Oscar Nitzchke, Avant-garde Architect Maestro of the Modernity 1900 – 1991

Oscar Nitzchke was a modernist architect, friend and associate of pre-and post-World War II era artists whose work he influenced, and whose architecture was influenced by those sculptors and painters. His 1936 drawings for his unrealized La Maison de la Publicité, projected for the Champs Elysees in 1935 are now part of MOMA’s permanent collection. Many art critics, architects, and art collectors are considering “ la Maison de la Publicité “ 1936 as precursor of the Pop Art.

In describing Nitzchke’s friend and associate’s project, Chareau’s Maison de Verre, completed in 1932, Kenneth Frampton, architectural art historian and Emeritus Professor of Architecture at Columbia University wrote that “Chareau’s Maison de Verre synthesizes the most diverse avantgardist trends of his time into the form of a new and generalizable architectural paradigm.” Then, crediting Nitzchke: “The genealogy of this work and the specific significance of its form are still, in my view, insufficiently known and understood, even today, although the image of Nitzchke’s cutaway axonometric is all too familiar to the cognoscenti of the thirties.” Kenneth Frampton, “Oscar Nitzchke and the Ecole de Paris” published in Oscar Nitzchke Architect 1985 Cooper Union catalog © Cooper Union.

His granddaughter Lea Lee, a visual artist who signed some of her photographs Eléonore Nitzschke in tribute to her grandfather’s works and life, recalls when, in 1975, she shared with her grandfather her desire to become a photographer. With a big smile, Oscar Nitzchke advised her to read Bouddhisme Zen in the Art of Archery. In this issue, Lea Lee is proud to share the magical, unusual, and forgotten stories from Oscar Nitzchke’s life as a brilliant but largely overlooked architect and intimate friend to many important 20th century artists, positioning him to become one of the greatest witnesses to modern Art history.

See below, Kenneth Frampton original article who was published in the Oscar Nitzchke ‘s Cooper union catalog done for the Oscar nitzchke‘s 1985 retrospective exhibit of Oscar Nitzchke s’works and he wrote especially about Oscar Nitzchke’master work : “la Maison de la Publicité” :

“I am referring of course, above all, to his famous unrealized Maison de La Publicité, projected for the Champs Elysées in 1935. As in the case of Chareau’s Maison de Verre, completed in 1932, it is this singular and still astonishing work which guarantees Nitzchke’s place in the history of 20th century architecture, largely because it synthesizes with ingenious simplicity the most diverse avant-gardiste trends of his time into the form of a new and generalizable architectural paradigm. The genealogy of this work and the specific significance of its form are still, in my view, insufficiently known and understood, even today, although the image of Nitzchke’s cutaway axonometric is all too familiar to the cognoscenti of the thirties.” © Kenneth Frampton © Cooper union School Oscar Nitzchke retrospective catalog

Born in 1900 in Altona (Germany) Nitzchke was admitted in 1917 to the Geneva Beaux Art in the class with Alberto Giacometti where he trained in drawing, also with Camoletti. Leaving Geneva, for Paris in 1920, Oscar Nitzchke related “I came to Paris, September 1920, with my mother because my family, my brothers, and sisters, were scared; you see.I was the little one, and they were afraid to see me going alone to Paris. Because at that time Paris was known as the Ville Lumière, the City of Light”. My mother stayed for three weeks. I had come from a little provincial area in Geneva. I did not know anything about Modern Art. In Geneva I had only once seen a watercolor exhibit by Cezanne.

I joined Laloux-Lemaresquier studio, a pillar of academic teaching at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, Then it was, I think in 1923, that we came across a book by Le Corbusier, Vers Une Architecture, also L’Esprit Nouveau of Ozenfant and Jeanneret.

After I passed by Gallery Jeanne Bucher Carrefour de la Croix Rouge in Paris, and saw on display a painting, i stayed fifteen minutes, fascinated and at the same time not understanding, and finally went in and asked the lady, ‘What is this? ‘Un Georges Braque, Monsieur.’ First time I heard of him.”

Discovering the avant-garde, Oscar Nitzschke left the studio that year, 1923 with a group of young rebels to open the Palais de Bois studio under Auguste Perret; In the company of Paul Nelson, Pierre Forestier, Ernö Goldfinger and Berthold Lubetkin, Oscar Nitzchké explored the potentialities of Perret’s rationalist constructive logic.

During his strolls through 1920’s - 1930’s Paris, Oscar admired the work of Max Ernst, Yves Tanguy and of many other painters surrealist. His footsteps often led him from the Café de Flore in Saint Germain-des-Près to Montparnasse where Kiki de Montparnasse, Man Ray, Modigliani, Alberto Giacometti, Pablo Picasso, André Breton, and many others rubbed shoulders. Oscar Nitzchke also encountered painters André Derain and Georges Braque in Varangeville and in other places met with musicians, poets and filmmakers.

In 1922 during the creation of Auguste Perret’s Palais de Bois movement, of which Oscar Nitzchke was a part, he crossed paths with Darius Milhaud, Eric Satie. Oscar Nitzchke’s works was also influenced by other artistic movements extant in Europe at that time; Bauhaus, Constructivism, Dada, Surrealism, Cubism and Art Deco. As well, artists and architects exchange ideas and influences , including Sonia and Robert Delaunay, Paul Nelson and Pierre Chareau, and designers Emile Jacques Ruhlmann, Eileen Gray, Jean Michel Franck, Jean Prouve; Oscar was also impressed by the beauty of the works of Gustave Klimt, Toyen, and Tamara de Lempicka, and also illustrators like Cassandre and Paul Colin influenced him.

Oscar discovered, with passion, the jazz of the interwar period, especially the music of Fats Waller. In his youth, he loved to laugh, go out and dance, frequented the Bal Nègre, and was fascinated by shows of artist Josephine Baker.

Oscar Nitzchke narrates, “I can tell the story, how I met Christian Zervos and all these great characters. In 1928, with two friends from Atelier Perret, we had two first prizes for ‘Maisons Mettaliques’ for the Forges de Strasbourg. And this man, Christian Zervos, who created Cahiers d’Art, the first magazine for modern art saw one of the Oscar Nitzschke ’s houses. So Christian Zervos wrote us a letter – he would see the houses – and then he came to see the houses, we became friends, I went to see him at his gallery. He had a famous gallery on rue du Dragon, in Saint Germain des Prés in the left bank in Paris.Then later, I met through him, Picasso, Braque, Leger, Ozenfant, Mirô, and many others. Famously, Oscar Nitzchke was there when Pablo Picasso and James Joyce first met in 1930 at the cafe’ de Flore in Paris at St Germain des Prés with their mutual friends, Yvonne and Christian Zervos.

” This effervescence of turn-of- the-century contemporary art communicated with the architecture of the time, where 19th- century art was juxtaposed with avant-garde art.

Oscar Nitzchke’s mastery of contemporary architectural techniques earned him the prize of the 1929 Metal House competition organized by the Forges de Strasbourg, a city where he contributed to the creation of the Aubette dance hall with Theo Van Doesburg and the Arps. He built more than five hundred examples of his elegant sheet steel box and, introduced by Christian Zervos, met the publicist Martial, owner of a plot of land on the Champs Élysées leading to Nitzchke’s design for the Maison de la Publicité in 1934-1936.

Calling this “a founding project of a radically new approach to the relationship between visual communication and architecture ... Forty years before the design of the Centre Georges-Pompidou, Oscar Nitzchke made the concrete building he imagined the support of a wall of moving images facing the avenue. A billboard by day and a luminous newspaper by night, this skin encompasses exhibition and audition rooms with fluid contours.”

Solicited by the painter Amédée Ozenfant, who commissioned him to design a project for his London school, Oscar Nitzchke then worked with Paul Nelson and Frantz-Philippe Jourdain on a Palais de la Découverte, whose organic forms and roofs suspended from cables inaugurated a repertoire far removed from the orthogonality of the ‘sovereign portico’ dear to Perret.

Oscar’s perspective drawings for the Palais de la Decouverte, now in MOMA’s collection, resulted from Paul Nelson’s, Oscar Nitzchke’s and his colleague Frantz Jourdain’s commission to produce a study for a permanent science Museum in the city. “The project, unfortunately never realized, envisioned a structure that was as functional as it was monumental, the outer envelope being designed to contain diverse exhibits with quite different spatial needs.”

In 1936, on his first trip to New York, Oscar Nitzchke and his wife Ritou (Renée Nitzschke) met Alexander Calder and his wife Louisa. They became very close friends, remaining friends for their entire lives, resulting in meeting with Paul Nelson in that year. The marvelous result of Alexander Calder’s and Oscar Nitzchke’s collaboration with Paul Nelson is La Maison Suspendue with its magnificent Calder and Arp sculptures, plus the marvelous Mirô contribution.

Oscar Nitzchke was invited, two years later in 1938, by Wallace K. Harrison, architect of Rockefeller Center, to work with him and teach at Yale University in New Haven. Leaving France for America, under the threat of invading Nazism in 1939, Oscar’s first collaboration in the United States, commissioned by Wallace Harrison, was helping Fernand Léger redecorate Rockefeller’s apartments in New York, where Fernand Leger had created his magnificent frescoes. As 1938 and 1939 progressed, he was invited by Wallace K. Harrison, architect of Rockefeller Center, to work with him and teach at Yale University. Oscar then imagined buildings for the Bronx Zoo and, later, more austere skyscrapers for the United Nations Headquarters (1947), where he played a key role in the team developing the final project. Between 1949 and 1953, Nitzchke directed for Harrison and Max Abramovitz the construction elements, lobby and façade of the Alcoa headquarters in Pittsburgh. Hailed by Marcel Lods as the first classic of metal architecture, this thirty-story skyscraper creates, with the resources of pressed aluminum, a play of light and shadow hitherto missing from American curtain walls.

In 1939-1940, Oscar imagined a new plan for the Bronx Zoo, very special and unusual, because the animals walked freely, not caged, unlike people watching them, who were inside a large transparent tube. In this project, Oscar collaborated with Alexander Calder adding Calder’s magnificent sculptures created in 1939-1940 for the adjacent African Habitat buildings at the Bronx Zoo designed by Oscar Nitzchke.

“ The reaction to this project created a bit of a scandalous atmosphere. Oscar Nitzchke told his grand daughter Lea Lee, how much fun he had with Calder and how they laughed a lot while doing this project together to see the offended reaction of the right and strict thinking of New York’s bourgeoisie at that time. What would they think of the elevator tubes of Paris’ Georges Pompidou Center created by Piano and Renzo, which take their audience into the paradise of the Georges Pompidou Museum, surely a nod to Nitzchke’s avant-garde project of 1939 that allowed animals freedom while humans had to contemplate them with wonder, while being enclosed in a transparent Tube ?”

Not only did Oscar Nitzchke bring Alexander Calder to Yale, making jokes with Calder for the students, who created a hanging mobile with socks, but Oscar Nitzchke also made possible the inclusion of a Calder Mobile in a monumental exhibition at Yale mounted by Henry Kibel in 1943.

On a more serious side, in 1958, Oscar Nitzchke again collaborated with Calder, and the architect Saul Edelbaum on an Auschwitz memorial in Israel.

Oscar Nitzchke participated in many, major architectural projects where his name has been forgotten, such as his collaboration with Pierre Chareau to redesign Robert Motherwell’s East Hampton house in 1947, where, as Lea Lee relates: “My grandfather said to me with a big laugh, “Robert Motherwell didn’t have any money at that time to pay our fee with Pierre Chareau so Motherwell gave us a Picasso drawing that we immediately sold, and we ate and drank off it together.”

At the same time, Oscar Nitzchke was working on the austere skyscrapers for the United Nations Headquarters as one of the international team of fourteen architects who designed the United Nations Headquarters under Wallace Harrison’s leadership. He contributed ideas and drawings; his professional abilities and his personality helped facilitate the cooperative effort of many strong, and often contentious personalities. Oscar and his friend, architect George Dudley, had worked with Harrison in his firm and at Yale.

Oscar Nitzchke was also acquainted with architects, especially Le Corbusier, who he had known since 1922 in Paris. George Dudley had acted as the recording secretary of the UN design process, and later wrote a book based on his notes and further research, Workshop for Peace–Designing the United Nations Headquarters.

In his memories about the UN project, Oscar Nitzchke wrote: “One evening the others were gone, and I was alone with Corbusier, and there was his model and Oscar Niemeyer’s model. And then, he asked me, ‘Which one do you like better?’ I said I liked Niemeyer’s; I like the plans, and I like the sculpture in the middle, and all that I said, it looked more Greek to me; then he said, ‘As you know, Oscar, Niemeyer is a wonderful artist, but not so much an architect’. Corbusier was fantastic, how he drew. I mean, he made sketches without hesitation, he was so sure. He was a genius. No doubt, I mean impossible genius.” “Le Corbusier’s letters from the time describe a less than harmonious working atmosphere. ‘I’m working here with Harrison, an American who’s a fraction jealous, and fourteen architects from different nations, he wrote to his mother on 6 May 1947. ‘1⁄3 hostile, 2⁄3 in favor. The draftsmen have become my friends. We can do something magnificent, and that’s why I forge on.’ Officially, the building’s design is credited to the committee –which included Le Corbusier – though many say that the completed complex more closely resembled the designs submitted by the Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer.” From Le Corbusier’s letters to his mother about his work during the UN © Phaidon © Jean Louis Cohen.

Oscar Nitzchke’s active participation in an important historical process can be seen as it extends over a long professional life on two continents. He was an inspirer, a collaborator, an enthusiast, a communicator, a catalyst; constantly and intimately involved with three generations of many of the most influential shapers of the modern movement, saying Oscar’s friend and colleague, architect Georges Dudley in his letter he wrote to Denise Scott and the Art critic/architect Robert Venturi :

“Oscar was many things to many people. He was certainly a charming fellow who made a legion of friends which he added to wherever he went (and still does ). Though he was a fine creative designer and a highly respected draftsman / renderer, he was not a major history maker or even a successful architect in the usual sense. But much more than just a talented hail-fellow-well-met or a failed “great architect.” He was something else that has great and too often unrecognized importance. He was a central and active participant in an importance historical process. The importance and (amazingly continuous) consistency of his contribution can only be seen as it extends over a long professional life on two continents. He was an inspirer, a collaborator, an enthusiast, a communicator, a catalyst; constantly and intimately involved with three generations of many of the most influential shapers of the modern movement.” © Cooper Union School Oscar Nitzchke catalog 1985 retrospective © George dudley © Gus Dudley

Oscar Nitzchke became good friends with Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, Sarah Vaughan regularly frequenting the bars of Harlem, where jazz musicians performed, and Birdland on New York’s 47th Street. Oscar became a discreet messenger between Christian Zervos, former publisher and friend from Paris, and Initiator of Picasso’s Catalogue Raisonne, and American curators and museum directors, including MOMA’s in 1945. Always passionate about art, Oscar frequented the whole of New York at the time meeting at galleries, Pierre Matisse, Leo Castelli, Sidney Janis, Julien Levy, Klaus Perls, to name only the most famous. In the 1940s and 50s, good friends Elaine and Willem de Kooning frequented the Cedar Bar with Nitzchke, then the meeting point of many artists including Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, Arshile Gorky and John Cage. All these people led a bohemian life and lived in joyful exchanges, bartering being customary, between two drinks and two giggles. The conversations were lively; they were dancing and singing.

“ The shift of themes and forms from modern European architecture to the United States has too often been seen as resulting solely from the exhibition “ The International Style, organized in 1932 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York by Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson. “ Those who passed on such as Oscar Nitzchké, however, allow us to discover the more secret itineraries by which a lasting transmission of the experiences of German or French modernism was accomplished. It the first sentence that Jean Louis Cohen wrote in his article published in French in Universalis with his poetic and sharp vision of architecture.

Lea Lee would like to thank Universalis for the legacies of Jean Louis Cohen ( 1947-2023 ) Architect and professor Emeritus at the College de France and at NY University to kindly authorized to publish the integral of Jean Louis Cohen article :

The shift of themes and forms from modern European architecture to the United States has too often been seen as resulting solely from the exhibition The International Style, organized in 1932 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York by Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson. Those who passed on such as Oscar Nitzchké, however, allow us to discover the more secret itineraries by which a lasting transmission of the experiences of German or French modernism was accomplished. Born in 1900 in Altona (Germany), Oscar Nitzchké discovered architecture in Geneva, and his artistic abilities at the Geneva Beaux Art in the same class then Alberto Giacometti, and start in 1917 a training drawing with Camoletti.

Later on, at the Laloux-Lemaresquier studio, a pillar of academic teaching at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, which he left in 1923 with a group of young rebels, to open the Palais de Bois studio under the tutelage of Auguste Perret. In the company of Paul Nelson, Pierre Forestier, Ernö Goldfinger and Berthold Lubetkin, Nitzchké explores the potentialities of Perret's rationalist constructive logic. In 1929, his mastery of contemporary techniques earned him the prize of the metal house competition organized by the Forges de Strasbourg, a city where he contributed to the creation of the Aubette dance hall with Theo Van Doesburg and the Arps. He built more than five hundred examples of his elegant sheet steel box.

“Through the publisher Christian Zervos, Nitzchke met the publicist Martial, owner of a plot of land on the Champs Élysées, on which the architect designed the Maison de la Publicité in 1934-1936, a founding project of a radically new approach to the relationship between visual communication and architecture. Forty years before the Centre Georges-Pompidou and the proposals of high-tech architects in the 1980s, Nitzchke made the concrete building he imagined the support of a wall of moving images facing the avenue. A billboard by day and a luminous newspaper by night, this skin encompasses exhibition and audition rooms with fluid contours.”

Solicited by the painter Amédée Ozenfant, who commissioned him to design a project for his London school, Nitzchke worked with Paul Nelson and Frantz-Philippe Jourdain on a Palais de la Découverte, whose organic forms and roofs suspended from cables inaugurated a repertoire far removed from the orthogonality of the ‘sovereign portico’ dear to Perret “.

Nitzchke, who had visited New York in 1936, was invited two years later by Wallace K. Harrison, architect of Rockefeller Center, to work with him and teach at Yale University in New Haven. In 1939 - 1940, Oscar, then imagined sensual buildings for the Bronx Zoo and, later on, more austere skyscrapers for the United Nations Headquarters (1947), where he played a key role in the team developing the final project. Between 1949 and 1953, Nitzchke directed for Harrison and Max Abramovitz which remains his major work in which he draws all the construction elements, the lobby and the façade of the Alcoa headquarters in Pittsburgh. Hailed by Marcel Lods as the first "classic" of metal architecture, this thirty-story skyscraper creates, with the resources of pressed aluminum, a play of light and shadow hitherto banished from American curtain walls.

“Oscar Nitzchke returned to France in the 60s, his work is slowly rediscovered in France and in the United State of America, notably on the occasion of the retrospective exhibition at the Cooper Union in New York in 1985. With his drawings, which are exemplary in the concision and suppleness of their lines, Nitzchke communicates today the vision of an aerial modernity carried by Perret's teaching, a vision whose flight has often been broken by the French religion of reinforced concrete.” © Jean Louis Cohen Universalis Encyclopedia Oscar Nitzschke 1900 - 1991 .

In Paris, Oscar became very enthusiastic about the first historical exhibition at the Denise René Gallery in 1955. With the patronage of Alexander Calder, a pioneering kinetic artist with his moving works of the 1930s and the participation of the young Yaacov Agam and Vasarely, this exhibition introduced the kinetic movement into post-war contemporary art and gave rise to kinetic movements created by South American artists who had taken refuge in 1950s and 60s Paris.

Nikolai Buglaï, a New York artist Oscar Nitzchke ‘s friend, writes in his interview article in Ragazine magazine, “Oscar Nitzchke is like a delicious slice of twentieth-century art. He was at the same table when Picasso and James Joyce met. He was Bûnuel’s roommate in Los Angeles when Bûnuel was a pauper. In Harlem, he knew Basie and Ellington, the whole group. He knew everybody. He used to drive around with Peggy Guggenheim in her pink Cadillac throughout the United States. So he had contact with the whole crew. In his pauper years, he would borrow money from Calder. Calder would give him little works of art that he could sell for money. From Satie he would get original manuscripts that he would turn into money. In that sense, he was an interesting guy. When his hearing got bad, people refused to hire him. But at age 80 or 83, his old students from Yale University got him a show at Cooper Union. Once he got the big show Cooper Union produced this fancy catalogue of his work. © Lea Lee © Ragazine © Nikolai Buglaï

When Lea Lee met Jean-Louis Cohen at the Eileen Gray Bard Museum exhibit in New York in March 2020, remembering being delighted to read in the exhibition catalogue that Eileen Gray herself had been influenced in 1936 by Oscar Nitzchke’s “the House of Advertising. La Maison de la Publicité” featured in an article published by Christian Zervos in the Cahiers d’Art in 1936. Lea Lee is sure that, somewhere, this makes Oscar smile.

© Lea Lee © Oscar Nitzchke Legacies

Lea Lee is sorry to let you know that this article has been “ First Published “

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As Lea Lee represent the Oscar Nitzchke Estate ,

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being the Legal executor given the 7 October 2017 by her mother Frederique Nitzschke .

Lea Lee had asked the Editor in Chief to fix all this errors and mistakes,