Carola Giedion-Welcker

Carola Giedion-Welcker

Art historian and collector. Born in Cologne, she studied art history in Munich and Bonn. With her marriage to Sigfried Giedion, their house in Zurich's Doldertal became a gathering place for a range of modern painters and sculptors whose work she promoted. These included Arp, Täuber-Arp, Brancusi, Giacometti, Klee, Ernst, Kandinsky, Mondrian; the couple developed a substantial collection of art works, based largely on gifts to them. Her first book, Moderne Plastik, Elemente der Wirklichkeit, Masse und Auflockerung (1937), was a pioneering work in the study of modern sculpture.

Giedion-Welcker's enthusiastic article on Ulysses in the Neue Schweizer Rundschau (1928) led to her meeting James and Nora Joyce, via Sylvia Beach, in Paris in the spring of 1928. Her article in the same journal the following year promoted "Work in Progress" and was translated and published in the journal transition. She was instrumental in bringing JJ to Zurich for consultation with ophthalmologist Alfred Vogt in 1930, after which the Joyces visited Zurich a number of times through the decade. Her photographs of JJ at Zurich's Platzspitz remain some of the most well-known images of him. While JJ lived in Paris the two corresponded frequently, and Giedion-Welcker provided assistance and solace during the family's difficult times with Lucia Joyce's mental instability. Her friendship with the Joyces proved to be critically important during the last months of 1940, when with Paul Ruggiero, Carola Giedion-Welcker was a key figure in enabling the Joyce family to enter Switzerland during the German occupation of France.

Giedion-Welcker was one of JJ's main promoters in the years after his death, editing the collection In Memoriam James Joyce (1941), and publishing articles about JJ in German and English in the 1940s and 1950s, an introduction to the German translation of Ulysses (1956), and the final chapter of the German translation of Herbert Gorman's James Joyce (1957). She continued an active involvement as a critic of modern art, with numerous articles in prominent journals. William Brockman