Art: Something New

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 of him.

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 the interior with different colors for each hour of the day. His latest brainchildren, which went on exhibition at Manhattan’s Sidney Janis gallery last week, he calls “galaxies.”

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.

Through his efforts, he announces confidently in the exhibition catalogue, “the traditional division of the plastic arts into painting, sculpture and architecture is transmuted and overcome, and their fluid unification is now contained within rather than combined from without.”

Horses Everywhere. Some of his galaxies have as few as three fragments. The most ambitious, however, has seven. In a 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.

The 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 of art.

Almost inevitably, Kiesler’s idea will be taken up by other artists and carried to greater heights of execution. He has planted the seed for a new kind of art, and inevitably opened for himself a whole new era of damnation and deification.

* A distant relative of Vienna-born Hedy Kiesler, who became Hedy Lamarr.