The Private Adolf Loos. Claire Beck Loos
photographer. This fact is known through letters from Claire and her mother Olga Beck, which have been preserved since the war years by Claire’s surviving family. That photographer was making images in the style of the Bewegung, an art movement that had influenced Loos, and to which Claire had most likely been exposed during a time of artistic experimentation in Paris. After Loos died, Claire continued her associations with his friend Max Thun-Hohenstein, a movement researcher attached to the Bewegung; a surviving photograph of her sister Eva suggests Claire had also been interested in photographing modern dancers. By working for this unnamed photographer, we know that Claire was experimenting with a Leica camera. She did this among other odd jobs she could find, including being a baker’s assistant.
Outside of what has been preserved by her surviving family and by Loos collectors, little of Claire’s photographic record is known to remain. Her letters suggest she actively pursued her vocation until she was caught up in Nazi deportations and the Holocaust. She writes that the landlord of one of her apartments in Prague allowed her to set up a darkroom, a generous act, as she would have been very limited in her abilities to go out in public by curfews and the imposition of wearing the Jewish Star of David, much less having means to purchase necessary supplies. Claire’s last photographs from this period, and indeed any other photos she may have been taken of Loos and his circle, are lost, as much of the contents of her safety deposit box at the Escompte- und Creditbank in Prague that she opened in 1939 was looted as Jewish property after the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia.
One can only wonder what Claire kept of letters or mementos, and equally importantly, what her artistic output was or could have been had she lived beyond the war. Her memories and photographs that have survived her, meanwhile, continue to tell the story of Adolf Loos, her primary known subject outside of her family. For years, her anecdotes about Loos could be found peppering others’ texts but without attribution, and her photographs were used sometimes without credit. This began to change when Burkhardt Rukschcio met Claire’s brother Max Beck in England and included information about her in his authoritative monograph with Roland Schachel Adolf Loos: Leben und Werk (Vienna: Residenz Verlag, 1982) and again when editor and filmmaker Adolf Opel republished Adolf Loos Privat in German in 1985 with informative supplemental materials, including photographs and testimony from Max Beck given informally at a conference on Loos at the Warburg Institute.
Translations of Adolf Loos Privat have now appeared in English (2011), Czech (2013), and Italian (2014) and a work of historical fiction closely based on Claire’s life, Le Scarpe di Klara [Klara’s Shoes] by Wolftraude di Concini appeared in Italian in 2018 (Publistampa Edizioni). In 2012–2013, Claire’s photographs were included alongside her much more famous contemporaries like Trude Fleischmann and Madame d’Ora in an exhibition at the Jewish Museum entitled Vienna’s Shooting Girls: Jewish Women Photographers in Vienna, curated by Iris Meder. And starting in 2017, the West Bohemian Writers’ Association has presented exhibitions and literary symposia about Claire Beck Loos and her book at several locales in Pilsen. The exhibition has also traveled to Brno, Brussels, and Riga, with Liberec and other cities still planned. Since 2012, the organizer, David Růžička, has given public presentations, readings, and written several articles about Claire which have appeared in magazines with circulations of up to 100,000 in the Czech Republic, turning her into a minor local celebrity and inspiring artwork, radio readings, television features, and further research into her life.
In these ways, Claire Beck Loos’ observations of her husband have now — approaching one hundred years later — returned the gaze fittingly back toward her.
* Date of death unknown. Given is the departure date of Claire’s four-day transport, number P-785, from Theresienstadt (Terezín) to the Nazi extermination camp in Riga, Latvia (Gottwaldt, Alfred and Diana Schulle. Die “Judendeportationen” aus dem Deutschen Reich 1941–1945 [Wiesbaden: Marix Verlag, 2005] 132).
INTRODUCTION TO THE PRIVATE ADOLF LOOS
Adolf Loos Privat was first published in 1936, three years after Loos died. Since its publication, this short biography has been hailed as a small jewel of literature composed of snapshot-like vignettes, a portrait of a man and mentor as seen by his young wife and caretaker, interpreter, secretary, and often proxy.
Loos had suffered long-standing health complications, which rendered him ultimately mute and deaf. During Loos’ particularly serious bout of illness in 1931, Claire recorded his wishes for tombstone. A year after his death, he was conferred a “grave of honor” when his body was moved to the Zentralfriedhof in Vienna to rest amongst the city’s finest writers, composers, and cultural icons; but it was not until 1956, however, that the grey granite block he had specified would be installed. Claire seems to have imagined this short book to become a memorial in its own right, especially as the architectural monument he had desired did not seem to be forthcoming.
Correspondence from the 1930s between Claire and the Loos expert and collector Dr. Ludwig Münz document the lengths to which the Beck family went in order to raise funds for Loos’ self-specified grave marker (cf. letter between Münz and Max Beck, page 218). When funds from initial book sales were not enough, Claire also solicited Loos’ friends and admirers for the remaining balance, calling on those like Loos’ former student Kurt Unger (as Claire once wrote, “Loos’ warrior”), who had provided for Loos financially toward the end of his life, and possibly notable figures like Czechoslovakia’s national poet, Josef Svatopluk Machar, as well as the country’s first president, Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk (cf. letter between Claire and Machar, page 219). How successful she was in this endeavor is still unclear.
At Loos’ gravesite on August 25, 1933 — where Claire’s passport details suggest that she was in attendance — Karl Kraus, Loos’ friend and comrade-in-arms as a cultural reformer, addressed his departed friend in his eulogy:
You were forever committed to the future. […] Your genius, through the removal of ornate obstacles to beauty, emancipated life from bondage to the commonplace, and diverted it from the circuitous. […] You have garnered — as does every person who leaves a legacy to future generations — considerable ingratitude from those living all too much in the present: a resistance which stems from the nebulous perception that a larger-than-life figure has emerged — one who will outlive them — a disruptor of disorder.
As with so many of Loos’ friends, Kraus held deep admiration for the man, which continues to translate through generations.
Through Claire it is possible to hear the words of this Loos, a more intimate account than the one recorded by experts and historians. To this point, Adolf Opel writes in Adolf Loos — Der Mensch [Adolf Loos — The Man],
[Claire’s] portrait of Loos is completely uncritical, and she omits almost entirely any exact dates and facts regarding Adolf Loos’ work. Still, her book exudes an air of authenticity, no doubt due to the fact that such a short period of time had passed between the recounted events and her recording of them. By the end of 1935, Claire Loos had already published short excerpts from her book in [two Viennese newspapers,] the Neue Freie Presse and Wiener Tag. Adolf Loos Privat appeared following them in early 1936, published by Johannes-Presse in Vienna — a publisher affiliated with the Neue Galerie of Otto Nirenstein (Kallir), [who was] a Schiele collector.
During Claire and Loos’ time together she heard his affection, his scorn, his aphorisms and stories, and transcribed his dictations, which bordered on histrionics when he was ill. With his manner of speaking quite clearly ingrained, Claire leaves the reader with a sense of living with the man, and makes it possible to hear some semblance of the way Loos talked — to friends, clients, wives, students, craftsmen, artists, and society.
But one can also read in Claire Beck Loos’ work a mirroring of the last collection of Loos’ writings, Trotzdem, published in 1931; her similar spare style is what so vividly reenacts his personality, creating a bricolage of images, narrative, and dialogue. While her memory of him is flattering