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  • Das Neue Sehen: Carola Giedion-Welcker und die Sprache der Moderne
  • Katharina Hagena (bio)
Das Neue Sehen: Carola Giedion-Welcker und die Sprache der Moderne, by Iris Bruderer-Oswald. Berne: Benteli Verlag, 2007. 462 pp. $51.53.

What bliss for a biographer—Joyceans especially will be able to empathize—to decide to write about a person’s life and then have the children of that person offer for examination boxes of letters and documents that have never been read, let alone published before. What a feast! This, or something like it, must have happened to Iris Bruderer-Oswald. Her book on the renowned art critic—and friend of Joyce’s—Carola Giedion-Welcker, published in 2007, was fed by many rich sources, and it grew strong: four hundred pages of text and sixty more including footnotes, a bibliography, and an appendix.

Bruderer-Oswald’s biography deals with Giedion-Welcker’s life as well as her work. In fact, both are inseparably intertwined, as Giedion-Welcker seemed wont to befriend the artists she admired and about whom she wrote. She was interested in their works as well as their lives and curious about what and in what way they thought. She drew her inspiration not only from their works but also from the conversations she had with them. If necessary, she supported and helped them.

The German-born Giedion-Welcker and her Swiss husband, the famous architect Siegfried Giedion, were a very hospitable couple who led something like a twentieth-century salon. All the avant-garde artists of modern Europe seem to have gathered in their Swiss house in the Doldertal in Zurich, especially during the Third Reich, when many of them were shunned or even persecuted by the Nazis. Gidieon-Welcker knew them all: Constantin Brancusi, Alberto Giacometti, Jean Arp, Guillaume Apollinaire, James Joyce, Alfred Jarry, Paul Eluard, Paul Klee, Max Ernst, Kurt Schwitters, Walter Gropius.

Bruderer-Oswald tackles every book and every essay Gidieon-Welcker ever wrote; she illustrates Giedion-Welcker’s theses, theories, and thoughts by discussing letters written to or by this dedicated art critic. In her letters, Giedion-Welcker expresses her passion for art and her enthusiasm for new ways of seeing, writing, sculpturing, painting, and constructing. Her language is vivid and strong. She loves little details; for example, we learn that on one of her visits to Brancusi’s house, the sculptor cooked her a dish “with white, soft cheese” (204). She mixes expressions from her hometown Cologne with Swiss German constructions—and she generously ignores German rules of punctuation—which, of course, immediately reminds us of Ulysses and thus brings us to her very special relationship with Joyce, his family, and his writings.

We hear about their first encounter in 1928, when Sylvia Beach [End Page 394] introduced them and Joyce asked the art historian to come for tea to his house in Rue Grenelle. I cannot help feeling a little distressed about this first encounter: Joyce exercising Irish charm and courtesy on a complete stranger, and she taking it in a very Germanic way, losing no time on rituals of politeness, and visiting him promptly that very afternoon. But they did become very close friends, so all must have gone well, and I should rid myself of my bourgeois qualms.

There are a number of well-known and also some unknown anecdotes about Joyce in Zurich and in Paris included in the book. For example, after a merry evening in the “Seerose,” Joyce laid himself flat on his back on top of Giedion-Welcker’s car and was driven home while watching the stars.

This biography includes a lengthy chapter on Giedion-Welcker’s relationship with Joyce and his work. It is remarkable how soon she realized that Ulysses was a monumental piece of art and how certain she was about this. She was a pioneer in what by now has become an industry. As an art historian, Giedion-Welcker recognized at once Joyce’s new way of seeing and creating reality and wrote about it, too. In an article for the Neue Schweizer Rundschau, she sees Ulysses as part of the avant-garde: time, space, simultaneity, dynamics—all the key...

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