Nicola L.: Softening Modernism at the Thomas Mann House in Los Angeles

In this video we explore the Thomas Mann House and look back at 'Nicola L.: Nous Voulons Entendre' – one of the highlights of ‘Frieze Projects: Against the Edge’, curated by Jay Ezra Nayssan for Frieze Los Angeles 2023.

Benno Herz (Program Director, Thomas Mann House) describes how the German author sought refuge in a Modernist Californian home, and his living legacy; and Jay Ezra Nayssan (Founder, Del Vaz Projects) speaks about his radical project to install works by Moroccan-born, French artist Nicola L., who spent her life softening the built environment, often challenging Modernism’s male hegemony of vision with a call to touch, hear and breathe.

Thomas Mann, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1929, arrived in Los Angeles with his family from Princeton in 1940, after spending seven years in exile. “Tip the world over on its side and everything loose will land in Los Angeles,” said Frank Lloyd Wright at the time, probably in response to the influx of European emigres in Los Angeles escaping World War II and the Holocaust. By the time the Manns arrived in Los Angeles, a number of their friends and colleagues had already settled in Los Angeles’s Westside – Theodor Adorno, Bertolt Brecht, Christopher Isherwood, and Salka Viertel in Santa Monica; Arnold Schoenberg in Brentwood; Marlene Dietrich in Westwood; Fritz Lang, Hedy Lamarr, Sergei Rachmoninoff, Igor Stravinsky, and Billy Wilder in Beverly Hills. Weimar found itself against the edge of the Pacific. 

In 1941, The Mann’s decided to make their move West permanent and commissioned architect Julius Ralph Davidson to build them a “moderately modern” house at 1550 San Remo Drive in Pacific Palisades. Much to the dismay of Davidson, the interiors were furnished to resemble the Mann’s Villa in Munich, rather than with modern furniture more fitting to the home’s exterior (Mann even managed to have his desk shipped over from Germany for his study). The house came to embody the exile — California modern on the outside, dignified German bourgeois on the inside. 

The legacy of California Modernism has often been subject to that kind of eccentric disparity. The experience of walking into a mid-century home (often designed by a world-renowned male architect) with carpet over hardwood floors or laminate over cast concrete walls is all too common. There’s no doubt that most of this is a result of downright disinterest in protecting architectural heritage in Los Angeles, and hence the small number of homes that have survived demolition since. But there’s a few examples when that isn’t the impetus behind the stark differences between exterior and interior design in California Modernist homes. Ray Eames, who lived in the shadow of her husband’s fame throughout a great deal of her career, diligently decorated their steel and glass home with layers upon layers of lush fabrics, textiles, rugs and floor pillows, innumerable objects and trinkets, and elaborate floral and food arrangements. When Pauline and Rudolph Schindler divorced but still lived in their home on Kings Road together, Pauline painted her half of the house salmon pink. As curator Mimi Zeiger once brilliantly put it, these examples of “softening” are actually manifesto — “softness as resistance.” 

Moroccan-born, French artist Nicola L. (1932-2018) spent her life softening the built environment, often challenging Modernism’s hegemony of vision with a call to touch, hear, breathe, and even become one with the spaces we enter and the rooms we live in. Her functional sculptures like the giant vinyl hand and foot sofas, lip and eye lamps, escargot tables and body-shaped bookshelves (examples of which were all on view at the Thomas Mann house) resist, or even disrupt, the notions of desensitization and sterility in minimalist art and modernist architecture. This couldn’t be clearer than with Nicola’s series of 'Penetrables', wall-sized “paintings” with body-part appendages sewn onto their surface, as well as the Fur Room or The House for Fifteen People (1969/2020), a free-standing, purple acrylic-fur room lined with fifteen Penetrables on the walls, floor, and ceiling for individuals to enter through, collectively becoming one with each other and with the structure.  

For both Nicola L. and Thomas Mann, the home was political. It was from his study that Mann would complete his novel Doctor Faustus as well as record his monthly anti-Nazi messages to the German people, broadcast by the BBC to Germany. Nicola, upon returning home to Paris in 1967, took to the streets with students and factory workers in the May 68 demonstrations, making a series of Penetrable protest banners. These banners were punctuated with entries for five to ten heads, with slogans such as 'WE WANT TO TOUCH,' 'WE WANT TO SEE,' WE WANT TO FEEL,' 'WE WANT TO LOVE', and 'WE WANT TO BE LOVED' stenciled across them. On view at the Thomas Mann House was an example of one of these banners with nine head-Penetrables and the phrase 'NOUS VOULONS ENTENDRE', or, 'WE WANT TO HEAR', this work resounds with Mann’s broadcasts, each of which began with the words “Germans, Listen!” 

In 2016, the house at 1550 San Remo Drive was put up for sale by the descendants of Chet and Jon Lappen, who purchased the home from the Manns in 1953. Though the Lappens had taken pride in owning and living in the Mann House, one of the home’s listing agents was quoted in the L.A. Times as saying “The value is in the land. The value is not really in the architecture, I would say," immediately sparking concerns over the possible demolition of the home. A few months later, the German government stepped in to save the house, with plans to create “a cultural center for debate over major trans-Atlantic issues, including migration, exile and integration”.

Today, the Thomas Mann House is one of the brightest beacons of its kind in Los Angeles, not only for creating a space that encourages trans-Atlantic debate, but also operating as a residency for artists and intellectuals from all over the world. “In a conflict-laden world which is no longer sure of its own order,” said German foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier at the time of the acquisition, “we need more than ever places in which cultural and social exchanges take place free from external pressure.” Each year, the Thomas Mann House accepts a dozen fellows, including journalists, political scientists, writers, and curators, to take up residence at the house and to develop their personal research projects around the house’s annual topic. This year’s manifesto is “The Political Mandate of the Arts,” and one could envision Nicola L.’s head and hands reaching through her Penetrables in eager anticipation. 

The Manns’ stay in Los Angeles was short-lived. With the rise of McCarthyism in the late 1940s and through the 1950s, the family's relationship with the U.S. deteriorated. Mann was called in for questioning as a suspected communist by the House Un-American Activities Committee. "As an American citizen of German birth, I finally testify that I am painfully familiar with certain political trends. Spiritual intolerance, political inquisitions, and declining legal security, and all this in the name of an alleged 'state of emergency.' ... That is how it started in Germany." What was once a refuge for the Manns had now become hostile territory, and so they fled Los Angeles for Switzerland in 1952, where Thomas passed a few years later. 

Text by Jay Ezra Nayssan for Frieze Projects: Against the Edge, for Frieze Los Angeles 2023.