23rd from Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 2. 2011
The name of Albrecht Graf Goertz might include for the design of the prestigious BMW 507 The Museum of Arts and Crafts in Hamburg is the New York industrial designer, now a first exhibition.
By Ursula Seibold-Bultmann
The Sunday breakfast in the sixties, when on the table nor the Rowenta Toaster shone silvery broke, always armed to the color scale on the knob. Stage 1 was marked with bright yellow, level 5, with dark brown. It is in these colors spat the device toasted bread slices and from: light yellow with a touch (on which the female part of the family placed great value) or a bit more towards black (father's preference). The spirit of the economic miracle embodied the utensil discreetly send it with such self-evident that no one came to the table the question of its designers even remotely in mind.
Had they looked more closely, it might have been seen in this creative discretion an essential relationship of the toaster with Mother Starmix Food Processor and its new Fissler pots or edged Saba transistor radio of the beach chair neighbors: the represented but all of these objects, the formal ideal of their designer Albrecht Graf Goertz (1914 - 2006), according to the draft to be good, was if you could omit from the final product any more. As a person, however, was the gifted self-marketer stresses on mundane, and when he was in Europe, he drove a pea-green Porsche-designed hand-unique. was
to his job in 1936 from Germany emigrated to the United States son of a Jewish mother in early days as a car washer and a worker in an aircraft engine factory came with a little luck. Due to a chance encounter, he was briefly hired by Raymond Loewy, the then Pope of American styles and designs. Before Goertz was made independently in 1953, he worked temporarily for the industrial designer Norman Bel Geddes and Carl Otto, whose book "Horizons" in 1932 made of aerodynamic shapes derived Streamlining popular.
As designers, almost entirely self-taught and always working alone, sold Goertz his American-style commercial idea of design in New York after successful post-war Germany. There, the demand for durable goods was so great that style issues for consumers were still minor point really. Moreover, this was still the little American-style, since 1907 the Werkbund promoted ideal of design quality as a morally sound size. From 1962, Goertz acquired then - his own words, the first Western designers - including assignments in Japan, where he worked for two companies, Nissan and Fuji.
The Hamburg Museum of Arts and Crafts, the part of his estate has dedicated, which in the industry, "the 007 design" said Earl is now a first small retrospective of fifty exhibits. The showpiece - a creamy white BMW 507 (1954/55) - glistens in the entrance hall of the house. At the end of the exhibition he responds Goertz's last work: a sometimes dull, sometimes brilliantly painted black Steinway grand piano. Sketches, some models, a film and explanatory texts illustrate the working process of the designer, but focus on finished products of the Agfa camera over the Mont Blanc fountain pen up to the Puma Tennis Dress for Martina Navratilova. Unfortunately, the rather elusive made no show classification of Goertz's work makes in the evolution of design since 1945, in the economic history or what would be the case that crosses the borders between continents and cultures especially rewarding in the global history of taste.
to 27 March. instead is a catalog of the exhibition Albrecht Graf Goertz 'illustrated English-language autobiography, "You've got to be lucky" (self-published, nd, 104 p., € 35, -) on.
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