A glimpse rather than a profile.



I
Let me begin this short article with a quote from a letter, which Carola Giedion Welcker wrote to me from Zurich on the 7th of October 1975:

‘Just now I have received Les Lauriers sont coupe’ by E. Dujardin from a local antiquarian. Quelle chance. These emotional outbreaks in their expression and formlessness were only able to flourish in this era of psychology. The nearness of Freud for Schnitzler?s ‘Lieutenant Gustel’(1901) and for Dujardin?s work the libertinism in the more independent language of the music of the symbolists - le v‘rs libre - Mallarmé etc. have initiated and encouraged the process in poetry. Also the ‘automatisme’ of the surrealists did swing along at the edgeÖ
And as a present topic take Samuel Beckett’s anti-rational view of the world. A dark, contemplative clown of soul with steady ‘kicks’ against ratio - intellectuality and the external world in order to be able to brood in the microcosm of the psyche!
How much more profound is all of that than the sociological over-interpretation and new-interpretation of art.
Eh bien: finissons. Travaillez bien, cordial salutes C.W.’

This passage typically and unmistakably characterises Carola Giedion-Welcker for the élan vital, the esprit in this letter, portrays the spur of a moment. It reflects the beauty of momentary joy, an impression conveyed, and it remains written between the lines of this letter like an inner monologue and an exclamation at the same time. As an independent statement and a quick reading for the young man to whom this letter was addressed, these lines capture a mind of swift, instant reflection, sharp and passionate.

At that time I was 28 and she was 82 - and if you believe in the symmetry of numbers, it was a perfect match.

II
The kind invitation to take part in this conference on Carola Giedion Welcker instantly stimulated my recollection of a time long passed yet vividly remembered. It is the inconspicuous vividness of involuntary recollection, which claims a particular susceptibility of the senses, a recollection Samuel Beckett so precisely described and demonstrated in his essay on Marcel Proust.

It all comes to the fore. By chance I had come upon CW?s book on Constantin Brancusi where I had read the remarkable opening quote by James Joyce on Brancusi?s work when I was a student in Munich (in 1972). CW?s book had taken me by surprise and I re-discovered two great artists at the same time, the writer and the sculptor.

I still cherish the book with all its fervently underlined passages of her text, filled with exclamation marks, interrogation marks, crosses and handwritten comments. I remember her splendid introduction on the confrontation and dialogue between Auguste Rodin and the young Brancusi, culminating in the dramatically proclaimed self-confidence of the young Romanian artist declining the master’s offer of an assistantship in the elder’s studio with the words: ‘Sous les grandes arbres rien ne peut pousser’ - ‘Nothing grows under big trees’. This sentence I had immediately underlined twice.

Footnote??