Lucie and Paul Peter Porges: Style and Humor
Public Programs & Events
An exhibition of fashion design, cartoons, and survival during the Holocaust
On View
September 11, 2001-June 28, 2002
Lucie and Paul Peter Porges: Style and Humor will be on view at the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion Museum from September 11, 2001-June 28, 2002.
Lucie and Paul Peter Porges were both born in Sanatorium Lucina in the Favoriten district of Vienna. In 1938, these two 12-year-old Jewish children’s lives were changed forever: Lucie Eisenstab fled with her parents and sister from Vienna through Belgium and France; Paul Peter Porges was evacuated from Vienna with other children to La Guette (a children’s home established by Baron Eduard de Rothschild on the grounds of his estate at Ferrires, near Paris), and made his own way across France. On the run from perpetual persecution and the threat of deportation to the death camps, both reached safety in Switzerland, where they ultimately met at the cole des Beaux Arts in Geneva in 1945. They later settled in New York, where they married in 1951.
They embarked on extraordinary careers: Lucie as the associate fashion designer at Pauline Trigre for decades; PPP as the popular cartoonist whose work appeared regularly in The Saturday Evening Post, Mad Magazine, and The New Yorker. This exhibition presents works by both of these remarkable individuals. It also tells the story of two cosmopolitan spirits — refugees from Nazi-Europe whose journey to freedom ultimately settled them on New York’s Upper West Side. Lucie stated: “Growing up during World War II, in terrible places, ‘on the run,’ I had this deep need for ‘beauty’…which led me into a world of style and design, reaching for harmony that became part of my life….”
From the high style of fashion to the irreverent humor of cartooning, their lives and careers affirm the essence of Jewish creativity and vitality. PPP remarked: “I consider myself a graphic raconteur, a New York Upper West Side Jew, and a very lucky one at that.”
Jean Bloch Rosensaft, Exhibitions Director, noted: “Their unique accomplishments challenge us to ponder the infinite potential of the 1.5 million Jewish children of the Porges’s generation who did not survive the Holocaust.”
Location
Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion Museum
One West 4th Street (between Broadway and Mercer Street), Manhattan
Admission
Free, photo ID required.
Museum Hours
Monday-Thursday, 9 am – 5 pm; Friday, 9 am – 3 pm; Selected Sundays, 10 am – 2 pm.
For information/group tours
please call 212-824-2205. Exhibition catalog available, with illustrations.
This exhibition is organized in cooperation with the Jewish Museum Vienna and with the support of the Museum Advisory Committee, HUC-JIR/New York.