Rights Information

World; L

Reviews

Claire wrote the book – first published in 1936 – to raise money for the tombstone Loos designed for himself. The book is so very alive with his presence, however, that surely it was a means to keep him close to her. […] In razor-sharp anecdotes, some a paragraph, some several pages, Claire writes in the present tense. The result is altogether Loosian: timeless, with as little ornament, but as much empathy, as any protégé could deliver. Here, theory in the flesh walks in.
–book review for the Society of Architectural Historians by Barbara Lamprecht, author of Neutra, Complete Works

Short tales of an afternoon or a conversation, make this [book] unique. […] You get a very clear sense of who Loos was as a person, or at least how Claire remembers him: an eccentric who flits between intense joy and fury, generous to a fault, unafraid to disagree intensely with a client, full of quips and contradictory ways of seeing the world. It is indeed a personal portrait, and a surprising, quite wonderful little book.

– Nicole Stock, Urbis

Claire [Beck Loos] writes about her husband’s colorful life and mercurial moods; his relationships with clients; his strange ways with money and friends and doctors; the time he bought up all the tickets to Schoenberg’s “Gurrelieder” and handed them out on a street corner. Her book reveals a sharp eye for capturing personality, story and zeitgeist.
– Stewart Oksenhorn, Arts Editor, Aspen Times

Claire Beck Loos, a gifted photographer and writer, […] reveals much about her ex-husband’s mercurial persona in a series of conversationally-toned vignettes such as “Josephine Baker Dances in Vienna,” “Shimmering Fish” and “At the Nudist Bathhouse.” Some are amusing, some poignant, some portentous of the darkness soon to envelope Europe. Though Claire Loos’s reminiscences are without rancor, she asserts that “Adolf could be a tyrant as much as a vibrant genius.” […] Claire died tragically at 38, at the Riga concentration camp; her memoir thus becomes a haunting tribute not only to Adolf’s talents, but to her own.
– Modernism Magazine

Admirably fresh, interesting and well written. […] This very relaxed way of writing about Adolf Loos and his work, and about what the history of architecture and the whole modern art of the 20th century has been, speaks at least as much, if not more than all serious and expert studies and monographs. The reader learns not only a lot about Loos’ bohemian lifestyle, relationship to money, women, or friendship with many cultural personalities of the 20s and 30s, but also about his individual vision of space and matter.
– Ondřej Bezr, iDNES.cz

Author Biography

Claire Beck Loos was a photographer and writer, born in 1904 in Pilsen, Czechoslovakia. Her immediate and extended families were Jewish industrialists and early clients of Loos. This unusual, literary biography has also become a self-portrait of a vibrant young woman who died a tragic and untimely death at Riga, a Nazi concentration camp, in 1942. The book honors her memory as well as her artistry.

Copyright Information

©2020 DoppelHouse Press