Collector, historian, and scholar of Modernist art and literature, particularly of sculpture. Carola Welcker was born in Cologne in 1893 to German banker Carl Welcker (1848-1928) and his American wife, Mary Legien (1865-1919). Welcker began studying art history at the University of Munich in 1915 under Heinrich Wölfflin. While studying at Munich, she met fellow student Sigfried Giedion, a prominent architectural historian, whom she married in 1919, adopting the surname Giedion-Welcker.