Overview
Contains stage designs, architectural drawings and plans, photographs, glass slides, blueprints, clippings, scrapbooks, programs, exhibition catalogues and magazine articles documenting Kiesler's career.
Dates
- Creation: 1920-1981, undated
Creator
- Kiesler, Frederick (Person)
Language of Materials
Materials in English, German, and French.
Conditions Governing Access
This collection is open for research.
A portion of this collection is shelved offsite at the Harvard Depository. Retrieval requires advance notice. Readers should check with Houghton Public Services staff to determine what material is offsite and retrieval policies and times.
A portion of this collection may contain fragile materials that require special care in handling. Please request assistance as needed with glass negatives.
Extent
9.73 linear feet (25 boxes and 87 folders)The collection documents Frederick Kiesler’s career as an avant-garde architect, stage designer, and teacher at the Juilliard School of Music who was associated with the De Stijl art movement in Europe and the United States from the 1920s-1960s. It contains designs, blueprints, conceptual drawings, photographs, glass slides, models, and props related to Frederick Kiesler’s theatrical sets and architectural projects. It also includes correspondence and printed material such as theater programs, exhibition catalogs, magazine articles, newspaper clippings, and scrapbooks. Of particular note are the designs and model for his conceptual “Universal Theatre”, masks and props for a production of Stravinksky’s Oedipus Rex at Juilliard, and his designs for a theater for the Empire State Music Festival in 1955.
Biographical / Historical
Frederick Kiesler was born Friedrich Jacob Kiesler was born on September 22, 1890, in Chernivtsi, Ukraine (then part of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy) to Dr. Julius Kiesler and Rosa Miesler, who were Jewish. After unsuccessfully applying to the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, he studied architecture at the Imperial and Royal Technical University of Vienna for three years and left without graduating in 1913. He served in the Landstrum infantry during World War I from 1914-1917. In 1920 he married Stephanie Frischer.
He began working in set design in 1923, his first project being for the premier of Karel Čapek’s R. U. R (Rossum’s Universal Robots). He developed a reputation for creating cutting edge avant-garde designs and joined the Dutch art movement De Stijl, also known as Neoplasticism. In 1926, the Kieslers moved to New York City, and Kiesler helped to organize the International Theatre Exposition in New York. He designed the Film Guild Cinema in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of New York City in 1929.
In 1933 Kiesler began working as a Scenic Director at the Juilliard School of Music and continued to work there until he retired in 1956. He continued to design architecture, furniture, exhibitions, and theatrical sets.
Kiesler had a long-standing fascination with developing “endless” architectural designs which lacked the usual divisions between spaces and which did not conform to traditional architectural structures, and later increasingly came to include use of “biomorphic” shapes (modeled after shapes found in natural organisms). His two prominent ongoing projects in this vein, which were never ultimately constructed, were the Endless House and the Universal Theatre.
Stephanie Kiesler died on September 3, 1963. In 1964, Kiesler married Lillian Olinsey. He died on December 27, 1965, in New York City.
Sources
“Biography,” Austrian Frederick and Lillian Kiesler Private Foundation. https://www.kiesler.org/en/biography-frederick-kiesler/
Goldberg, Lily. “Frederick Kiesler: American, born Austria-Hungary. 1890-1965,” Museum of Modern Art. https://www.moma.org/artists/3091
Arrangement
Arranged into four series: I. Designs and models; II. Photographs and slides; III. Correspondence; and IV. Printed materials. Collection has been minimally processed.
Physical Location
Harvard Depository
Immediate Source of Acquisition
Gift of Lillian Kiesler, 1984 and 1994.
Processing Information
Processed by Annalisa Moretti, 2022.
This collection was processed to a basic level with minimal rehousing, organization, and preservation.
Creator
- Kiesler, Frederick (Person)
Subject
- Kiesler, Frederick (Person)
- Juilliard School (Organization)
Source
- Kiesler, Lillian (Person)
- Title
- Kiesler, Frederick, 1890-1965. Frederick Kiesler papers, circa 1920-1981 (MS Thr 729): Guide
- Status
- completed
- Author
- Houghton Library, Harvard University.
- Date
- 2022
- Description rules
- dacs
- Language of description
- eng
- EAD ID
- hou01713
Repository Details
Part of the Houghton Library Repository
Houghton Library is Harvard College's principal repository for rare books and manuscripts, archives, and more. Houghton Library's collections represent the scope of human experience from ancient Egypt to twenty-first century Cambridge. With strengths primarily in North American and European history, literature, and culture, collections range in media from printed books and handwritten manuscripts to maps, drawings and paintings, prints, posters, photographs, film and audio recordings, and digital media, as well as costumes, theater props, and a wide range of other objects. Houghton Library has historically focused on collecting the written record of European and Eurocentric North American culture, yet it holds a large and diverse number of primary sources valuable for research on the languages, culture and history of indigenous peoples of the Americas, Africa, Asia and Oceania.
Houghton Library’s Reading Room is free and open to all who wish to use the library’s collections.
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