SCHOFFER, NICOLAS

born Sept. 6, 1912, Kalocsa, Austria-Hungary [now in Hungary] Hungarian-born French artist best known for his sculptures employing mechanical movement, light, and sound. Schffer studied painting at the School of Fine Arts in Budapest from 1932 to 1935 and then at the cole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. He became a French citizen in 1948. Between 1941 and 1951 he held a variety of jobs, including those of foundry worker and hotel porter. Schffer's early metal sculptures, from the mid-1940s, reflect the hard-edged, self-consciously modern influences of Constructivism and Neoplasticism. The later kinetic works, which are variously concerned with the viewer's experience of space, light, and time, Schffer christened spatiodynamic, luminodynamic, and chronodynamic. These works characteristically employ rotation devices, sound machines, and screens onto which continually changing patterns of colour and shadow are projected, as, for example, in the spatiodynamic tower at Lige (1961). His work has frequently been used in conjunction with experimental theatre (e.g., Night of Poetry, 195657).