced by modernity; rather he felt obliged to the architectural style of Paul Schultze-Naumburg .

Sibyl had a brother Claus (1902–1942) and two sisters Eva (1899–1981) and Hertha (1898–1980). Her uncle was the impressionist painter Richard Pietzsch . Her nephew, the son of her eldest sister Hertha, was the musicologist and musician Wolfram Steude .

Sibyl's parents' house: the "small artist house"

Sibyl grew up in the so-called “Small Artists House” at Pillnitzer Landstrasse 57, which her father had built in 1899 according to his own plans. It is the smaller version of the artist's house in Dresden-Loschwitz, which was designed a little earlier by Martin Pietzsch and is located nearby . As was not uncommon for middle-class children at the time, the children of Pietzsch belonged to the Wandervogel , a youth movement that upholds a love of nature, freedom, personal responsibility and national pride. Sometimes these attributes were also marked with an appreciation for the allegedly Germanic roots of Germany. Sibyl joined the movement at the age of 15, but left it a year later. She is described as a smart but also rebellious girl who was little inclined to conform. Her diary entries indicate that she had no close friends and that her mother found them "difficult". Her good academic achievements were sometimes countered by severe anxiety, which almost led to a breakdown until she was physically exhausted and before she graduated from high school in 1920. The only person with whom she developed a closer bond was the pastor Carl Mensing, a pastor of the Lutheran Church in Dresden , with whom she was still in contact after her school days.

Badly affected by the First World War , she successfully finished high school at the age of 17. Although her grades were at least as good as those of her brother Claus, her father wanted her not to go to university. This should only be reserved for Claus. Her desire to be creative and to make a contribution as a poet or writer is documented in her diary entries. Against the background of her father's objection, she tried to start an apprenticeship as a bookseller and thus at least to some extent to find a way into literature. Her older sisters were also forbidden from receiving any academic training. Her mental and physical condition remained precarious. During her apprenticeship in Dresden, Halle and Leipzig , she suffered several breakdowns and spent several months in sanatoriums . In 1923 she finally broke off her training as a bookseller and began working as a secretary. After a few months at the Research Institute for Cultural Morphology in Munich , she switched to a Leipzig publisher. She received very good job references, which highlighted her above-average commitment and literary education.

Theater and film career

Sibylle Pietzsch (1927)

Nevertheless, none of these activities satisfied her, so that she returned to her parents' house in Dresden in 1924 and took acting lessons with Lily Kann and later with Erich Ponto . Since 1923 she also studied philology at the universities of Leipzig (1925) and Gießen (1929). After her first engagement in Sagan , Silesia , she moved from the provinces to Berlin, where she worked as an actress and screenwriter under the stage name Sibyl Peach . There she auditioned for various roles and had relationships with various men who she hoped would support her career. Between 1926 and 1929 she appeared in several plays and films, including 1928 in Richard Löwenbein's Fate of Girls . Despite positive feedback from the meetings, there was no lasting success.

Against this background, the acceptance of the marriage proposal of the industrialist and intellectual Carl Dreyfuss (1898–1969) from Frankfurt am Main , whom she had met in Berlin, explains . Dreyfuss came from a wealthy Jewish family and ran the family business he had inherited. He was a close friend of Theodor Adorno and also wrote surrealist texts with him that appeared in the Frankfurter Zeitung . At the wedding of Carl Dreyfuss and Sibyl Pietzsch on September 30, 1929 in Frankfurt, Adorno was one of the best man. Sibyl took on an occasional role at the Frankfurt theaters and soon received an engagement, albeit a short one, at the New Theater in Frankfurt . After working as a lecturer at the Rütten & Loening publishing house , she began working as an assistant dramaturge at the Darmstadt State Theater in early 1931 . After an initial satisfaction, however, she realized that this professional situation could not last. Problems also arose privately. Dreyfuss got into economic difficulties due to the global economic crisis and even had to sell his house. In addition, Dreyfuss was also known as a bon vivant and womanizer and, after the failure of his first marriage, had various love relationships, including with the actress Marianne Hoppe . When Dreyfuss met Hoppe in the summer of 1930, he was still married to Sibyl. It is not certain whether Sibyl knew about the affair, but she did know Marianne Hoppe, as she was often a guest at Dreyfuss' house until the end of 1930. From July 1931, the couple lived separately, but kept in touch. Sibyl returned to Berlin, where she found a job in the Tobis Tonbild Syndicate as a production assistant during the transition from silent to sound film . Your job was to develop scripts. In this position she met László Moholy-Nagy.

Marriage to László Moholy-Nagy

In the winter of 1931/1932 she and the Bauhaus professor, painter, designer and photographer László Moholy-Nagy and she became a couple. She married László Moholy-Nagy in London in 1932; for both it was their second marriage. As a result of the reprisals and the ban on the profession issued by the National Socialists in Germany, her husband worked in Amsterdam from 1934 , while she stayed in Berlin with her daughter Hattula, who was born in 1933. The family moved to London in 1935 , where their second daughter Claudia (1936–1971) was born a year later. In England she wrote her first book, The Imperfect Woman , a feminist-oriented analysis of women in society. The German-language manuscript was never published.

In 1937 the family emigrated to Chicago in the United States , where Moholy ‐ Nagy founded the New Bauhaus architecture school that same year , which became part of the Illinois Institute of Technology in 1949 and is now known as the IIT Institute of Design. Sibyl Moholy-Nagy assisted her husband there. She supported his activities at the institute, for example she organized the summer courses and occasionally even taught herself. She edited her husband's book Vision in Motion , which appeared in 1947 after his death. At the same time, she had traditional duties as a housewife and mother. She addressed this double burden in her diaries, which pushed her own dreams and ideas into the background. All of the arduous work was not really appreciated. At the beginning of their emigration, their ambitions were also hampered by the fact that their knowledge of English was insufficient. During the first few years she was able to communicate well, but her language was not yet polished.

Architecture and art historian

After the death of her husband in November 1946 as a result of leukemia , she had to support her family and decided to pursue a career as an architectural historian. It made a name for itself through a large number of published specialist articles and books. She benefited not only from her father's experience and knowledge, but also from her contacts to Walter Gropius and Sigfried Giedion , whom she had met personally through her husband.

In 1947 she received a position as a lecturer at the Institute of Design in Chicago. This was followed by a year of teaching at Bradley University in Peoria . In 1949 she moved to California, where she taught at the Rudolph Schaeffer School of Design in San Francisco and the University of California at Berkeley . With the publication of the biography of her late husband Moholy-Nagy in 1951, she began a career as a professor of architectural history at the Pratt Institute in New York, where she held the chair for architectural history and materials science.

Foreword and translation into English (1953)

In 1953, Moholy-Nagy translated the second book in the 14-book Bauhaus series Pedagogical Sketchbook by Paul Klee . He worked as a Bauhaus teacher from 1921 to 1931. For the book, originally published in 1925, her husband designed the cover layout and typography. Moholy-Nagy also wrote the introduction for the English edition, entitled Pedagogical Sketchbook .

In addition to her teaching activities, Moholy-Nagy conducted field studies , where she examined, among other things, the traces of immigrants in North America and their construction methods imported from their home countries and their further development in the United States. In 1953 she received the Arnold Brunner grant from the Architectural League of New York for her work on traditional architecture . Her field studies resulted in her work Native Genius in Anonymous Architecture , which she published in 1955 and dedicated to the architect Frank Lloyd Wright , whom she admired . Its architecture, she commented, fits in harmoniously with the American landscape. She even saw him as the outstanding and best architect in the country, who knew how to architecturally bring regionality to a new level - and that far from any sentimentality as practiced, for example, by Charles Voysey or Charles Follen McKim. In contrast, she described the steel and concrete structures of Gropius and Mies van der Rohe as foreign bodies. In her works she shed light on the unreality of urban life and the part that modern architecture and the excesses of the Bauhaus movement play in it.

In 1969 she retired. From then until her death she was visiting professor at Columbia University in New York . She died in a New York hospital on January 8, 1971, at the age of 67.

estate

The research facility Archives of American Art of the Smithsonian Institution has a collection of around 1500 objects on ten microform rolls - the so-called Sibyl and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy papers . This includes correspondence, diaries, notes, photographs and other printed matter. The archive collection covers the period from 1918, when László Moholy-Nagy began painting, until 1971, when Sibyl Moholy-Nagy died. The origin of the collection is based on a donation in 1971 by the daughter Hattula Moholy-Nagy. The original objects and documents were returned to the daughter after the film was made.

The Museum of Modern Art in New York archives correspondence between Sibyl Moholy-Nagy and architecture critic Philip Johnson .

reception

Sibyl Moholy-Nagy is considered an important architecture critic because of the re-evaluation of modern architecture that she initiated after the Second World War . Due to its numerous specialist publications and thus its pronounced presence, it played a key role in the architecture scene in the post-war United States. The assessment goes back to Reyner Banham , who put Moholy-Nagy on a par with Jane Jacobs and Ada Louise Huxtable after her death . She was characterized by her contentious writing style and her ability to hit the nail on the head. Where others praised, she judged, and she did not shrink from taking the greatest stars of modernity into the target of her criticism. During her active time, but also after her death, people tried to marginalize her again and again.

She is also seen as one of the driving forces behind the growing interest in the urban and historical components of architecture. In addition, she was open to other cultures.

The Belgian art historian and architecture theorist Hildegarde Heynen said of Sibyl Moholy-Nagy:

“First of all, Sibyl Moholy-Nagy had a very interesting and very extraordinary life. It was also very important for architectural criticism in the 1950s and 60s. "

Heynen pleaded for a new perspective on Moholy-Nagy, whose influences she sees in today's architectural practice. Moholy-Nagy was one of the first to take a critical look at modern architecture in South America. Even back then, she proposed an environmentally conscious approach to architecture, which, even by today's standards, is viewed as forward-looking. She is an example of an influential critic who is probably far less noticed than her work deserves.

As a contentious person, she was also in a controversial exchange with the Harvard Art Museums . Walter Gropius convinced Moholy-Nagy to bequeath the light-space modulator , a groundbreaking kinetic sculpture that her husband had created, to the Fogg Art Museum . She was consistently concerned that the museum curator was trying to preserve the sculpture in such a way that he wanted to make a working replica in order to avoid damaging the original. The files on the sculpture, which is currently on display at the Busch-Reisinger Museum , are full of a subtle but teasing exchange of views between the museum director and Sibyl Moholy-Nagy.

Awards

Filmography

As an actress:

  • 1928: The fate of girls as Lene, the gardener's daughter, by Bruno Lutz and Erich Zander
  • 1929: Comradeship marriage as Maria, camera by Georg Krause
  • 1930: Kamarádské manželství as Eva Rubesová

As production assistant:

  • 1926: Berlin still life , directed by László Moholy-Nagy
  • 1932: Big City Gypsies , directed by László Moholy-Nagy

Publications (selection)

Novella
  • Children's children , Bittner, New York 1945.
Architectural criticism
  • with the participation of László Moholy-Nagy and Walter Gropius : Moholy-Nagy: experiment in totality , Harper, New York 1950.
  • Carlos Raúl Villanueva and the architecture of Venezuela , Hatje, Stuttgart 1964.
  • Matrix of Man: An Illustrated History of Urban Environment . Preager, 1968.
  • The city as fate: history d. urban world , Callwey, Munich 1970, ISBN 978-3-7667-0194-7 .
  • Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, a total experiment , Kupferberg Verlag, Berlin 1972, ISBN 978-3-7837-0070-1 .
Professional articles and essays
  • Expo '67. In: Bauwelt . Volume 58, Nos. 28-29, 1967, pp. 687-696. ( Digitized version )
  • Hitler's Revenge . In: Art in America , September / October 1968, pp. 42-43.
translation

literature

  • Judith Paine: Sibyl Moholy-Nagy. A Complete Life. In: Archives of American Art Journal , 15: 4 (1975), pp. 11-16.
  • Jeanine Fiedler:  Moholy-Magy, Sybil. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 17, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1994, ISBN 3-428-00198-2 , pp. 701 f. ( Digitized version ).
  • Hilde Heynen: Navigating the Self: Sibyl Moholy-Nagy's Exploration of American Architecture. In: Oriental-Occidental Geography, Identity, Space: Proceedings, 2001 ACSA International Conference , Washington: ACSA Press, 2001, pp. 151-155. ( Digitized version ).
  • Hilde Heynen: Anonymous architecture as counter-image: Sibyl Moholy-Nagy's perspective on American vernacular In: The Journal of Architecture , 2008, pp. 469–491. ( Digitized version ).
  • Hannelore Rüttgens-Pohlmann: Artwork of a lifetime. Sibyl Moholy-Nagy. Reconstruction of the biographical course of a German émigré. BIS-Verlag, 2008, ISBN 978-3-8142-2132-8 .
  • Hilde Heynen: Sibyl Moholy-Nagy. Architecture, Modernism and its Discontents. Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2019, ISBN 978-1-350-09411-6 .
  • Saxon Architects Foundation (ed.), Hilde Heynen: Sibyl Moholy-Nagy. A biography. Sandstein Verlag, 2019, ISBN 978-3-95498-463-3 .

Web links

Commons : Sibyl Moholy-Nagy  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Heynen: Sibyl Moholy-Nagy. A biography. P. 15 and p. 17.
  2. ↑ a b Heynen: Sibyl Moholy-Nagy. A biography. P. 17.
  3. ↑ a b Heynen: Sibyl Moholy-Nagy. A biography. P. 18.
  4. ^ Heynen: Sibyl Moholy-Nagy. A biography. Pp. 20-21.
  5. ^ Ann Lee Morgan: The Oxford Dictionary of American Art and Artists. Oxford Univ. Press 2007, ISBN 978-0-19-512878-9 , p. 316
  6. ^ Archives of The New York Times : Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, Architectural Critic, Is Dead , article from January 9, 1971, last accessed May 8, 2019
  7. ^ The New Bauhaus. Our Bauhaus Heritage. , last accessed on May 8, 2019
  8. ↑ a b D. Stratigakos for Places Journal : Hitler's Revenge , last accessed on May 9, 2019
  9. ^ Heynen: Navigating the Self: Sibyl Moholy-Nagy's Exploration of American Architecture. P. 152.
  10. ↑ a b J. Fiedler: Moholy-Magy, Sybil . P. 702.
  11. ^ Heynen: Navigating the Self: Sibyl Moholy-Nagy's Exploration of American Architecture. P. 154.
  12. ↑ Guide to the Sibyl Moholy-Nagy Collection (PDF; 129 kB)
  13. ^ Archives of American Art: Sibyl and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy papers, 1918–1971. , last accessed on May 9, 2019
  14. ↑ a b Pioneering Woman of American Architecture: Sibyl Moholy-Nagy (English), last accessed on May 9, 2019
  15. ^ Reyner Banham: Sibyl Moholy-Nagy. In: Architectural Review 150, No. 893, 1971, p. 64.
  16. ↑ a b The Harvard Crimson: Heynen Revives the Voice of '60s Critic , article by Alexander B. Fabry from February 22, 2008 (English), last accessed on May 8, 2019
  17. ↑ John Simon Guggenheim, Fellows of 1967 ( Memento from August 19, 2012 in the Internet Archive )
  18. ↑ New York Times : Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, Architectural Critic, Is Dead , article January 9, 1971, accessed July 19, 2019
personal data
SURNAME Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Pietzsch, Dorothea Maria Pauline Alice Sibylle (birth name); Peach, Sibyl
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German-American dramaturge, actress, architecture and art historian and university professor
DATE OF BIRTH October 29, 1903
PLACE OF BIRTH Loschwitz , German Empire
DATE OF DEATH January 8, 1971
Place of death New York , USA