The House for Tristan Tzara by Adolf Loos

35 Pages·2013·8.73 MB·English

The House for Tristan Tzara by Adolf Loos
An attempt to reconstruct the collaboration between an artist
and an architect
Contents
List of illustrations
Introduction
I. An unconventional client and an uncompromising architect
Tzara’s exile from Moinesti to Zurich
Tzara moves to Paris
Tzara starts a new life with Greta
Loos in Vienna
Loos moves to Paris
Tzara and Loos meet
II. The Tzara House
Climbing the hill of Montmartre towards the house
A facade that speaks
The classical principles of a modern facade
A membrane between public and private realms
The rear and the private
III. The discovery of the interior
The entrance
From outside to inside
Loos's attitude towards drawing
Differences between the drawings and the building
Loos's raumplan theory
IV. The living spaces
Ascension to the living spaces
The living room and the dining room
Parallel with the Ducal Palace in Urbino
V. The research of values
Discussion on the loss of meaning
Primitivism and the regression of values
An architecture trying to satisfy our fundamental desires
Conclusion
Bibliography
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List of illustrations
1. Samuel Rosenstock with his father and grand-father, Photograph, July 1912,
private collection. Source : François Buot, Tristan Tzara (Saint-Amand-Montrond:
Grasset, 2002), p. 241.
2. Portrait of Samuel Rosenstock in Romania, Photograph, 1914, private collection.
Source: Buot, p. 242.
3. Cover of the journal Dada 3. Source: The Art Institude of Chicago, Irene E.
Hofmann, 'Documents of Dada and Surrealism: Dada and Surrealist Journals in the
Mary Reynolds Collection'.
4. Dada in Paris, Photograph, 1922. Source: Buot, p. 243.
5. Parisians Surrealists. Photograph, Anna Riwkin, Paris 1933. Source: <http://
waxinandmilkin.com/post/11591242155/kvetchlandia-parisian-surrealists-tristan>.
6. Portrait of Tristan with Greta, Date unknown (most probably taken around 1924).
Source: Buot, p. 244.
7. Portrait of Adolf Loos, Photograph W. Wels, 1912. Source: Panayotis Tournikiotis,
Adolf Loos (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1991), p. 17.
8. Front facade, Tzara House, Paris, Photograph, 1930. Source: Max Risselada,
ed., Raumplan Versus Plan Libre: Adolf Loos and Le Corbusier 1919-1930 (New
York: Rizzoli, 1988), p. 87.
9. Rear facade, Tzara House, Paris, Photograph, c. 1930. Source: Risselada, p. 87.
10: Adolf Loos, model of 'Unite d'Habitation with Graded Terraces', Vienna, 1923.
Source: Tournikiotis, p. 136.
11. Vestibule, Tzara House, Paris, Photograph, Date unknown. Source: Tournikiotis,
p. 136.
12. Drawings of the Tzara House by Adolf Loos, Pencil on transparent paper, 1st
August 1925. Source: Zednicek, p. 152.
13. Photomontage of the facade, 1930. Source: Risselada, p. 86.
14. Living Room, Tzara House, Paris, Photograph, c. 1930. Source: Risselada, p.
87.
15. Dining room, Tzara House, Paris, Photograph, c. 1930. Source: Risselada, p.
87.
16. 'Josephine Baker in Banana Skirt from the Folies Bergère production', Walery
Studio (Stanislaus Walery), Gelatine silver print, 1928, Private collection, St Louis.
Copyright Hulton archives.
17. Tzara's study, Tzara House, Paris, Photograph, c. 1930. Source: RIBApix,
<http://www.ribapix.com/>.
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Introduction
In 1925, the Viennese architect Adolf Loos had been commissioned by the
founding father of the Dada movement, Tristan Tzara, to design and build a house in
Paris for him and his wife the Surrealist painter Greta Knutson.
As I would like to show in this essay, this commission was not at all a business
as usual. Tristan Tzara and Adolf Loos worked with two diametrically opposed
philosophies and world views and as such their collaboration appears rather
impossible. Adolf Loos was not only an architect, but a radical and polemic thinker
who was known to refuse to adapt to his clients wishes, rather it was Loos himself
who demanded from them to change their attitude of living and even eating and
dressing. In 1925 Loos had just left his Austrian culture to start a new career and
life in Paris. What fascinated me in this research was to see whether Loos adapted
perhaps a bit more to the needs and wishes of Tristan Tzara, for it was in Paris and
in the fascinating cultural scene of artists, actors and intellectuals that Loos imagined
his new commissions.
On the other hand, Tristan Tzara, with the help of his Dadaist friends in Zurich, and
later in Paris, was known for mocking reason and logic in every possible way. His art
was taking the form of experimental writings and unexpected theatrical performances
with a devotion to the absurd. He worked with the idea to “agitate the audience” and
to “shake their consciousnesses”. Tzara even argued for spontaneity rather than
reflection when he said: 'Thinking is made in the mouth' 1. He presented himself as the 1. Tzara quoted in Henri Béhar and
Catherine Dufour, Dada, Circuit Total
opposite of a rationalist, and we can only imagine that with such attitude he would be
(Lausanne: L’Age d’Homme, 2005),
a difficult partner to discuss the details of a house for him and his wife. p. 28 The original text was published
in ‘Dada Manifeste sur l’Amour Failble
In this period of aftermath of the First World War, it was difficult for Adolf Loos to
et l’Amour Amer’, Sept manifestes
impose his style in Paris. The Parisian society was still trying to leave behind the difficult Dada, Paris, Jean Budry, ed. Du
Diorama, 1924, p.57.
memories of five years of atrocities and was finding refuge in excesses of all kinds.
It was the period of années folles (The Crazy Years). Loos preferred an architecture
which was gentle and refined, but as I will show later, nevertheless provocative.
The relationship between Loos and Tzara eventually gave birth to an emblematic
residence in Paris Montmartre. The Tzara House is the only built work realized by
Loos in France. It became exemplary for modern architecture and became registered
as a historic monument since 1975. Therein the following I would like to examine
the house in detail and investigate how it became the home of the Dadaist poet.
Through the spatial analysis of the house and the discussion of the ideas of these
two dissenting characters, I would like to approach a building of which exists relatively
little research and documentation. I would like to find out whether the building can
tell the story of modernity and the visions about art and architecture of these two
illustrious personalities.
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I. An unconventional client and an uncompromising architect
Tzara’s exile from Moinesti to Zurich
Tristan Tzara was born as Samuel Rosenstock in 1896 into a Jewish family in
Moinesti, Romania. At this time many Jews were not emancipated and were not
granted full citizenship. Only in the aftermath of World War 1 and the establishment of
Great Romania in 1919 and the Constitution of Romania in 1923 sanctioned that
Jews were awarded citizenship and minority rights. Up until then Jews had no citizen
rights in Romania and Tristan Tzara’s grandfather who owned a forestry development
company was never able to become landowner.2 2. See François Buot, Tristan Tzara
(Saint-Amand-Montrond: Grasset,
2002), p. 17.
Pic. 1: Samuel Rosenstock with his
father and grand-father.
Photograph: July 1912.
Private collection.
At the age of eleven, Tzara moved first to a boarding school and then to a High
School near Bucharest. In 1912 he was among a group of friends who established
the journal Symbolul which soon attracted well-known authors of the Romanian
Symbolist movement. The magazine was distributed at school and featured the first
poem of Tzara.3 3. ibid. p. 21.
In 1914 Tzara enrolled at the University of Bucharest to study mathematics and
philosophy but did not graduate. In 1915 he adopted the pseudonym of Tristan
Tzara which he would keep for the rest of his life. In Romanian, Tzara written in
Westernised spelling means “soil” or “country”.4 4. ibid. p. 22.
He soon found Bucharest suffocating and was annoyed by a life without fantasy
and a family too protective for his taste.5 In autumn 1915 Tristan decided to leave 5. ibid. p. 30.
Bucharest to follow his friend Marcel Janco to Zurich. The departure meant for him
and his family that he would never return, a very difficult moment which he would later
describe in his autobiography published into the journal Les Feuilles Libres in 1923
with the following words:
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I pass over a painful chapter of insults, of terror, of curse, of rage, of affairs, of
anger, of horror, of hate. Because at the last moment, before leaving, my father felt
the impassable barrier cutting the link of our lives, and in front of this rupture that
he knew definitive, he cried. I was dead for him.6 6. Tristan Tzara, ‘Faites vos jeux’,
Les Feuilles Libres, 1923, translation
by the author.
Pic. 2: Samuel Rosenstock in
Romania.
Photograph: 1914.
Private collection.
Zurich had become the ‘refuge of a youth that refuses the war’7. The city was in a 7. Buot, p. 34.
state of an endless party. The cafes were full of people talking about peace and
revolution and imagining how to rebuild a new world.8 8. ibid. p. 35.
In February 1916, Hugo Ball, Hans Arp, Marcel Janco and Tristan Tzara opened
the famous night club, the Cabaret Voltaire.9 Their goal was to create a meeting-place 9. ibid. p. 38.
for the artists of Zurich. They were experimenting with new forms of artistic
performances. Tristan Tzara, Marcel Janco and Richard Huelsenbeck executed their
first simultaneous poem, ‘L’Amiral Cherche une Maison a Louer’ (The admiral is
looking for a house to rent), on March 30, 1916.10 10. Annabelle Melzer, Dada and
Surrealist Performance, PAJ Books,
Annabelle Melzer in her book Dada and Surrealist Performance analysed these
Johns Hopkins Paperbacks ed
linguistic collages and wrote about them that these ‘experiments in simultaneity led (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1994), p. 35.
to multiple voices reading poems and manifestos, and the simultaneous reading of
unrelated texts (often in different languages).’11 Their performances disregarded any 11. ibid. p. 36.
logic, praised spontaneity and celebrated the absurd. They had the effect to
disconcert the audience and the evenings at the Cabaret were often culminating in a
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burst of life with the audience joining in this irrational joy. An idiosyncratic art movement
was born. It was mocking traditional art and its tendencies to yield to the will of
others.12 The Cabaret became a realm in which a new reality was montaged and 12. Buot, p. 45.
experienced with.
The word Dada was picked randomly in a dictionary in April 1916. This invention
of the term is usually attributed to Tristan Tzara. In July 1916, the Cabaret hosted the
first ‘Dada evening’. At the same time the group published the journal Dada 1. Dada
2 followed in December of the same year. We would however have to wait until 1918
to see the publication of the ‘Manifeste Dada 1918’, in Dada 3, by Tristan Tzara. We
can notice on the cover that for the first time the name of Tristan Tzara appears as
the director of the journal. Tzara became the leader of the group.
Pic. 3: Cover of the journal Dada 3.
December 1918.
But Dada was not only an art movement. It was also the action of a group of rebels
aiming for change.
In 1918, Tzara wrote in his manifesto:
Those that belong to us keep their freedom, we do not recognize any theory. We
have enough of cubist and futurist academies: laboratories of formal ideas (...)
there is large destructive, negative work to do. Sweep away, clean (….) I’m against
all systems, the most acceptable system is by principle to have none.13 13. Tristan Tzara, Sept Manifestes
Dada (Jean Budry & Company,
1920), p. 17, translation by the
The painter Hans Arp, born in 1886 and who would later become a close author.
collaborator of Tzara, wrote about his experiences of the war and how he and his
friends took the trauma of it as a new starting point for their artistic works.
Revolted by the butchery of the 1914 World War, we in Zurich devoted ourselves
to the arts. While the guns rumbled in the distance, we sang, painted, made
collages and wrote poems with all our mights. We were seeking an art based on
fundamentals, to cure the madness of the age, and a new order of things that
would restore the balance between heaven and hell.14 14. Hans Arp, On My Way, quoted in
Herbert Read, Arp (London: Thames
and Hudson, 1968), p. 30.
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Also, in his 1975 book, The Concept of the Avant-garde: Explorations in
Modernism, John Weightman pays attention to this crucial moment in the lives and
works of the circle of friends around Tzara.
The starting-point was the First World War, which came as a traumatic shock to
so many intellectuals. Since rational, civilised governments could perpetrate such
horrors, it was felt that there must be something wrong with reason.15 15. John Weightman, The Concept
of the Avant-Garde: Explorations in
Modernism (London: Alcove Press,
The aim of Dada could be understood as the rejection of systems of values where 1973), p. 137.
the reason had failed. But these young provocateurs were also just trying to feel
alive in a world which must have been very dark at the time. It was not only an art
movement but the collaborative action of a group of individuals who, in the years
after the First World War had in common a strong desire to radically change the
world. The Dada movement and later the Surrealist movement aimed to heighten
the consciousness of the observer and provoke the public with incongruous pieces
of art. The role of art was to avoid that people were lulled in the dreariness and
ignorance of accepting politics and cultural affairs. Rather art was to stimulate ideas
and liberated thinking and argumentation.
Tzara moves to Paris
In 2002, François Buot, a French historian and specialist in the surrealist period
wrote a comprehensive biography on Tristan Tzara. The biography builds on new
materials from Jacques Doucet library and the Bibliothèque de France who had
collected Tzara’s works. Other biographies by March Dachy16 or Henri Béhar17 16. Marc Dachy and Richard
Huelsenbeck, Tristan Tzara:
focused more on Tristan Tzara’s participation in the Surrealist group. But, Buot’s work
Dompteur des Acrobates: Dada
is particularly helpful as it includes more research and references to the written work Zurich (L’Échoppe, 1992).
of Tzara which has also been recently published by Christian Nicaise.18 17. Tristan Tzara and Henri Béhar,
Dada est Tatou: Tout est Dada (Paris:
Buot begins his book in 1919 when Tristan Tzara was suffering from a depression
Flammarion, 1996).
and dreamed about escaping ennui. In his aim to find like-minded comrades, he
18. Christian Nicaise, Tristan Tzara:
started mailing to intellectuals and writers in the whole Europe.19 He began a Les Livres (Instant Perpétuel, 2005).
correspondence with André Breton who was seduced by his work and quickly Breton
asked him to come to Paris. 19. Buot, p. 85, translation by the
author.
In a letter addressed to Breton, he wrote:
If we write it is only to find refuge (…) I would have become an adventurer with a
dashing figure and fine gestures if I had the physical strength and the nerves to
realize the sole achievement to not get bored.20 20. ibid. , translation by the author.
Pic. 4: Dada in Paris.
René Crevel, Tristan Tzara and
Jacques Baron.
Photograph: 1922.
7
Tristan Tzara arrived in Paris in January 1920, without any financial means. He
stayed with Germaine Everling, the partner of his friend, the painter Francis Picabia.21 21. ibid. p. 88.
Breton, Louis Aragon, Philippe Soupault and Paul Eluard welcomed his arrival as they
had admired Tzara’s work and he was immediately introduced to the most important
artistic circles of Paris.22 22. ibid.
Dada had reached Paris and together with his new accomplices, Tzara would
continue to produce even more of his bizarre performances.
Pic. 5: Parisians Surrealists.
From left to right: Tristan Tzara, Paul
Eluard, Andre Breton, Hans Arp,
Salvador Dali, Yves Tanguy, Max
Ernst, Rene Crevel, and Man Ray.
Photograph: Anna Riwkin, Paris
1933.
However by the end of 1921, in December, a rupture between Tzara and Breton
took place. Buot tells us that Tzara ‘fell back in a period of anonymity and boredom
which he was trying to escape since several months’.23 23. ibid. p. 118, translation by the
author.
Tzara starts a new life with Greta
Tzara said in 1923, ‘What I enjoy the most in life, is money and women. But I have
little money, and a lot of misfortune in love.’24 24. ibid. p. 156.
The year 1924 would see a change for him. In May, at the bottom of the hill of
Montmartre, in the bar La Cigale, on Rue de Rochechouart, Tzara had been strikingly
successful with the opening of his last theatrical play, Mouchoir de nuages
(Handkerchief of clouds).25 This is were he met the painter Greta Knutson. Greta 25. ibid. p. 172.
Knutson was introduced to him by Thora Klinkowström who together with her partner
Nils Dardel had moved into a workshop in a street at the top of the hill of Montmartre
since 1920.26 26. ibid. p. 178.
According to Thora Klinkowström, ‘between Greta and Tristan, it was love at first
sight. Before we had been able to finish a bottle of champagne from Moyses, they
were already forming a couple’.27 In July, Tzara disappeared with Greta, to the great 27. ibid. p. 181, translation by the
author.
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surprise of their friends who used to see them at all of the soirée mondaine. He wrote
to Thora to tell her that he would be back and wanted to start a new life. He asked
her to look for a building lot for him, as he wished to get married before the end of the
year and was looking for a site to build a house.28 28. ibid. p. 201.
Pic. 6: Tristan with Greta.
Photograph: unknown date. Most
probably taken around 1924.
Initially the couple decided to have a house and a flat to rent, a setting which is
called “Hôtel particulier” in France, and which could be translated to “private hostel”.
The money came from an inheritance of Greta from her grandfather who made
fortune in architecture and urbanism.29 Buot tells us that Greta’s father was a great art 29. ibid. p. 202.
enthusiast, aware of the new tendencies of the time and very influential on her.30 Both 30. ibid.
Tristan and Greta were part of the intellectual scene of Paris. Thora found the site for
the house in 1924 in Montmartre, at the bottom of the hill, Avenue Junot.31 31. ibid.
Tristan Tzara and his wife were delighted about the location and set about to find
an architect. They had heard about a Viennese architect who frequented some of the
arts parties and had become known for his polemic writings against the conservative
culture and architecture of Austria. Perhaps we could imagine their first meeting as
an introduction of the architect through a brief biographical narrative. Therefore, in the
following, I would like to trace briefly the life of Adolf Loos up until the point when he
meets Tristan Tzara.
Loos in Vienna
Adolf Loos was born in Brunn in 1870, in the Moravia region of the Austro-
Hungarian Empire, a city that today is called Brno and is the second largest city in the
Czech Republic. In 1839 the first train arrived in Brno from Vienna located 100 km to
the south. This is where Loos went for studying at the Academy of Beaux Arts in
9