The Private Adolf Loos. Claire Beck Loos
was called by his admirers and friends in his lifetime and postmortem. When the Neue Freie Presse published excerpts on the second anniversary of Loos’ death, the newspaper praised Adolf Loos Privat as “valuable” and “a document humain,” and a positive review was published by composer Ernst Krenek.
Readers of this book today will need to keep in mind that Claire’s retrospective memoir captures not only the personal and social transformative power of Loos’ work, but also figures the contradictions of the man as a sign of the times. On July 4, 1929, Loos wrote to Claire that he liked the Jews “better than people from Vienna,” barely a compliment. Separately, with some irony, he called himself an “anti-Semite” and made no secret of having had several Jewish wives. A short chapter reveals Claire’s emphasis on such statements and lays bare Loos’ internal logic, which was convoluted and perhaps reactionary, but which at the same time places him within larger trends toward anti-Semitism in public discourse that was already apparent in the 1930s.
Claire shows these insidious effects in certain discomfiting instances by flipping between the first and third person, as if she is both inhabiting the frame, but at the same time watching herself like a character in it. This dissociative process may reflect her outsider status, a feeling of abjectness both privately as a woman and in the larger social narrative as a Jew (though she had been baptised when she was a child, presumably to remove stigma). Yet a love story it is, and no matter how abject she feels, she portrays herself always redeemed in the eyes of her husband, Adolf Loos.
While Claire and Loos’ marriage lasted only a few years, she lived nearly her whole life under the unifying coherence of his architecture. As Opel describes more fully in Adolf Loos — Der Mensch, informed by interviews with Claire’s brother Max Beck,
An association between Claire’s [parents], Otto [and Olga Feigl] Beck — who had made [their] fortune in the iron [wire] and commercial hops industries — and Adolf Loos began prior to World War I. In 1907, Otto Beck had commissioned Loos to furnish his apartment in Pilsen. In 1928, Loos relocated the apartment to a different site in Pilsen to which the Beck family had moved. It was during this period that the almost 60-year-old Loos decided to marry the 24-year-old Claire Beck. She, a professional photographer, had already developed — along with her artistic vocation — a Bohemian penchant for independence, a lifestyle she chose in defiance of her family and eschewing the brewery city of Pilsen. She departed for Paris, where she hoped to join its Bohemian culture. It was there that she also became reacquainted with Adolf Loos, who had taken up residence in Paris in the late 1920s, and who was struggling to procure commissions. Claire’s parents were against a marriage of the two for several reasons, not the least of which was the age difference of 34 years. Moreover, there had been a colossal scandal involving Loos in 1928 — a case involving moral impropriety, which was mercilessly exploited by the tabloids. Allegations made against him by three minor girls led to a trial and sentencing with probation.
The “scandal” related here has been discussed in other publications, including Christopher Long’s dramatic and well researched account, Adolf Loos on Trial (Kant, 2017), which shows how the proceedings became in some ways a referendum on the avant-garde and its perceived immorality. Claire has little to say about this episode, but she does comment, with some sarcasm, on Loos’ humane response to prostitutes: that he and his close friend, Oskar Kokoschka would try to “save” them (author’s emphasis); that Loos would invite them to his house for lunch or parties along with anyone: carpenters, clients, the demimonde, students, etc.; and that Loos was, if anything, an idealist and great social equalizer.
Claire didn’t have an easy marriage to Loos, though by all accounts, including her own, she knew what she was getting into. They married on July 18, 1929. As Opel tells it,
Before the year was out, Loos became extremely ill and had to be transported to the Cottage Sanatorium in serious condition. In the following two years — and thus for the entire duration of this short marriage — Adolf Loos repeatedly required treatment at health resorts and sanatoriums. Aside from the two focal points of Pilsen and Prague, where he completed his last projects, one finds traces of Adolf Loos during these years in Karlsbad and Baden near Vienna. The Loos [couple] also returned frequently to Vienna, where the pair stayed in hotels and boardinghouses as Loos had become too frail to climb the stairs to his sixth-story apartment. In addition, he had been forced to sublet his apartment on several occasions in order to keep up with pressing debts.
In 1931, between March and July, Loos and Claire traveled through Germany, Switzerland, and Italy on their way to the Riviera, before heading back to Paris. They stopped on their way through, or stayed at, Nürnberg, Frankfurt, Mannheim, Heidelberg, Darmstadt, Stuttgart, Zürich, Milan, Nice, Cap d’Antibes, Juan les Pins, Cannes, and on their way to Paris, went through the mountains between the Riviera and Lyon. They arrived in Paris at the Café du Dôme, which had been known since the turn of the century as a gathering place for intellectuals and artists.
It was a fantastic voyage, but it was doomed. Loos and Claire separated in Paris, in 1931. A brief missive Loos wrote to his student Kurt Unger on October 29, 1931, contains rumors of Claire being romantically involved with others, one named simply as “Bauer.” By January 1932 Claire had requested formal divorce papers through a client of Loos in Vienna, the lawyer Dr. Gustav Scheu. After this, Claire may have attended another art school; but she never remarried, and she kept “Loos” as her last name.
As for the fates of the Beck family, Claire’s father Otto Beck died in 1934 and was buried in Pilsen. Claire and her mother, Olga, remained in Czechoslovakia through the Nazi invasion and had every intention to emigrate to join their surviving family in England or New York. However, in the end they could not obtain visas — neither to Cuba nor Ecuador, the two last hopes they had before they were called up for deportation on Nazi-requisitioned trains to “the East.” In one of her last letters, she writes about trying to send her books out of Europe to her brother-in-law in New York — could those have been versions of the book you hold in your hand?
Through her photography and her book, and because of Loos, something of Claire survives. The traces of her work that we can see suggest there was more, that she accomplished more, but in the brevity of her life and manner of her death, this remains only supposition about an unrealized potential.
What we do know is that Adolf Loos Privat distinguishes itself through its literary experimentation and use of language. Akin to a work of modern architecture, it uses an efficient, precise, and spare vocabulary, with little ornamentation. Unlike traditional German, often an unwieldy, clause-bloated language, Claire writes in short sentences and chooses words that are straightforward and which punctuate space with a consistent measure. It’s as if she imagines having to parse her phrases to the nearly-deaf Loos. Perhaps her first vignette is even an indication for the reader of the approach one might take with the book — that it could be read out loud — and thus Claire’s stories about Loos might be enjoyed much as his own writings were in the coffeehouses, in dialogue with other people.
Part performance, part memorial, Claire brings her own voice alive in concert and contraposto with Loos. Claire is referred to by Loos as “Klara,” “Kläre,” “Lerle,” and “Lärle;” she called him “Dolf” and “Dolfi.” Comedic timing relates Claire’s sense of humor about the ludicrous situations in which she finds herself. The madcap adventures with Loos feel tangible. And no matter its strange or unlikely context, a love story at heart still it is.
Cues from Loos’ letters fill out these impressions. Loos misses her “sweet saxophone voice” (April 8, 1929); when he proposes to her, the response is “a great poem in prose” (June 25, 1929). After he finishes a serial novel in the newspaper he imagines she could have written it (July 4, 1929). They agree to wed, and he sends her “thousands of kisses everywhere, your husband Dolf.” Further elements from Loos’ letters to Claire can be found in an appendix here. However, the content of what she expressed to him in her letters will remain for us unfortunately a mystery, as a fire destroyed many of the Loos papers.
At the end of Claire’s book we are left with the distinct impression that even after their divorce, their love continued. She has elided certain details, nevertheless, which we learn about in the journal of Loos’