Word: kiesler
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Frederick John Kiesler has one of the smallest frames and biggest brains in contemporary art. A gentle, Vienna-born egotist, he lives in strict simplicity in Manhattan's Greenwich Village, and at 58 still steadfastly refuses to limit his ideas to the salable, the practical or even the altogether sensible. His colleagues have been both damning and deifying his theories for years. Because he keeps well ahead of his time, Kiesler has little substance to show for his notions and few laymen ever have heard...
Colors for Hours. Back in the 1920s Kiesler* pioneered both "floating" building (cantilevered out from masts, like suspension bridges) and "spiral" architecture (abolishing the division between floors) which Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright later developed. In the 1930s he deeply influenced today's theater design by blueprinting expandable stages and semicircular projection screens. In the 1940s he painted ideally simple theater sets for No Exit and The Magic Flute, began experimenting with abstract sculpture constructed "to relax inside." More recently he completed a project for a "continuous house" (egg-shaped), featuring a prismatic mechanism which would flood...
...Kiesler's "galaxies" are not startlingly beautiful, but they are more original than any art novelty of the past decade-including Picasso's ceramics, Giacometti's stick-sculptures, Matisse's chapel at Vence, Jackson Pollock's dribble-pictures and Juan O'Gorman's outdoor mosaics at the University of Mexico. Instead of painting single pictures, Kiesler has painted fragments of pictures, often irregularly shaped, designed to be hung in clusters according to definite geometrical schemes...
...panel flat on the floor (like a low table) a horse is seen from above, on the wall parts of the same horse are seen from the side, and on the ceiling it is seen from beneath. The whole says nothing new, or even particularly convincing, about horses. But Kiesler, a cool optimist, says he chose his subject because it seems to dramatize space, as does an overturned table...
...value of Kiesler's galaxies is that they demonstrate a new dimension for pictures. Hitherto paintings generally have required the looker to project himself into their midst by an effort of the imagination: it was necessary to imagine the flat surface of the picture as a sort of window, looking onto an actual scene. Kiesler's galaxies can surround the viewer, as a room does: they place him within the work...