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Hans Noë—“hiding master” sculptor, architect, and Tony Smith, Barnett Newman, and Mies van der Rohe protégé—dies at 96
Hans Noë wore many hats—architect, sculptor, Fanelli Cafe proprietor. He was also a Holocaust survivor, and a protégé of Tony Smith, Barnett Newman, and Mies van der Rohe. Noë died in his sleep on May 11 at his home in Garrison, New York, at age 96.
Alva Noë, his son, confirmed his death for The New York Times.
Noë had a retrospective in 2023 at New York’s National Museum of Mathematics curated by author Lawrence Weschler, reviewed by AN. This was just one of two solo shows the indelible artist had his entire life—the first was in 2021 at the Fireplace Project in East Hampton, New York.
The deceased’s retrospectives were always by invitation of someone else, he never sought them out. That’s partially from trauma he carried with him since fleeing his childhood home in Czernowitz, a city in the Bukovinian region on the edge of the Austro-Hungarian empire in what is now southwestern Ukraine.
House 1, East Hampton, New York c.1963Noë was born in 1928. He saw the magisterial central synagogue just down the street from his Jewish family’s home get torched by the fascist Romanian army not long after. He spent his remaining teenage years hiding from the Gestapo.
This trauma followed Noë wherever he went; his family immigrated from Europe to New York City on Christmas Day, 1949. In the handful of interviews he later gave, like those with Weschler, Noë said any glimmer of the limelight made him panic. He later admitted he had PTSD.
After immigrating, Noë enrolled at Cooper Union, where he studied under Tony Smith, the subject of a new book edited by James Voorhies and Sarah Auld. There, he also met Barnett Newman, and stretched canvasses for Mark Rothko. He was in the same orbit as Jackson Pollock, Ad Reinhardt, Theodoros Stamos, and others.
Noë told Weschler in 2023: “When it came to art, Tony became my father and Barney my uncle.” Noë later enrolled at the Illinois Institute of Technologyand studied under Mies van der Rohe. At IIT, he met a ceramics student, Judy Baldwin. They got married in 1960.
House 2, East Hampton, New York c.1965House 3, East Hampton, New York c.1971Baldwin and Noë subsequently left Chicago and moved to New York. There, between 1963 and 1971, Noë designed and built 12 houses with his partner Richard Schust. Noë detested the client-facing side of practice, so he’d often build the homes himself, mostly on Long Island, with a team of friends and apprentices, and then sell them off.
“I came to realize how a successful architect has to be not one but three things: he has to be a great architect, he has to be a great self-promoter, and he has to be a great businessman. And I was only one of those three,” Noë told Weschler in conversation.
It was around this time when Noë started buying up properties in Soho, and renting them to artists. Noë bought Fanelli Cafe in the early-1970s. “When you opened the door” at Fanelli, Sasha Noë said, “the wind would come in, and it would make everyone cold. So he built a little half wall out of glass to keep people warm. But he didn’t make it look like it was built in 1847. He used his Mies van der Rohe knowledge to do it. He didn’t try to fake it.”
Fanelli Cafe became a New York City staple, and Noë and Baldwin eventually moved to Garrison, New York, where they raised their family. There, he produced geometric wooden maquettes imbued with subtle poetic meaning—all in relative isolation and without celebration.
Study by Hans NoëA model by Hans Noë on display at the National Museum of Mathematics“I used to imagine my general distaste for self-promotion and my indifference toward fame as sort of emblematic of a certain kind of moral or at any rate aesthetic superiority,” Noë said. “With high considered self-regard, I was refusing to enter into that whole delusional rat race.”
“But I’m no longer so sure,” Noë continued. “I think rather that my problem may simply have been one of fear, a prolonged PTSD, as it were, with its roots wending back to my experience of the war, when survival enforced an entire regime of perpetual hiding, since any and every calling of attention to oneself could so easily have proven fatal not only to myself but to my entire family. And maybe it’s just that I never got over that way of being in the world.”
House 3, East Hampton, New York c.1971Today, Noë’s son, Sasha, still runs Fanelli and Alva is a world-renowned philosophy professor at UC Berkeley. Judy lives in Garrison, and Noë is survived by his children and grandchildren.
#hans #noëhiding #master #sculptor #architect
Hans Noë—“hiding master” sculptor, architect, and Tony Smith, Barnett Newman, and Mies van der Rohe protégé—dies at 96
Hans Noë wore many hats—architect, sculptor, Fanelli Cafe proprietor. He was also a Holocaust survivor, and a protégé of Tony Smith, Barnett Newman, and Mies van der Rohe. Noë died in his sleep on May 11 at his home in Garrison, New York, at age 96.
Alva Noë, his son, confirmed his death for The New York Times.
Noë had a retrospective in 2023 at New York’s National Museum of Mathematics curated by author Lawrence Weschler, reviewed by AN. This was just one of two solo shows the indelible artist had his entire life—the first was in 2021 at the Fireplace Project in East Hampton, New York.
The deceased’s retrospectives were always by invitation of someone else, he never sought them out. That’s partially from trauma he carried with him since fleeing his childhood home in Czernowitz, a city in the Bukovinian region on the edge of the Austro-Hungarian empire in what is now southwestern Ukraine.
House 1, East Hampton, New York c.1963Noë was born in 1928. He saw the magisterial central synagogue just down the street from his Jewish family’s home get torched by the fascist Romanian army not long after. He spent his remaining teenage years hiding from the Gestapo.
This trauma followed Noë wherever he went; his family immigrated from Europe to New York City on Christmas Day, 1949. In the handful of interviews he later gave, like those with Weschler, Noë said any glimmer of the limelight made him panic. He later admitted he had PTSD.
After immigrating, Noë enrolled at Cooper Union, where he studied under Tony Smith, the subject of a new book edited by James Voorhies and Sarah Auld. There, he also met Barnett Newman, and stretched canvasses for Mark Rothko. He was in the same orbit as Jackson Pollock, Ad Reinhardt, Theodoros Stamos, and others.
Noë told Weschler in 2023: “When it came to art, Tony became my father and Barney my uncle.” Noë later enrolled at the Illinois Institute of Technologyand studied under Mies van der Rohe. At IIT, he met a ceramics student, Judy Baldwin. They got married in 1960.
House 2, East Hampton, New York c.1965House 3, East Hampton, New York c.1971Baldwin and Noë subsequently left Chicago and moved to New York. There, between 1963 and 1971, Noë designed and built 12 houses with his partner Richard Schust. Noë detested the client-facing side of practice, so he’d often build the homes himself, mostly on Long Island, with a team of friends and apprentices, and then sell them off.
“I came to realize how a successful architect has to be not one but three things: he has to be a great architect, he has to be a great self-promoter, and he has to be a great businessman. And I was only one of those three,” Noë told Weschler in conversation.
It was around this time when Noë started buying up properties in Soho, and renting them to artists. Noë bought Fanelli Cafe in the early-1970s. “When you opened the door” at Fanelli, Sasha Noë said, “the wind would come in, and it would make everyone cold. So he built a little half wall out of glass to keep people warm. But he didn’t make it look like it was built in 1847. He used his Mies van der Rohe knowledge to do it. He didn’t try to fake it.”
Fanelli Cafe became a New York City staple, and Noë and Baldwin eventually moved to Garrison, New York, where they raised their family. There, he produced geometric wooden maquettes imbued with subtle poetic meaning—all in relative isolation and without celebration.
Study by Hans NoëA model by Hans Noë on display at the National Museum of Mathematics“I used to imagine my general distaste for self-promotion and my indifference toward fame as sort of emblematic of a certain kind of moral or at any rate aesthetic superiority,” Noë said. “With high considered self-regard, I was refusing to enter into that whole delusional rat race.”
“But I’m no longer so sure,” Noë continued. “I think rather that my problem may simply have been one of fear, a prolonged PTSD, as it were, with its roots wending back to my experience of the war, when survival enforced an entire regime of perpetual hiding, since any and every calling of attention to oneself could so easily have proven fatal not only to myself but to my entire family. And maybe it’s just that I never got over that way of being in the world.”
House 3, East Hampton, New York c.1971Today, Noë’s son, Sasha, still runs Fanelli and Alva is a world-renowned philosophy professor at UC Berkeley. Judy lives in Garrison, and Noë is survived by his children and grandchildren.
#hans #noëhiding #master #sculptor #architect
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