Mies Van Der Rohe: Critical Essays

by Franz Schulze (Editor)

Essays by Wolf Tegethoff, Richard Pommer, and Fritz Neumeyer. Interview with James Ingo Freed. The rich legacy of scholarly and critical reassessments of Mies van der Rohe continues to grow since his centenary in 1986. This book which had its origins in the historic centennial exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, presents four provocative new writings on Mies augmented by 150 illustrations from MOMA's Mies van der Rohe Archive and other sources. In his insightful introduction, Franz Schulze, author of the acclaimed Mies van der A Critical Biography, discusses the reasons why Mies's art and name evokes such a different response today and compares Mies to Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier in terms of critical fortune. Wolf Tegethoff traces the maturation of Mies's thought during the 1920s, bringing fascinating new research to his examination of this complex European period. Art historian Richard Pommer examines Mies's political ideology and those of other artists of the modern movement in the Weimar years and the first years of the Third Reich. Fritz Neumeyer addresses the issues of tradition and modernity in Mies's life's work through a detailed analysis of several of his earliest buildings. In the concluding piece, architect James Ingo Freed, who studied under Mies at the Illinois Institute of Technology and succeeded him as director of ITT, offers penetrating comments on Mies as an educator and as an architect during his American years. Franz Schulze is Hollender Professor of Art at Lake Forest College. Wolf Tegethoff is Professor at the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte in Munich. Richard Pommer is Professor of Art History at New York University's Institute of Fine Arts. Fritz Neumeyer is Professor of Architectural Theory at the Technical University, Berlin. James Ingo Freed is a partner in the architectural firm I.M. Pei & Partners. Distributed for the Museum of Modern Art.

192 pages, Hardcover

First published December 1, 1989

About the author

Franz Schulze was born in Pennsylvania and grew up in Illinois, Pekin and Chicago, as his civil engineer father moved to follow employment in the 1930s. Perhaps his interest in art and architecture was stimulated by visiting with his father the 1933-34 Century of Progress Exhibition, Chicago, which he still remembers vividly. After Lane Technical High School in his Chicago neighborhood, Schulze attended Robert M. Hutchins' University of Chicago and graduated in 1945 with a two-year wartime Ph.B. and a strong if somewhat crammed grounding in the classics. He went on to the Art Institute of Chicago's School for his B.F.A. and M.F.A. degrees, the latter the terminal degree for academics in studio art. After two years teaching at Purdue University, Schulze, according to his own account, mis-stated his age (as twenty-seven, not twenty-five) to apply for and become art professor and head of the Art Department at Lake Forest College in 1952 (to 1958), succeeding the College's first full-time art professor, Joseph P. Nash (for Nash, see the finding aid for his collection elsewhere in this series of such guides).

Schulze taught at Lake Forest full-time from 1952 through 1991, and is the Betty Jane Hollender Professor of Art, Emeritus. He was a popular teacher, garnering in 1968 the students' Great Teacher award. He organized major, museum-quality exhibitions of art on campus in the 1950s and 1960s that fostered excellent town-gown relations while building student connossieurship. He took emeritus status in 1991 to devote full-time to his work on his 1994-published biography of Philip Johnson. He continued to teach courses occasionally and now participates in some classes.

Notable among his former students are Richard D. Armstrong '71, director of New York's Guggenheim Museum; Peter Reed '77, Senior Deputy Director of Curatorial Affairs, of New York's Musuem of Modern Art; Kingston Heath '68, author and Professor of Historic Preservation at the U. of Oregon; and Stephen M. Salny '77, author of books on architect David Adler (Norton, 2001), interior designer Frances Elkins (Norton, 2005), and interior designer Michael Taylor (Norton, 2009).

Schulze is an artist, working on canvas and with charcoal, and has done many portraits, including some of significant Chicago architects, shown in Chicago in 2011. His portraits of his Lake Forest College friends and colleagues provide a valuable chronicle of the campus and town history of the past almost six decades, including College presidents. A show of his drawings took place February 18 through March 26, 2011, at the Printworks Gallery, Chicago.

The artist's work included also graphic design for College publications (Tusitala annual literary magazine), striking publicity for 1950s town-gown Fireside chats, and in the early 1960s a new seal to replace the one in use for over a century. This was the College's emblem through the decade and then again in the mid-1990s.

Schulze began writing art criticism for New York periodicals in 1958 and he has continued this work into the 2000s. He also served as art critic for the Chicago Daily News until it was absorbed into the Chicago Sun-Times in 1978, after which he wrote for that paper. He has written several books and has contributed chapters, introductions and forewords to many more. His own most notable books to date are Fantastic Images (1973), Mies van der Rohe: a Critical Biography (1985), and Philip Johnson: Life and Work (1994). He was the lead author for 30 Miles North, a History of Lake Forest College, Its Town and Its City of Chicago (2000), the institution's first separate;y-published historical volume, and lead co-editor of the well-received 5th ed. of Chicago's Famous Buildings (2003). His soon-to-be published Fall, 2012 titles are listed at the opening of this sketch.

Schulze did not have formal academic training especially in architectural history. He educated himself through his journalism and his teach