A PROGRAM FOR THE NEW WHITNEY MUSEUM
OF AMERICAN ART
Elaine Lustig Cohen [Designer]
Elaine Lustig Cohen [Designer]: A PROGRAM FOR THE NEW WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART. [New York: the Whitney Museum of American Art, 1964]. Original edition. Slim quarto. Printed glossy wrappers. 12 pp. Elaborate graphic design throughout. Glossy white wrappers lightly dust spotted, but a nearly fine copy.
9.04 x 12.03 (24 x 31.5 cm) stapled booklet promoting the design and construction of the Marcel Breuer building, completed and opened in 1966. The Breuer building, located at the corner of Madison Avenue and 75th Street, served as the Whitney's third home; previously, the Museum had gradually migrated northward from its original location on West Eighth Street to West 54th Street. It was designed by Hungarian-born, Bauhaus-trained architect Marcel Breuer (1902–1981), who worked with Hamilton Smith, creating a strong modernist statement in a neighborhood of traditional limestone, brownstone, and brick row houses and postwar apartment buildings. Considered somber, heavy, and even brutal at the time of its completion in 1966 ("an inverted Babylonian ziggurat," according to one critic), Breuer's building is now recognized as daring, strong, and innovative. It has come to be regarded as one of New York City’s most notable buildings and identified with the Whitney's approach to art. The Whitney's programming at the Breuer building concluded on October 20, 2014.
Excerpted from Steven Heller’s AIGA Medalist profile: “Elaine Firstenberg (New Jersey, 1927 – 2016) and a younger sister were raised by Herman Firstenberg, a plumber, and Elizabeth Loeb Firstenberg, his bookkeeper. Her mother and father encouraged their daughter’s creativity, so Elaine was enrolled in art lessons, where she learned to draw from casts. At 15, she wandered into Peggy Guggenheim’s short-lived but influential Art of This Century gallery, where Guggenheim had exhibited a collection of Kandinskys in an installation designed by Frederick Kiesler. That chance visit ignited Elaine’s lifelong passion for modern art. Soon thereafter, Elaine enrolled in the art department of Newcomb College at Tulane University. One of her art classes was based on basic Bauhaus fundamentals. Her favorite painter at the time was the proto-pop artist Stuart Davis. In those days women were not encouraged to study art as a profession, so she took art education courses at the University of Southern California to prepare for a teaching career. She then taught in a public school during the first year she was married to Lustig.
“Elaine was 20 when she met Alvin, then 32, at the opening of a new Los Angeles art museum in 1948. They were a handsome couple. A whirlwind courtship was followed by marriage and a job as the “office slave,” she recalls. Alvin presumed she would work in his office, though he had no intention of teaching her graphic design. “Teaching me was not even an issue,” she says. “It was, after all, a different time.” He did however encourage Elaine to research materials for interior design projects. Meanwhile, she made collages for prospective children’s books and sketches of fantasy furniture.
“In the late 1940s the California economy was weak, with hardly enough industry to support local designers. So in 1950, when Josef Albers invited Alvin to establish a graphic design program at Yale, the couple immediately left for New York. Professionally things were looking up, but Lustig’s health was deteriorating and his reliance on Elaine increased. Nonetheless, when the end came about, she was unprepared for what would happen next.
“About a week after Alvin’s funeral, Philip Johnson, who had earlier commissioned Alvin to design the Seagram Building signage, called Elaine to tell her that the job was hers. He then asked her when the official alphabet would be complete. That call was like ice water thrown on her face. “When Alvin died nothing had been done on Seagram,” Elaine recalls. “Eventually my schedule of the lettering and signs were incorporated into the architectural working drawings.” In addition to signs, she designed New York Times ads for the building. Johnson recognized her remarkable efforts, which helped to forge an important bond between them. Seagram next hired her to do a catalog for the rental of spaces in the building . . . .”
Marcel Lajos Breuer – Lajkó to his friends – was born on 21 May 1902 in the provincial city of Pecs, Hungary. His early study and teaching at the Bauhaus in Weimar and Dessau in the twenties introduced the wunderkind to the older giants of the era of whom three – Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, and Walter Gropius – were to have life-long influence upon his professional life.
By the time he left Germany in 1935 to join Gropius in London, Breuer was one of the best-known designers in Europe. His reputation was based upon his invention of tubular steel furniture, one big residence, two apartment houses, some shop interiors and several competition entries.
Two years later, Gropius asked him to join Harvard’s architecture faculty and, during WWII their partnership revolutionized American house design while teaching a whole generation of soon-to-be famous architects.
On his own in New York in 1946, Breuer saw a practice that had been essentially residential finally expand into institutional buildings with the UNESCO Headquarters commission in Paris in 1952 and the first of many buildings for Saint John’s Abbey in Collegeville, MN two years later.
His New York-based firm moved through three ever-larger offices, with a branch in his beloved Paris to handle work in seven European countries; he gathered five young partners in the process.
By 1968, when he won the AIA’s Gold Medal, he could look back on such world-famous monuments as New York’s Whitney Museum (probably the best known), IBM’s La Gaude Laboratory (his personal favorite), the headquarters of the Departments of HUD and HEW in Washington DC (he finally felt American), and Flaine (an entire ski-town in the French Alps). In that same year, he won the first Jefferson Foundation Medal that cited him “among all the living architects of the world as excelling all others in the quality of his work.”
He retired in 1976 and died on the 1st of July 1981 after a long illness. [Robert F. Gatje FAIA]