Shira Backer | PARIS LA

The public graphic design work and private painting practice of the late Elaine Lustig Cohen are on view through mid-August at the Jewish Museum as part of its Scenes from the Collection program.

This week join curators Prem Krishnamurthy, Cole Akers, and Shira Backer for a conversation about this key twentieth century designer.

ELAINE LUSTIG COHEN talk

Thursday, April 4, at 6:30 pm.

Jewish Museum

1109 Fifth Avenue (at 92nd Street), New York City.

Elaine Lustig Cohen artwork, catalogue, logo, book jacket, architecture, and graphic design, from top: Primary Structures, The Jewish Museum, 1966, exhibition catalogue; Mask, 1967, sculpture; Stop Pollution, 1957, Water Resources Council, logo; Domingo, 1975, collage; Museu de Arte Moderna, Rio de Janeiro, catalogues (2), 1957 and 1961; 375 Park Avenue (Seagram Building), 1957, building signage; Stepanova, 2009, portrait; Louis I. Kahn, 1963, Braziller press, book jacket; Prelude to 1958–1959 Season, 1958, Kootz Gallery, invitation; Max Ernst, 1965, The Jewish Museum, exhibition catalog; Baby Doll, 1957, New Directions press, book jacket; Munson Williams Proctor Institute, 1960, building signage. Images © 2019 Estate of Elaine Lustig Cohen and courtesy the estate and the Jewish Museum.

THE ARCADES: CONTEMPORARY ART AND WALTER BENJAMIN, a new exhibition at the Jewish Museum, “brings together contemporary art works inspired, consciously and unconsciously, by Walter Benjamin, one of the twentieth century’s most original and enigmatic thinkers. Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction is an undergraduate art-history staple, but true Benjaminiacs consider his massive, unfinished Arcades Project to be the writer’s magnum opus. What began as a short essay on the glass-ceilinged Paris Arcades of the mid-nineteenth century (the modern shopping mall’s ancestor) spiralled out into a warren of notes, citations, and commentaries forming a restless survey of modernity.”*

Benjamin’s Arcades Project—the notes for which he left with Georges Bataille before killing himself on the Pyrenees in 1940 after leaving Nazi-occupied France—was made up of thirty-six folders on such subjects as “Fashion,” “Mirrors,” “Panorama,” “Dream City and Dream House,” and “Flâneur,” (a term Benjamin popularized). For THE ARCADES exhibition, curator Jens Hoffman (assisted by Shira Backer) has brought together works by Walead Beshty, Andrea Bowers, Chris Burden, Walker Evans, Lee Friedlander, Andreas Gursky, Pierre Huyghe, Mike Kelley, Collier Schorr, Cindy Sherman, Taryn Simon, and James Welling.

THE ARCADES: CONTEMPORARY ART AND WALTER BENJAMIN, through August 6.

THE JEWISH MUSEUM, 1109 Fifth Avenue, at 92nd Street, New York City.

thejewishmuseum.org/exhibitions/the-arcades-contemporary-art-and-walter-benjamin

*David Wallace, “Walter Benjamin’s Unfinished Opus, Revisted Through Contemporary Art,” The New Yorker, May 9, 2017:

newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/walter-benjamins-unfinished-magnum-opus-revisited-through-contemporary-art

A view of The Arcades: Contemporary Art and Walter Benjamin, at the Jewish Museum. Artwork, all by Adam Pendleton: Black Dada Reader (wall work #1), 2016; what is…?/Chagall (study), 2017; Dada Dancers (study), 2016.

Photograph by Will Ragozzino–Social Shutterbug

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ELAINE LUSTIG COHEN

CONTEMPORARY ART AND WALTER BENJAMIN’S ARCADES