Mona Kuhn’s love affair with Rudolph Schindler’s modernist LA home

When German photographer Mona Kuhn visited the 1922 house designed by the Austrian architect Rudolph Schindler, she was captivated less by its repute as a premier example of modernism in Los Angeles than a sense of what it must have been like to live there. She imagined Schindler, who had come to the city to work with Frank Lloyd Wright, enjoying the promise of the post-war era. His house was built on a dirt track called Kings Road, which is also the title of Steidl’s book on Kuhn’s project. It embodies his 'space architecture', rooms that he designed to be open to the warm climate with outdoor dining, warm wood finishes and intentionally human, even cosy, proportions.

In photographing the ochre concrete walls or tantalising views of the gardens, she conjured the figure of Schindler’s former lover, a woman whose existence she discovered in his terse letter ending their love affair and citing his marriage to Pauline. 'It is a mistake to place one’s whole world unto one point or person – the world is endlessly big – and life rich without bottom – you will find your treasures – without me,' he printed in tidy pencil on ivory paper.

Kuhn is best known for her large-scale suggestive or ethereal photographs of nudes, especially women. She chose a radically different method in these pictures of the nameless lover, making prints in a solarised technique popular with early Surrealist artists like Man Ray. She wanted to remain true to the aesthetic realm of early modernism to underscore her fiction.

The exhibition ‘The Schindler House: A Love Affair’ features Kuhn’s silver prints of a slender beauty, nude or in a chemise, installed in a darkened room in Galerie XII in Santa Monica, which is owned by Valerie-Anne Giscard d’Estaing. Colour prints with details of the house interiors add to a sense of voyeuristic intimacy.

The photographs have been exhibited in other institutions and galleries but this presentation is based on Schindler's own architectural concepts of space. Projections of the architect’s letters and blue prints illuminate walls of the gallery with a sound installation composed by Boris Salchow. Kuhn hopes viewers will feel immersed in the experience of another time and the lure of an impossible love. 'I wanted for them to find each other again, many years later, in yet another form of art. It was the impossibility of their moment in time that gave me an impulse forward,' she wrote.

This fiction allows us to think about the renowned architect as a person with desires and foibles apart from the man who had a profound effect on the evolution of architecture. Kuhn did her research at the archive at UC Santa Barbara. The Austrian MAK Center for Art and Architecture owns and operates the house.

There are many stories of early years at the house, when Schindler and fellow Austrian architect Richard Neutra lived in separate but connected wings of the house with their respective wives. Stories of romantic intrigue are part of that lore but Kuhn was attracted more by the unknown saga that she has portrayed. 'I was interested in the quiet and fragile moments of loneliness: immigration, relation to family back in Austria, professional under-appreciation, all sorts of personal artistic emotions that usually live beneath the surface,' she explained.

The book Mona Kuhn: Kings Road is published by Steidl, also available from amazon.com

The 'Schindler House, a Love Affair' exhibition is at Galerie XII Los Angeles until 12 October 2024, galeriexii.com