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Art for Living and Living for Art
John Haberin New York City
Sonia Delaunay and Frederick Kiesler
Sonia Delaunay liked to say that she lived her art. At the very least, she dressed the part. She was not the only modernist with an urge to experiment and a grounding in design and everyday life. So, he thought, was another early modern artist devoted to experiment, Frederick Kiesler. She did, though, know how to live.
Cannot get up the energy to go to a museum? Kiesler would understand. He wanted his work to respond to body movements, posture, and sheer fatigue. He saw his architecture and design 
as creating and breaching "fields of energy exchange," even when you cannot. With his Mobile Home Library, you need not so much as reach for a book to read sitting down. The book would come to you.
Its bare white shelves at the Jewish Museum do not look all that relaxing. Museum-goers cannot enter their half closed circle, for fear of damage, even as they wheel around the room or in place. Still, Kiesler was an idealist, and he took seriously the idea of Modernism as a science—a search for truth in service to humanity. If he seems largely forgotten, that may show how much that dream has faded, but do not be too sure. As postmodern critics loved to ask, has Modernism failed? Perhaps, but this modernist outlasted many a movement.
Dressing the part
One first encounters Sonia Delaunay at Bard College Graduate Center, or at least a mannequin in her place, already dressed for art. Not in studio clothes, although the show's final floor has all the informality of an artist's studio, with an invitation to join in. Throw pillows set one at ease as the mess and dedication of an actual studio never could, each covered with the artist's rhythms and colors. And back downstairs, on film, she is at work herself, surrounded by the same patterns, in progress or on herself. More formally, in a full-length photo, a dancer wears a dress of her design as Cleopatra. Delaunay's dedication to form extended to collaboration and across the arts.
Born in 1885, she came upon her form with her husband, Robert Delaunay, and they never once departed from it ever after. You may know it from his paintings—their half circles spiraling down the canvas as if in motion. Assembled triangles or, if you like, disassembled diamonds lock the pattern in place, leaving no hint of a background color and nothing unpainted. They called it Simultané, which has entered English as Simultanism, and they felt it as not just a personal discovery, but one to be shared with humanity as the breakthrough between art and life. Colors run to pure primaries, but not to overwhelm the senses with their brightness. One remembers them equally for their richness and shallow depth.
Who made the discovery? One may as well ask who discovered abstract art. Was it them, Francis Picabia, or Hilma af Klint before them all? Maybe just say that they invented it simultaneously. In any event, Robert has gone down as the proper painter, Sonia as the one who applied his art to practical and impractical purposes, a simplification that has made her all too easy to overlook. Much the same charge long dogged Sophie Taeuber-Arp compared to her husband, Jan Arp—and Taeuber-Arp first had her collaborations, too, including puppet theater. Just two years ago, a MoMA retrospective corrected the record for her, and Bard is out to do the same for Sonia Delaunay.
Delaunay gets all four floors of an Upper West Side mansion, but it does not feel packed. It devotes the first floor to an introduction, including a huge time line, and the fourth to that studio. Besides, she thought less in terms of multiplying work than in dedication, with a single style and extended projects. One could just as well say, at the risk of cliché, that she lived for art. She worked with leading choreographers and theaters, including the Ballet Russe, and even designed playing cards. She had not sold out, but they did.
She had a revival at that, with new commissions in her seventies, as collaboration became newly respectable—even before today's care to merge art and craft. Think of Robert Rauschenberg, also in dance. Of Jewish background, she found safety from the Nazis in the south of France, although her husband died in 1940. She moved in with, sure enough, Jan and Sophie Taeuber-Arp, and commissions kept coming. They allowed her to work on a larger scale than ever before, in mosaics, tapestry, and interior design. Her furniture looks block-like and uncomfortable, but it allowed others, too, to live her art. It also helped answer a remaining charge, that she had never been ambitious enough.
She was never as edgy as Pablo Picasso at the height of Cubism, in his own close approach to abstraction, or as wildly playful as Taeuber-Arp. Cleopatra looks no more or less than expected in her pose and profile. The closest she came to the pursuit of the modern came early on, in illustrating a poem by Blaise Cendrars, on fuller display last year at the Morgan Library. It took her further, too, from Paris to the Trans-Siberian Railroad. She may have lived her art, but she was not out to transform ordinary life. She was first and foremost a woman of the theater.
Getting up the energy
At a given moment, Frederick Kiesler can seem merely quaint or way ahead of his time. Born in 1890 in the Ukraine, he seems just right for a world at war now. He headed off as fast as he could nonetheless—first to Germany, where he could see home design as both artifice and household necessity, and then to the Netherlands. He had success with stage sets, just as he later worked with performers at the Julliard. He did not join the Bauhaus, with its dream of art for the many, but he did accept an invitation from de Stijl, the movement with Piet Mondrian, before leaving for New York. He can seem the Forrest Gump of modern art, present at everyone else's creation, but he was more than a walk-on and never unwitting.
Where an artist as commercial as Andy Warhol saw his early work in fashion as a step toward something more, Kiesler anticipates today's growing interest in design as art. Nothing was above or beneath him. He undertook displays for Saks Fifth Avenue and a gallery for Peggy Guggenheim, Art of This Century in 1942. He worked with Film Guild Cinema starting in 1929. Does its name evoke both avant-garde film of the past and a revival house in the present? He taught for years at Columbia University, where he showed his students short films on everything from "radioactive rays" and "tiny water animals" seen under a microscope to "the world of paper."
He aspired, then, to art as a science, but also art of the everyday, and he could not separate the two. It led him to found the Laboratory for Design Correlation at Columbia in 1938. Mobile Home Library recalls prefabricated, affordable housing, but it incorporates mobility and vision as well. Architecture for him had to be light on its fight and had to design with light, well before lighting as art for James Turrell and Dan Flavin. Naturally his culminating projects were Vision Machines. Naturally, too, they drew on the science behind "how we see" in order to stimulate hallucinations and dreams.
That science seems all but incomprehensible today, although a typescript spells it out in brutal detail. It turns, though, on the interaction between a machine and a human subject, much like AI art now. It gives new meaning to design correlation, as correlation between the mechanical and human, and it issued in a Correalism Manifesto. Rather than a mirror or window onto nature as a passive subject, Kiesler saw his work as "activating the active object." He divided his design for Peggy Guggenheim into spaces for abstract, surrealist, daylight, and kinetic art. He thought of film itself as "photographs in motion."
Interactive art has high aspirations even now, as with Rirkrit Tiravanija and relational esthetics. Yet it is almost impossible to replicate in a museum. What a show once called "theanyspacewhatever" may be nowhere at all. The curator, Mark Wasiuta, is left with display after display of the sketchiest of plans and sketches. He gets off to a strong start with the mobile bookshelves, live and in person, and a modest screen for films. Yet the library still bars visitors as it twists ever so slowly in the wind.
Just two more rooms follow, as if to rub in Kiesler's broken dreams for contemporary living. His biomorphic Endless House never began—or at least never got past a 1958 model, seven years before his death. He called picture frames "deadening," in contrast to the active object, but they do offer something to contemplate. Most good art is very much the active object, but it can also slow time and take time to come to life. His own art is well worth rediscovering, but it may not take all that long. Better grab a book.
Sonia Delaunay ran at Bard College Graduate Center through July 7, 2024, Frederick Kiesler at the Jewish Museum through July 28.