Récit de ma vie: Berne, Uttwil, La Haye, Otterlo, Bruxelles, Paris, New York, Oberägeri, 1917-1957

Abstract

Henry van de Velde describes his journey and that of his family during forty turbulent years of European history (1917-1957), through Switzerland where he became friends with Kirchner and Romain Rolland, the Netherlands where he plans a museum for the Kröller-Müller family, and Belgium where he was called in 1926 to direct a new Institute of Decorative Arts intended to reiterate in Brussels the experience of his Weimar school, the predecessor of the Bauhaus. Despite the heated controversy by Victor Horta, his school opened in 1927 in the former abbey of La Cambre. It brings together an elite teaching body whose pedagogy, centered on workshop practice, has a lasting influence on the country's production and enjoys international recognition with the Belgian pavilions at the 1937 Paris and New York exhibitions 1939. At the same time, he built the library of the University of Ghent (1933-1940), with its "book silo", and became artistic adviser to the Belgian Railways and the Malles Ostende Douvres. He also exercised this role with the Ministry of Public Works before accepting a similar mission, in 1940, at the General Commission for the Restoration of the Country, placed under the authority of the German military administration. After the war, depressed by investigations which ended in a dismissal, he moved to Switzerland, to Oberägeri, where Alfred Roth and Max Bill watched over him. He wrote his memoirs there and received personalities such as Giedion, Neutra, Aalto or Philip Johnson, interested in this self-taught protagonist of Art Nouveau, now recognized as one of the fathers of modern architecture of the 20th century.