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A deserted Paris house holds the mystery of a brilliant Viennese
modernist who worked alongside Le Corbusier and Adolf Loos before
vanishing. A leading painter still highly regarded in South Africa,
Jean Welz's prior architectural career has been virtually unknown
until a string of discoveries unfolded for author and filmmaker
Peter Wyeth, allowing him to narrate this amazing true tale of
genius. Trained in ultra-sophisticated, but conservative Vienna,
Welz was sent to Paris for the 1925 Art Deco exhibition by his
influential employer, renowned architect Josef Hoffmann. There he
met preeminent modern architects Le Corbusier and Adolf Loos. The
latter employed him to assist in building a house for the founder
of Dada, Tristan Tzara. They all mixed in avant-garde circles at
the Dome Cafe in Montparnasse along with Welz's classmate from
Vienna, later Chicago-based architect Gabriel Guevrekian; Welz's
future employer Raymond Fischer, whose archive was mostly destroyed
by Nazis; and photographer Andre Kertesz. Through Welz's South
African family archive, author Wyeth retrieves stories, letters,
portfolios, and photographs generations after Welz's death that
unravel his heroic designs, his stunning built critique of
Corbusier's "Five Points of Architecture," a gravestone for Marx's
daughter, and the many ways that Welz disappeared amongst his
collaborators, intentionally and not. This account of why Jean Welz
did not become a famous name in architecture takes us through his
brother's Nazi-art-dealings, illness, betrayal, emigration, and an
uncompromising artist's vision at the same time sifting through
significant, literally-concrete evidence of Welz's built projects
and visionary designs.
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