VI
The following lines by Seamus Heaney on the poet Elisabeth Bishop may stand as an apt commentary on Carola Giedion-Welcker as well: ‘Her intelligence was both strict and passionate, her whole character equally averse to self-pity and to self-aggrandisement. Anything too solemn or too obvious (especially concerning herself) discomfited her, so even praise could be risky’.
The unpathetic intuition of intuition in her work was apparent both in her speech and in her writing when, for example, she would draw a brilliant comparison between Joyce’s universal space-time spirit and the multidimensional time-space of the visual arts of the same generation as related energies. She saw Joyce’s new emanating strength of the synergy of content and emotion as a new symbolism of the word equal to the new symbolism of form in contemporary art . ‘Like Klee in his painting, Joyce humanizes the world of the factual and the creative through his language’ , she wrote in 1941, shortly after Klee?s death.

It was the same affection in her attitude as a writer as in her approach towards art as a collector. It was the same caring nature touched by a genuine imaginative spirit. A spirit, Shakespeare characterized in his Midsummer-Night’s Dream: ‘The lunatic, the lover and the poet, are of imagination all compact: and, as imagination bodies forth the forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing a local habitation and a name.’

Seen in this light CW?s writing was more than an observant writing, it gave itself entirely to what it discovered until a lucid conclusion could evolve and be given a name. Although her sense of reality was ‘more earthbound than angelic’ , Carola Giedion-Welcker stood on firm ground with an ‘airy’ mind.

Only today have I become fully aware that she was indeed over 80 years old during the time of our encounter and friendship in the 1970s. As a young man I never actually realized her true age since it did not seem to matter at all.
In retrospect examplary in a very particular way was the jour fixe CW attended every Wednesday at the cafeteria of the Kunsthaus in Zurich. Here she and her friends Marietta von Mayenburg and Lucia Moholy met every week to have coffee and a chat. Marietta a former ballerina who had danced under Diaghilev in Paris and Lucia a photographer, first wife of L?zl? Moholy Nagy, who had moved to Switzerland after her husband?s death. The meetings of these -three graces’, whose ages together added up to almost 250 years, were absolutely amazing. There was a gleefulness in this circle and once their attention lighted on a subject, it immediately grew lambent and carried them away like high-spirited teenagers. They were always in the best of moods and always joking and CW had taken great pleasure in introducing me, the youngster, to her lady?s club. I do not remember what topics we touched upon in our conversations on things past and present, but there was always a noticeable merriment in the air.

My encounter with Carola Giedion Welcker seemed the most natural and yet luckiest coincidence in my life as a young scholar and artist during the time between 1974 and 1978. It was a gift and a lasting example.
During that time CW had most generously supported and challenged my thesis on Brancusi?s photographs, which was to become the first ever documentation of this hitherto unknown and believed to be lost material.