ALVIN
ALVIN lustig
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Biography An introduction about Alvin Lustig and his lifetime.
ALVIN LUSTIG Graphic Designer vv Published in US in 2014 by Studio Art FF. 219 W 19th Street New York, NY 10011 Telephone : 212-691-6500 Fax : 212-633-1974 All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review. Author & Editor - Eddy Beast Designed - Fithalita Febriany www.studioartff.com
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Journey The journey of Alvin Lustig, a credible candidate for the AIGA Lifetime.
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Born Modern The entire life and the design of Alvin Lustig.
“I make solutions nobody wants to problems that don’t exist.”
–Alvin Lustig
1. biography
lustig
was born in Denver, Colarado in 1915. He did not have a huge Interest in designing until he reached high school. One of his teachers opened his eyes to the world of art and he became inspired to create things himself from then on. His formal art training consisted of attending the Art Centre School of Design as well as studying under Frank Lloyd Wright in Tallesin East for 3 months. He gained success early on in his career.
At age 21 he worked in a drug store’s back room doing freelance jobs as a typographer and printer. It was then when he started to create his geometrio abstract styles in design. He would use plain colors and simple shapes. After a year of that he decided that designing was what he really wanted to do more of and quit that job. He designed books for New Direction in LA and Noonday Press as well as joined The Society for Contemporary Designers group. Instead of making book jackets that tried summarizing the book, he would read it and gain a sense of what the writer was trying to portray and put that in an image.
There was not enough work in California at that time though, so in 1944 he moved to New York. From 1944 to 1948 Lustig was the Director of Visual Research for look Magazine. He moved back to LA for 5 years and did furniture, architectural, fabric, book and other designs in an office he ran. He even taught workshops and design courses at Yale, University of Georgia, Art Center, and Black Mountain College in North Carolina. Lustig developed a theory that Israel could Impact society with good design and moved there in 1950.
He was never able to test this theory though because his diabetes caused erosion in his vision and by 1954 he was virtually blind. Through his blindness he still continued to work. in one instance, he was hired to design signs for Seagram’s building and managed to direct his wife and assistants on how to create every single detail. Alvin Lustig died at the age of 40 on December 4th, 1955. His collection was donated in 1986 to RIT by Elaine Lustig Cohen, his wife of seven years.
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EDU Lustig’s approach to design reflected the Bauhaus tradition of integrating fine and applied arts, of wedding technology with artistic creativity. Since he regarded differences in projects as largely technical, a designer had to develop and maintain a high standard of design, which could be successfully applied to any medium. The designer’s task, no matter what the project, was to use words, forms and color to create a harmonious whole, more powerful than any single element. For Lustig, creating form was simultaneously to create content. While rooted in a tradition of design orderliness and complementarity, Lustig was an experimenter who played with and altered forms, cautioning against settling into a routine format. His strategy incorporated a respect for simplicity, for the need to eliminate design elements not contributing to the force of the image. Lustig set definite and universal criteria for good design, but looked to technology to offer unlimited opportunities for achieving visual excellence. Lustig had an intellectual approach to design problems, which he said were solved more often in the head than anywhere else. He was known to spend days thinking about a project before putting anything down on paper. He was a voluminous reader on a
variety of subjects and possessed a broad knowledge of painters and painting. All this background information was brought to an assignment as well as the need to research the particular project. When designing a book jacket for example, Lustig would read the text first, so that his design better represented the feel of the literature. Lustig was an active proselyter of good design who regarded the public as “form blind” and insistently reprogrammed his clients. When publisher Ward Ritchie invited Lustig to share studio space, Lustig redesigned Ritchie’s office. Likewise, when Arthur A. Cohen, President of Noonday Press, hired Lustig as a jacket designer, Lustig attempted to redesign the entire publishing firm. The designer felt the more information a client had, the better informed his or her decision would be. The client was responsible for selfeducation in order to select quality design talent. Lustig’s success in converting clients and his drive to improve the visual environment was paralleled in his effectiveness as a teacher during the same years, 1937 to 1955. For someone so passionately involved in design education, Lustig had only one year of formal training, at the Art Center
School in Los Angeles. He didn’t think it possible to teach creative art but he did think it possible to teach awareness. He looked to the campus as an area for experimentation and research not possible in the working world, the results of which could lead business and industry. Lustig lobbied for education programs which combined creative pursuits with technical instruction and which balanced the theoretical with the practical. In addition to studio courses on color and form, he advocated for proof presses, printing equipment and darkrooms as well as workshops conducted by leading professionals immersed in the “real” world. One of the most influential of Lustig’s educational activities was the design program he helped develop for Yale where he had begun teaching in 1951 as Visiting Critic in Design. Lustig felt the best design programs were affiliated with the best painting programs. The painter generated private, subjective symbols while the designer produced objective, public symbols. The interaction of the two would result in design with an ideal balance of originality and universality. The design program for Yale grew out of a 1945 summer course that Lustig conducted at Black Mountain College in North Carolina which was based on the teachings of artist Josef Albers. Lustig also developed a proposal for a design school at the University of Georgia and taught at the Art Center School in Los Angeles and the University of Southern California.
Originally from Denver, Lustig moved to Los Angeles as a child and there began his design career. In 1933, at the age of eighteen, he became art director of Westways Magazine published by the Automobile Club of Southern California. In 1935 he studied for three months with Frank Lloyd Wright at Taliesin and in 1936, with Jean Charlot, the Mexican fresco artist. Between 1937 and 1944, Lustig operated his own typographic and printing business where he experimented with standard geometric type ornaments for printed pieces and books, much of it for Ward Ritchie Press. In the early forties, James Laughlin of New Directions Books in New York began to commission jacket designs which earned for Lustig an international reputation. He left Los Angeles for New York in 1944 to create a visual research department for Look Magazine while continuing a freelance practice. In 1946 he returned to LA to open a design office and took on a variety of projects including several stores, an apartment hotel and even a molded plywood helicopter. Lustig returned to New York in 1951 where he continued to involve himself in diverse assignments, from book jackets for Noonday Press to an architectural identification program for Northland shopping center in Detroit. His work was exhibited at the American Institute of Graphic Arts, the AD Gallery in New York, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and the Museum of Modern Art.
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CATION.
s t n e m e g d e wl o n Ack
The Alvin Lustig Archive would not have been possible without the extreme generosity, guidance and vision of Elaine Lustig Cohen, who shared her personal archives with us and allowed this project to become a reality. For all her inspiration, support and kindness, we thank her dearly. We’d also like to thank Steven Heller for his expertise on Alvin Lustig (amongst many other items) and for his permission to reprint the numerous articles he has written for our section introductions. Steve’s expertise, insight and articles were instrumental in the site’s achievements. Steven Heller is currently working on the Alvin Lustig biography.
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THE MAGIC YEAR
A short time later he joined a club with four other man they named the Los Angeles Society for Contemporary Designers. They believed design on the west coast was old and copied and was in need of a faceless. Soon after Alvin moved to New York City where he could renew and begin a modern outlook in his career, he believed design in new York was well ahead of everyone else in the industry. In 1944 he became a visual research manager for Look magazine and also look up interior design and industrial design in 1946 he returned to Los Angeles and stayed there for 5 years working for a company involved in architecture, textiles, furniture and books. Alvin was head of this office and this is where his theories being involved with all aspects of design began. Alvin and Elaine Fursenbung in 1948 and married her.
Soon Alvin was producing so much work became well known very quickly and acquired many clients. He designed everything from record albums, magazines, advertisements, commercial catalogs, annual reports, office spaces, textiles, a helicopter, a water lower, print materials, for the girl scouts, and also developed design courses at LACC. Diabetes began to take his vision in 1954 and by 1950 he was blind, but still taught and worked an projects with the help of his wife.
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Lustig developed diabetes as a teenager. As a result of diabetes by 1954 he was virtually blind. He developed Kimmelstiel-Wilson syndrome, an incurable kidney disease connected to diabetes. Lustig died at the age of 40 of diabetes-related complications on December 4, 1955. Elaine Lustig Cohen, Lustig’s wife and fellow graphic designer, took over his New York City design firm after his death in 1955. She was awarded an AIGA Medal in 2011 for her contributions to American graphic design.
DEATH
19 Student of Frank Lloyd Wright Inducted into the Art Director’s Club hall of fame in 1986 Died at age 40 of diabetes complications in 1955. In the final years of his life he started to go blind, yet he kept designing, even memorizing the Pantone color codes for when he went completely blind. He designed practically everything! He even designed a helicopter! (You could compare him to Charles and Ray Eames) Master of Modernism. He had a very intellectual approach to solving problems in design, which is why his work seems very Bauhaus.
Facts
Designed everything because he felt good design would benefit the world.
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JOURNEY
Alvin Lustig’s
contributions to the design of books and book jackets, magazines, interiors, and textiles as well as his teachings would have made him a credible candidate for the AIGA Lifetime Achievement award when he was alive. By the time he died at the age of forty in 1955, he had already introduced principles of Modern art to graphic design that have had a longterm influence on contemporary practice. He was in the vanguard of a relatively small group who fervently, indeed religiously, believed in the curative power of good design when applied to all aspects of American life. He was a generalist, and yet in the specific media in which he excelled he established standards that are viable today. If one were to reconstruct, based on photographs, Lustig’s 1949 exhibition at The Composing Room Gallery in New York, the exhibits on view and the installation would be remarkably fresh, particularly in terms of the current trends in art-based imagery.
23 Lustig’s 1949 exhibition at The Composing Room Gallery in New York.
Lustig created monuments of ingenuity and objects of aesthetic pleasure. Whereas graphic design history is replete with artifacts that define certain disciplines and are also works of art, for a design to be so considered it must overcome the vicissitudes of fashion and be accepted as an integral part of the visual language. Though Lustig would consider it a small part of his overall output, no single project is more significant in this sense than his 1949 paperback cover for Lorca: 3 Tragedies. It is a masterpiece of symbolic acuity, compositional strength and typographic craft that appears to be, consciously or not, the basis for a great many contemporary book jackets and paperback covers.
25 Lustig’s first jacket for Laughlin, a 1941 edition of Henry Miller’s Wisdom of the Heart, eclipsed the jacket designs of previous New Directions books, which Laughlin described as “conservative” and “booky.” At the time, Lustig was experimenting with non-representational constructions made form slugs of metal typographic material, revealing the influence of Frank Lloyd Wright, with whom he studied for three months at Taliesin East. The most interesting of these slug compositions was for Ghost in the Underblows (1940) for Ward Ritchie Press, which echoed Constructivist typecase experiments from the early twenties yet revealed a distinctly native American aesthetic. Though these designs were unconventional, some years later Laughlin noted that they “scarcely hinted at the extraordinary flowering which was to follow.” Laughlin was referring the New Classics series by New Directions that Lustig designed from 1945 to 1952. With few exceptions, the New Classics are as inventive today as when they premiered almost fifty years ago. Lustig had switched over from typecase compositions to drawing his distinctive symbolic “marks,” which owed more to the work of artists like Paul Klee, Joan Miró and Mark Rothko than to any accepted commercial style. Although Lustig rejected painting as a being too subjectivized and never presumed to paint or sculpt himself, he liberally borrowed from painting and integrated the abstract sensibility into his total design.
The paucity of work in California forced Lustig to move to New York in 1944, where he became visual research director of Look magazine’s design department until 1946. He not only designed progressive-looking printed house organs and promotional materials, he designed the actual department in a Modern manner. While in New York, he took up interior design and began exploring industrial design as well. In 1946 he returned to Los Angeles and for five years ran an office specializing in architectural, furniture and fabric design, while continuing his book and editorial work. To hire Lustig was to get more than a cosmetic makeover. He wanted to be totally involved in an entire design program-from business card to office building. His designs for both the print materials and office interiors for Lightolier exemplify the strict and total unity of his vision.
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Lustig’s
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covers for Noonday Press (Meridian books), produced between 1951 and 1955, avoid the rigidity of both traditional and Modern aesthetics. They serve as signposts for the direction his general design had taken. At the time American designers were obsessed with the new types being produced in Europe-not just the modern sans serifs, but recuts of old gothics and slab serifs-which were difficult to obtain in the United States. Lustig ordered specimen books from England and Germany that he would photostat and either piece together or redraw. These faces became the basis for more eclectic compositions. Lustig also became interested in, and to a certain extent adopted, the colder Swiss approach. Perhaps this accounts for the decidedly more quiet look of the Noonday line. To distinguish these particular books, which focused on literary and social criticism, philosophy and history, from his New Directions fiction covers, he switched from pictorial imagery to pure typography set against flat color backgrounds. The typical paperback cover of that era was characterized by overly rendered illustrations or thoughtlessly composed calligraphy. Lustig’s subtle economy was a counterpoint to the industry’s propensity for clutter and confusion.
Lustig’s work reveals an evolution from an experimental to mature practice-from total abstraction to symbolic typography. One cannot help but speculate about how he would have continued had he lived past his fortieth year. Diabetes began to erode his vision in 1950 and by 1954 he was virtually blind, yet even this limitation did not prevent him from teaching or designing. After learning that he was losing his vision, he invited his clients to a cocktail party in order to announce it to them, and give them the option to take their business to other designers. Most remained with Lustig. Philip Johnson, a key client and patron, even contracted Lustig to design the signs for the Seagram’s building. His wife, Elaine Lustig Cohen, recalls that he fulfilled his obligations by directing her and his assistants in every meticulous detail to complete the work he could no longer see. He specified color by referring to the color of a chair or sofa in their house and used simple geometries to express his fading vision. In the 1950s, Lustig decided to emigrate to Israel, not from any religious conviction, but because he believed that in this infant state good design could exert a significant impact on society. But Lustig died in 1955 before he had the chance to test this theory. Instead, he left behind a body of unique design that stands up to the scrutiny of time, and models how a personal vision wedded to Modern form can be effectively applied in the public sphere.
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Born Modern
Many of today’s graphic designers, for reasons of both economics and personal gratification, are stretching the borders of their practice by assuming the role of strategists who can advise on, and exert control over, a client’s total design needs. This notion of the graphic designer as wide-ranging generalist is hardly new. Back in the ‘30s, ‘40s, and ‘50s, when graphic design was establishing its footing in the business world, its leading practitioners could well ask themselves: Why do one job when you could make a real difference by doing every job? They felt that involvement in the total design effort ensured perfection, whereas piecemeal involvement invited dissatisfaction. To that end, designers like Paul Rand, Erik Nitsche, and Alvin Lustig made a point of working with clients who wielded power and influence and didn’t pigeonhole them, but rather, as like-minded visionaries, accepted their assessment of themselves as renaissance men.
35 Lustig (1915-1955), a modern-design pioneer, particularly inveighed against professional categorizing. “The words ‘graphic designer,’ ‘architect,’ or ‘industrial designer’ stick in my throat giving me a sense of limitation, of specialization within the specialty, or a relationship to society that is unsatisfactory and incomplete,” he wrote, about his brief yet variegated career, in the September 1946 Interiors. “This inadequate set of terms to describe an active life reveals only partially the still undefined nature of a designer.” He felt that life was too short for such compartmentalization; by age 39 he had gone blind from diabetes, and a year later, he died. Perhaps knowing that his time was limited forced
Lustig to excel in many design disciplines and pack a lifetime of experience into half a lifespan. Lustig proclaimed that he was a charter member in the “younger group that was born modern,” for whom design was not a job but a calling. He held the rather messianic belief that anything a modern designer laid hands on - from a book cover to a room interior - would benefit the world. He ignored design boundaries; when clients or friends would innocently ask his advice about, say, which lamp to purchase for their office or home, he would reply, “I won’t recommend a lamp, but I will redo the entire room” - even though he never formally studied architecture or interior design.
Alvin Lustig’s Each of his studios was selectively filled - edited with objects that best illustrated a modern spirit; a few of them - a figurine of an Aztec god, a steel boat propeller, a bulbous glass jug - accompanied him to all his spaces. Ivan Chermayeff, who worked for Lustig before and after he became blind, recalls that his Manhattan office was “clean as a whistle, very small, very ethereal, and very modern.” But, Chermayeff adds, it was also very formal, as the design was “more about stuff than space - picking a lamp or a desktop” rather than building an architectural environment. In fact, Lustig was prohibited by the building’s owners from making structural improvements, so he devised imaginative means to divide space - such as hanging a white wooden blind from the ceiling to separate reception from work areas while allowing for transparency, and using a simple beaded curtain suggesting fluidity to replace the door to the storeroom. Lustig also designed sculptural lighting fixtures with small circular bulbs that were akin to the abstract linear designs he used on some of his better-known book jackets. He hung floor-to-ceiling curtains made from Ninon, an inexpensive white transparent nylon fabric, to smooth out the edges of the room. “It was “all very chic,” Chermayeff says, as well as practical.
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F F I C E
Painting is dead, long live the dustjacket. Alvin Lustig brought modern art into American bookshops
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Alvin Lustig believed that painting was dead and that design would emerge as a primary art form. In his poetic book covers of the 1940s, he remade the visual languages of Dada, the Bauhaus and Surrealism. The current preference among American book jacket designers for fragmented images, minimal typography and rebus-like compositions must be traced directly to Lustig’s stark black and white cover for Lorca (which is still in print) – a grid of five symbolic photographs tied together through poetic disharmony. This and other distinctive, though lesser known, covers for the
New Directions publishing house transformed an otherwise realistic medium – the photograph – into a tool for abstraction though the employment of reticulated negatives, photograms and setups. New Directions publisher James Laughlin hired Lustig in the early 1940s and gave him the latitude to experiment with covers for the New Directions non-mainstream list, which featured authors such as Henry Miller, Gertrude Stein, D.H. Lawrence and James Joyce. While achieving higher sales was a consideration, Lustig believed it was unnecessary to “design down” to the potential buyer.
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Lustig
approach developed from an interest in montage as practised by the European Moderns of the 1920s and 1930s. When he introduced this technique to American book publishing in the late 1940s, covers and jackets tended to be painterly, cartoony or typographic – decorative or literal.
Art-based approached were considered too radical, perhaps even foolhardy, in a marketplace in which hard-sell conventions were rigorously adhered to. Unlike in the recording industry, where managers regarded the abstract record covers developed at about the same time as potential boost to sales, most mainstream book publishers were reluctant to embrace abstract approaches at the expense of the vulgar visual narratives and type treatments they insisted captured the public’s attention.
c 2014