Book Description

One of the most creative artists of our century, Frederick Kiesler worked from the 1920s onwards as an architect, stage designer and environmental artist. His best-known works are still the Endless House project, the design of Peggy Guggenheim's Art of this Century Gallery in New York and the "Shrine of the Book," a sanctuary for the Dead Sea Scrolls in Jerusalem. Kiesler was also a prolific writer on design, architecture and creativity. His ideas of a total theater, of endless architecture and of sculpture inspired by organic forms have been a rich source of inspiration for subsequent generations of artists. Even 30 years after his death, his original, shrewd thinking lends his texts freshness, reflecting the temperament of a man who worked intensely and persistently on the project of a modern art that would not exhaust itself in rationalism and functualism. Although, during his lifetime, he was only well known among artists and architects, Kiesler can be numbered together with Duchamp among the most important innovators of art after 1900. His work is currently undergoing a critical resistance by architects and art historians, who will welcome this volume of writings. The selection combines writings from every branch of art and number of journal entries, as well as other unpublished texts and poems from his estate.