Alvin Lustig (1915 – 1955), a talented and masterful graphic and industrial designer, was born in Denver, Colorado to a family that he said had “absolutely no pretensions to culture.” He reached the zenith of his incredible career in the early 1950s before his tragic early death. Lustig's family moved to Los Angeles when Alvin was just five. The family was poor, and Alvin was skipping classes to act as a drifting magician for various school assemblies. However, “an enlightened teacher” introduced him to modern art, sculpture and French posters.
“This art hit a fresh eye, unencumbered by any ideas of what art was or should be, and found an immediate sympathetic response. This ability to ‘see’ freshly, unencumbered by preconceived verbal, literary or moral ideas, is the first step in responding to most modern art." (Personal Notes on Design, AIGA Journal, Vol. 3 No. 4, 1953)”
He began his unusual art education which included one year at Los Angeles Community College and one at the city's Art Center School, while he also took a job as art director of Westways, the monthly journal of the Automobile Club of Southern California, followed by independent study with both architect Frank Lloyd Wright for three months at Taliesen East, and artist Jean Charlot.
At age 21 Lustig set up his first design office in Los Angeles, and became a freelance printer and typographer, doing jobs on a press he kept in the back room of a drugstore. It was here that he began a remarkable professional career with innovative graphic and typographic design for book publisher Ward Ritchie, and for several local clients for whom he designed a visual identity through creation of stationery, programs and other printed pieces. Proclaiming that he was “born modern” and had made an early decision to practice as a “modern” rather than a “traditional” designer, he experimented with completely abstract geometric designs using ornamental typeface. Believing fervently that design could change the world, a year later he abandoned printing to concentrate on graphic design. He joined designers like Saul Bass, Rudolph de Harak, John Folis and Louis Danzinger to become a charter member of the Los Angeles Society for Contemporary Designers. These were artists whose believed in the principles of the Modern design and aimed to challenge the traditional aesthetic vision of West Coast design establishment.
He revolutionized the design of book jackets by refusing the traditional styles. As James Laughlin, a publisher who hired him in the early 1940s writes:
“His method was to read a text and get the feel of the author’s creative drive, then to restate it in his own graphic terms,” (The Book Jackets of Alvin Lustig” , Print, vol. 10 no. 5, October 1956)
Laughlin, was a progressive publisher with an intuitive understanding of the artistic graphic design, who commissioned Lustig to create book jackets for such important thinkers as Henry Miller, Gertrude Stein, D.H. Lawrence and James Joyce, and he gave the artist the freedom to experiment and develop his personal style in a fertile ground for visual poetry and modern typographical explorations.
Seven years later, in 1944, Look Magazine offered him the post of Director of Visual Research in New York, but after two years Lustig returned to California and opened a design office in Beverly Hills. The late 1940s saw the development of Lustig's architectural and interior design practice, and a number of industrial design commissions for lighting fixtures,fabrics and furniture. Lustig kept his hand in graphic design, continuing to produce quantities of book jackets for the New Directions, Knopf and Noonday presses during the 1940s and 50s, and covers for several periodicals including Fortune magazine.
A move back to New York in 1950 brought a return to a concentration on graphic design with projects for the Girl Scouts of America, American Crayon Company, Whitney Publications and Intercultural Publications, in addition to several museums and art galleries. Lustig's career as educator began with a teaching assignment at North Carolina's Black Mountain College in the summer of 1945, and led to further contracts with the Art Center School at Los Angeles and Yale University. A one-man exhibition of Lustig's work was mounted by New York's A-D Gallery in 1949 and traveled to Walker Art Center in Minneapolis; five years later he had completely lost his sight, a complication of diabetes. Alvin Lustig died in New York on December 5, 1955, survived by his widow Elaine Firstenberg
Lustig, whom he had married in 1948.
Lustig pushed back the accepted boundaries of Modern design.
Lustig was intensely interested in montage as practiced by the European Moderns of the 1920s and 1930s. The preceding New Directions titles, which Laughlin described as jacketed in a “conservative, ‘booky,’ way” were completely overshadowed by Lustig's first jacket for Laughlin, a 1941 edition of Henry Miller’s
Wisdom of the heart. Influenced by Frank Lloyd Wright, at the time Lustig was exploring the possibilities of non-representational compositions made from metallic typefaces. Despite the fact that
Wisdom of the Heart was innovative for the early 1940s, still Laughlin criticized it some years later as “rather stiff and severe…" as compared to artist's design for the New Directions New Classics series, over the 1945-1952 period, which still appear innovative and imaginative designs, in which which he was influenced by his favorite artists, Paul Klee and Joan Miro. Indeed, his style was varied as he freely adopted various elements from the works of any painters who he admired.
In Many of his photo-illustrations, done in collaboration with many photographers, Lustig rendered a fresh interpretation of the visual communication design of of the Bauhaus, Dada and Surrealism and inextricably wedded them to contemporary avant-garde literature. Although many other American designers also experimented with artistic jackets, as described by Laughlin in Print,
“Lustig’s distinction,lay in the intensity and purity with which he dedicated his genius to his idea vision ...I have heard people speak of the ‘Lustig Style,’ but no one of them has been able to tell me, in fifty words or five hundred what it was. Because each time, with each new book, there was a new creation. The only repetitions were those imposed by the physical media.”
Lustig erroneously believed that, painting was dead, and design would emerge as a primary art form – hence his jackets were not only paradigmatic examples of how Modern art could successfully be incorporated into commercial art, but showed other designers how the dying (plastic) arts could be harnessed for mass communications. He also believed that the book jacket should become the American equivalent of the glorious European poster tradition.
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