"A valuable fine-grained portrait The English translation of her book is fluent and accurate, conveying well the tone of Claire Loos’ original (which, in turn, to some extent mimics Loos’ own writing style). Richly informative." Christopher Long, West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture"Claire Beck Loos, a gifted photographer and writer,  reveals much about her ex-husband’s mercurial persona in a series of conversationally-toned vignettes . Claire died tragically at 38, at the Riga concentration camp; her memoir thus becomes a haunting tribute not only to Loos's talents, but to her own.."Judy Pollan, Modernism MagazineAdolf LoosA Private Portrait is an unusual, literary biography featuring lively, often humorous, snapshots” of Viennese-Czechoslovak architect Adolf Loos. An intimate collection of vignettes reveal Loos’ personality, temperament and philosophy during the last years of his life (1929-1933) and the ways in which he helped shape Modern architecture. This translation, by Constance C. Pontasch and Nicholas Saunders, is the first English edition, the book having enjoyed several reprints in German.The author, Claire Beck Loos, was a photographer and Adolf Loos’ last wife. She was born in 1904 in Czechoslovakia; her family were Jewish industrialists and important early clients of Loos, commissioning several apartments in Pilsen and works by the architect’s friend Oskar Kokoschka. In addition to being a biography of her husband, Adolf LoosA Private Portrait also serves as a self-portrait of Claire, a vibrant young artist who died a tragic and untimely death at Riga, a Nazi concentration camp, in 1942. The book includes supplemental texts by Claire’s niece Janet Beck Wilson, biographical materials and previously unpublished artistic photographs by the author.

Adolf Loos A Private Portrait

Biographies & Memoirs

Loos, Claire Beck

Arts & Literature

DoppelHouse Press

Escape Home: Rebuilding a Life after the Anschluss tells the story of a secular Jewish family uprooted by the Nazi occupation of Austria and Czechoslovakia who flee Europe to reunite in post-war America and rebuild their lives. Based primarily on the memoir of architectural designer and Frank Lloyd Wright apprentice Charles Paterson (born Karl Schanzer), who was nine years old when the Nazi invasion reached Vienna, as well as newly uncovered documents and accounts of events found in letters between family members, the book is a riveting tale of discovery and coming to terms with a past that casts a long shadow.

Escape Home: Rebuilding a Life after the Anschluss -- A Family Memoir

Charles Paterson

Carrie Paterson

A gem of an historical source.... This unique book provides a wonderfully illustrated and nuanced account of one of America’s most significant twentieth-century designers. Alison J. Clarke, University of Applied Arts, Vienna A page turner [that] captures this leading Modernist in his own words. Bennett Johnson, Chicago Art Deco Society Magazine Frankl’s autobiography sheds even more light on the man, other key artists and designers, and most important, Austrian and American culture in the first half of the twentieth century. Wendy Kaplan, Los Angeles County Museum of Art Viennese émigré Paul T. Frankl was a pioneer of early modern design in America, known for his Skyscraper” furniture of the 1920s and later for the work he did for Hollywood celebrities such as Fred Astaire, Alfred Hitchcock, Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn. His autobiography, thought for decades to be lost, was written at the end of Frankl’s long career and is a vivid account of his early life, his rise in the profession, and his many travels in search of ideas and forms. What will now be known as Frankl’s last book is written in a captivating style befitting the personality of a gentle and cultured man who revolutionized and advocated for American modernism. This edition, hand-sewn with a printed linen cover, won a design award in Austria and is introduced and annotated by modern design scholar Christopher Long, author of Paul T. Frankl and Modern American Design (Yale 2007). The book includes a remembrance written by his daughter Paulette Frankl as well as many previously unpublished photographs and drawings.

Paul T. Frankl | Autobiography

Frankl, Paul T.

‘Verklempt’, Yiddish slang, means ‘choked with emotion.’ In his latest collection of stories, internationally best-selling author Peter Sichrovsky aggressively dismantles post-Holocaust Jewish identity. These are love stories where love is a bitter pill, a joke, a missed chance at happiness, a secret, a ghost, or a longing to be with a person one cannot even remember. Sichrovsky writes without embellishment, spare outlines of characters that feel familiar, and infuses them with dark humor and tragedy. With characteristic inquisitiveness and provocation, Sichrovsky delivers a delightful collection that entertains and inspires us to tears, laughter, revelations. Darkly humorous, absurd, sometimes tragic and erotic. Foreword by award-winning playwright Ari Roth. Stories, among others: In “Prague,” an adolescent Jewish boy struggles when his Communist parents renounce their affiliations upon Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia ― just as he is about to land a date at the local Communist club. “The Love Schnorrer” follows a hapless, depressed man leaving his wife and children to secretly emigrate with a Jewish partner, but he is deceived by this new woman, who he most thought he could trust. In “The Sirens” a young couple in Israel ― he a native Brooklynite and she an Israeli-born doctor―struggle to keep their marriage and family together under Saddam Hussein’s latest rocket attack. “Berlin,” “Holiday,” and “Pig’s Blood” have an autobiographical aspect. Interviews, interrogations, and captive audiences all reveal aspects of the author’s curious career and iconoclastic personality. In “Clearance Sale” a Jewish man married to the wrong woman for years ― she’s German, with Nazi-sympathizing parents ― consummates a brief affair with his Jewish secretary on a teddy bear, but only by passing backward through his life to a point of self-annihilation. “The Aunt” is a raunchy romp through an old people’s home, where the protagonist’s Aunt Martha is forced to share a room with an old Nazi. “Coffin Birth” finds the wealthy businessman and Holocaust survivor Herr Bernstein only able to reconcile his seventieth birthday with the conception that he will have an heir ― by any means necessary ― when he learns his daughter is a lesbian. Somewhere in every story there is a real person. These stories are based on facts. But they are not documentations. They reflect hopes, fears and indifference. Every story is true, as true as a story can be. ―Author’s Preface to the English Edition

Verklempt

Literature & Fiction

SICHROVSKY, Peter

Literary

Jazz in Nazi-era and postwar Germany, as lived by a Jewish prodigy who survived the horrors of Theresienstadt and Auschwitz. "Coco, it's not important what you play. It's important how you play it," said Louis Armstrong to jazz and swing guitarist Coco Schumann during a break between sessions. Recalling this episode Schumann reminds readers that even in the midst of real-world nightmares, music is alive and musicians experience this essential freedom and hope, which they can, in turn, give to their audiences. Throughout his remarkable life, Coco Schumann (b. 1924) would accumulate accolades, including the Order of Merit from the Federal Republic of Germany in 1989 and the prestigious Ehrenpreise Lifetime Achievement Award in 2015, and play with jazz greats Toots Thielemans, Dizzy Gillespie, Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, and others. But few knew he relied on composing music and performing for live audiences to ease the burden of his wartime memories. After forty years of silence Schumann's memoir opened a rare window into the previously unknown life of one of Germany's most renowned musicians, who was a member of the vibrant and illegal Berlin club scene, a part of the cultural revival of postwar Berlin, and a survivor of Theresienstadt (Terezin) and the horrors of Auschwitz. Shortlisted for the 2017 A.R.S.C. Awards for Excellence in Historical Research in Jazz. Includes over 50 historical documents and rare photographs.

The Ghetto Swinger: A Berlin Jazz-Legend Remembers

Schumann, Coco

Dingbat 2.0 is the first critical study of the most ubiquitous and mundane building type in Los Angeles: the dingbat apartment. Often dismissed as ugly and unremarkable, dingbat apartments have qualities that arguably make them innovative, iconoclastic, and distinctly L.A.” For more than half a century the idiosyncratic dingbat has been largely anonymous, occasionally fetishized and often misunderstood. Praised and vilified in equal measure, dingbat apartments were a critical enabler of Los Angeles’ rapid postwar urban expansion. While these apartments are known for their variety of midcentury decorated facades, less explored is the way they have contributed to a consistency of urban density achieved by few other twentieth century cities. Dingbat 2.0 integrates essays and discussions by some of today’s leading architects, urbanists and cultural critics with photographic series, typological analysis, and speculative designs from around the world to propose alternate futures for Los Angeles housing and to consider how qualities of the inarguably flawed housing type can foreground many crucial issues facing global metropolises today. Published in cooperation with The Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design. Book design: Jessica Fleischmann/still room.

Dingbat 2.0: The Iconic Los Angeles Apartment as Projection of a Metropolis

History

Americas

Liat Yossifor’s first artist monograph focuses on a series of ever-evolving grey paintings she produced from 2011-2016. Employing a time-based process to create these works, she continuously scrapes, sculpts, and re-works the paint until it hardens on the surface. Of the works here, Yossifor has said, The grey is so much more for me. The grey is the result of color being consumed, of constant editing. The grey is the result of a thousand paintings that got destroyed in the process of making a single one.” Yossifor was recently profiled by Modern Painters as an artist to watch for 2016 and this year has exhibitions in New York; Frankfurt, Germany; Guadalajara and Chicago. The book includes essays by Karen Lang, Christopher Michno, Stella Rollig and Ed Schad and was designed by award-winning Vienna-based graphic artist Peter Duniecki.

Movements: Liat Yossifor

Arts & Photography

Schad, Ed

Lang, Karen

Rollig, Stella

Michno, Christopher

History & Criticism

Subject of The New York Times documentary "The Forger," winner of a World Press Photo Award and an Emmy Award As seen on 60 Minutes with Anderson Cooper "[An] engrossing literary debut. ... Writing in Adolfo's voice gives this suspenseful narrative candor and immediacy." – Kirkus Reviews Reader's Choice Award –Elle Magazine, France Wall Street Journal's Top 10 Most Anticipated Non-Fiction: Fall Books 2016 "Every resistance movement had its forgers, but few have told their tales. Many, like Kaminsky, were very young technicians and chemists when they began their work. Sarah Kaminsky’s affectionate rendering of her father’s life, with all the intricacies of his trade, is a book not just about a remarkable craftsman, but a man who strove to save 'every life that was in danger.'” –Times Literary Supplement Best-selling author Sarah Kaminsky takes readers through her father Adolfo Kaminsky's perilous and clandestine career as a forger for the French Resistance, the FLN, and numerous other freedom movements of the twentieth century. Recruited as a young Jewish teenager for his knowledge of dyes, Kaminsky became the primary forger for the French Resistance during the Nazi occupation of Paris. Then, as a professional photographer, Kaminsky spent the next twenty-five years clandestinely producing thousands of counterfeit documents for immigrants, exiles, underground political operatives, and pacifists across the globe. Kaminsky kept his past cloaked in secrecy well into his eighties, until his daughter convinced him to share the details of the life-threatening work he did on behalf of people fighting for justice and peace throughout the world.

Adolfo Kaminsky: A Forger's Life

Kaminsky, Sarah

Individual Artists

Insightful essays and rarely-seen images tracing, from birth to maturation, several generations of Hungarian modernism, from the avant-garde to neo-avant-garde. This wide-ranging collection by Éva Forgács, a leading scholar of Modernism, corrects long-standing misconceptions about Hungarian art while examining the social milieu and work of dozens of important Hungarian artists, including László Moholy-Nagy and Lajos Kassák. This book paints a fascinating image of twentieth-century Budapest as a microcosm of the social and political turmoil raging across twentieth-century Europe.

Hungarian Art: Confrontation and Revival in the Modern Movement

Forgács, Éva

This hybrid book examines the art and politics of “The Nude” in various cultural contexts, featuring books of canonical western art pirated and either digitally- or hand-censored in Iran by anonymous government workers. Author Glenn Harcourt uses several case studies brought to the fore by American painter Pamela Joseph in her recent “Censored” series. Harcourt’s rigorous, culturally-measured and art historical approach complements Joseph’s appropriation of these censored images as feminist critique. Harcourt argues that her work serves as a window toward larger questions in art. These include an examination of the evolution of abstraction; the role of women in western society, as seen through the history of painting the body; the effects of western art on cultures outside the west (sometimes referred to in Iran as “west-toxication”); and how artists in non-western countries, specifically those in Iran living under rules of censorship that specifically prohibit representation of the body, engage with the history of western art found in the censored books. Harcourt’s discussion of Iranian contemporary artists focuses on censorship tropes in portraiture, including works by Aydin Aghdashloo, Gohar Dashti, Katayoun Karami, Daryoush Qarezad, Manijeh Sehhi, Newsha Tavakolian, and others. Issues of privacy and security prevent some Iranian artist insiders from being named, but studio images as well as recipes for removal of the censored marks along with testimony from artists who are now living outside Iran provide reference for many English-speaking readers who don’t otherwise have knowledge of the country’s strict policies. Image reproductions ranging from the pages of the censored books themselves, to Joseph’s paintings, to artwork by contemporary Iranian artists, make the book visually intriguing, timely, and visually fascinating reading.

The Artist, the Censor and the Nude: A Tale of Morality and Appropriation

Harcourt, Glenn

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