Tamar Cohen simply introduced the launch of a brand new web site dedicated to the legacy of her mom, Elaine Lustig Cohen, who died in 2016. And fairly a legacy it’s—as painter, collagist and one of many first girls graphic designers to run her personal studio. The positioning is wealthy with each effective and utilized artwork. My essay beneath was written when Elaine was awarded the AIGA Medal for lifetime achievement.
When Elaine Lustig Cohen assumed possession of her husband’s midtown Manhattan design apply after he died on the age of 40, most of his shoppers—amongst them the architect Philip Johnson—anticipated her to finish his unfinished commissions. Little did they notice that Alvin Lustig, a totemic power within the subject of recent design, by no means supplied to incorporate her in his personal initiatives. “As a rule, nobody within the Lustig workplace designed besides Alvin himself,” Elaine recollects. In actual fact, she and his assistants, together with (for a short while) Ivan Chermayeff, would do the so-called “soiled work” whereas Alvin, wearing a crisp white shirt and tie, sat at his immaculate marble desk with solely a tracing pad, making thumbnail sketches for others to render.
Few feminine American designers ran their very own studios at the moment. Certainly, this could have been troublesome for anybody, however to fill Alvin’s giant footwear required true grit. Nonetheless the 28-year-old Elaine, who had no formal coaching as a designer, accepted her trial by fireplace and emerged as a exceptional expertise in her personal proper. She finally specialised in guide cowl and jacket design, museum catalogs and constructing signage, adhering initially to Alvin’s aesthetic till she developed her personal Modernist model.
Though Elaine was one of many few high-profile girls working within the graphic design subject on the time, she insists it was not a defining challenge. As an alternative, she says, working a small enterprise was her largest problem. “My gender might have been a difficulty for different designers,” she says, “however not for my shoppers.” Her spectacular roster contains proposals for TWA signage, airport identification for the Federal Aviation Administration, and the signage for Basic Motors’ technical campus in collaboration with Eero Saarinen. And as much as the day in 1962 when she closed the studio, Elaine continued to earn commissions from museums, structure corporations and guide publishers, together with Noonday Press, whose co-founder, Arthur Cohen, she later married.
From 1948–1955, although, Elaine was married to—or as she places it, was “a blind disciple” of—the charismatic Alvin Lustig. What she realized from him throughout their seven-year relationship is the important thing to understanding her personal distinct apply. Alvin wed summary and surreal ideas of recent portray and sculpture to business design, which throughout the Forties and early ’50s contributed to the look of American Modernism. By 1950 his childhood diabetes was ascendant, and by 1954 he was blind. But even in an impaired state he directed Elaine and his assistants via each design element.
Elaine Firstenberg was born in Jersey Metropolis in 1927. She and a youthful sister have been raised by Herman Firstenberg, a plumber, and Elizabeth Loeb Firstenberg, his bookkeeper. Her mom and father inspired their daughter’s creativity, so Elaine was enrolled in artwork classes, the place she realized to attract from casts. At 15, she wandered into Peggy Guggenheim’s short-lived however influential Artwork of This Century gallery, the place Guggenheim had exhibited a group of Kandinskys in an set up designed by Frederick Kiesler. That probability go to ignited Elaine’s lifelong ardour for contemporary artwork. Quickly thereafter, Elaine enrolled within the artwork division of Newcomb School at Tulane College. One in every of her artwork courses was based mostly on fundamental Bauhaus fundamentals. Her favourite painter on the time was the proto-pop artist Stuart Davis. In these days girls weren’t inspired to review artwork as a occupation, so she took artwork schooling programs on the College of Southern California to organize for a instructing profession. She then taught in a public faculty throughout the first yr she was married to Lustig.
Elaine was 20 when she met Alvin, then 32, on the opening of a brand new Los Angeles artwork museum in 1948. They have been a good-looking couple. A whirlwind courtship was adopted by marriage and a job because the “workplace slave,” she recollects. Alvin presumed she would work in his workplace, although he had no intention of instructing her graphic design. “Educating me was not even a difficulty,” she says. “It was, in any case, a special time.” He did nonetheless encourage Elaine to analysis supplies for inside design initiatives. In the meantime, she made collages for potential youngsters’s books and sketches of fantasy furnishings.
Within the late Forties the California economic system was weak, with hardly sufficient trade to assist native designers. So in 1950, when Josef Albers invited Alvin to ascertain a graphic design program at Yale, the couple instantly left for New York. Professionally issues have been wanting up, however Lustig’s well being was deteriorating and his reliance on Elaine elevated. Nonetheless, when the tip took place, she was unprepared for what would occur subsequent.
A few week after Alvin’s funeral, Philip Johnson, who had earlier commissioned Alvin to design the Seagram Constructing signage, referred to as Elaine to inform her that the job was hers. He then requested her when the official alphabet can be full. That decision was like ice water thrown on her face. “When Alvin died nothing had been finished on Seagram,” Elaine recollects. “Ultimately my schedule of the lettering and indicators have been integrated into the architectural working drawings.” Along with indicators, she designed New York Occasions adverts for the constructing. Johnson acknowledged her exceptional efforts, which helped to forge an necessary bond between them. Seagram subsequent employed her to do a catalog for the rental of areas within the constructing.
Quickly Elaine moved the studio into her condo. “I knew that with an workplace I’d be working solely to maintain my workers occupied, and I didn’t need that sort of headache,” she says. Across the identical time, Arthur Cohen, guide writer and the Lustigs’ greatest buddy, insisted that Elaine design Meridian Books’ new line of paperbacks. Alvin designed the primary 25 and Elaine went on to do greater than 100 extra. These jackets helped distinguish her extra freeform model from Alvin’s late-period precisionist method.
In 1956, Elaine married Arthur Cohen, who satisfied her that having an actual workplace may earn her extra formidable and remunerative commissions. Towards her higher instincts she opened Lustig and Reich, with former Lustig studio member Jack Reich. After a yr the enterprise was disbanded, and Elaine returned to her sole proprietorship at dwelling.
Along with jackets and covers, Elaine designed foyer indicators and catalogs for the Museum of Primitive Artwork, Rio de Janeiro’s Museum of Trendy Artwork, Lincoln Middle (at the side of Chermayeff & Geismar, on signage that was by no means adopted) and the 1964 New York World’s Honest, creating graphic design for the architectural agency Harrison & Abramovitz. For Johnson, she designed indicators for 2 Yale buildings. Johnson additionally used her for different initiatives: “A lot work got here from Philip,” says Elaine, “as he would suggest me to individuals he was working for, like John de Menil and his Schlumberger oil firm.” Additional commissions got here by means of different architect buddies. Elaine designed constructing interiors and, with Richard Meier, designed and did the graphics for Sona, an Indian authorities–sponsored handicrafts retailer on New York’s East fifty fifth Avenue. In 1963 she launched a fruitful relationship with the Jewish Museum, designing catalogs, invites, luggage and exhibition installations for such groundbreaking artists as Jasper Johns, Yves Klein and Robert Rauschenberg.
Elaine was not an ideological Modernist however she favored readability and ease, and used useful typography with asymmetry as a tenet. She most well-liked pure geometry. Half-jokingly, she says she was “brainwashed” into desirous to design the whole lot. Certainly, she maintained an exhausting schedule, even after the start of her daughter, Tamar (now a graphic designer too).
Constructing on her information of forgotten Twentieth-century avant-garde typography, she paid homage to the previous with out mimicking it. A figuring out eye would possibly discover telltale indicators of The New Typography and modernist portray, curiously meshed collectively and interpreted individually. Eclecticism reigned. She developed her personal palette, kind preferences and private glyphs. She savored the meditative pleasure of assembling paste-ups and refining the main points. Her work trusted accidents. Her design was akin to making a portray or collage—it was a puzzle, and playfulness was evident even in her most rationalist work. E book title pages prolonged over spreads, unconventional on the time. The pages have been modeled on movie, increase pace and movement as kind stretched over pages. Elaine had discovered her design consolation zone.
But she had additionally reached a useless finish. As the only proprietor of her dwelling studio, she was “confined” to the identical shoppers with whom she started. “It had backfired on me that I didn’t have [a real] workplace,” Elaine says. “Working alone I couldn’t do giant initiatives.” So in 1969 she determined to show her consideration virtually completely to portray. Coincidentally, her husband left the publishing world, which triggered some monetary woes, forcing them to dump of their fashionable artwork and ephemeral collections.
The silver lining got here of their founding of Ex Libris, a rare-book dealership. For a lot of non-public and institutional design collectors, Ex Libris turned a wellspring of newly appreciated European avant-garde paperwork, and a boon to the burgeoning design historical past motion. Though she nonetheless accepted the occasional shopper, Elaine primarily did the Ex Libris catalogs, which she would design in an acceptable historic method. These catalogs, uncommon at this time, are unimaginable assets for design analysis. (Her daughter, Tamar, designed a few of the later catalogs.)
By 1970, Elaine noticed portray and design as separate however equal practices. She turned to collage and printmaking, combining kind and picture the place potential, however not in a business method. In 1995, Elaine’s designs have been featured in an exhibition curated by Ellen Lupton on the Cooper-Hewitt, and her paintings continues to be proven at New York’s Julie Saul Gallery, amongst different venues.
For her eightieth birthday, 52 years after first taking the reins of her design apply, Elaine produced a sequence of 5 giclée prints, in a restricted version of 5 every, celebrating her life in graphic design. The sequence took place, she says, “as I turned concerned in creating alphabets in Adobe Illustrator, which led to a sequence of letterform landscapes.”
Elaine Lustig Cohen started in her husband’s shadow, but emerged amongst her male counterparts as an exemplar of latest graphic design and typography. By Ex Libris, she turned a fount of design historical past and a clever and beneficiant useful resource for students and college students of design. She is a dwelling hyperlink between design’s Modernist previous and its regularly altering current.
