Los Angeles County Museum of Art

In 1980, Bill and I curated the Georges Vantongerloo retrospective, featuring over a hundred works, which opened at LACMA on October 8 of that year.5 From LACMA we drove to Pacific Palisades to visit Ray Eames in her studio—her husband, Charles, had died two years earlier.

Like Eames, the architect Konrad Wachsmann also taught a class in architecture at the Ulm School of Design. Wachsmann had spent the previous two decades living and working in the U.S.A., where he survived the Holocaust. His mother, sister, and nephew did not, however; they were all murdered by the Nazis. Before emigrating, Wachsmann had built a holiday cottage for Albert Einstein in the village of Caputh outside Potsdam. The Einsteins were also forced to flee in 1933 and abandoned the house, which, in a bitter twist of fate, was then impounded and put to use by the Hitler Youth.