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1993 AIGA MEDAL
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 40 in 1955, he
had already introduced principles of modern art to graphic design that
have had a long-term 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.
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.
The current preference among American book jacket designers for
fragmented images, photo-illustration, minimal typography and rebus-like
compositions can be traced directly to Lustig’s stark black-and-white
cover for Lorca, a grid of five symbolic photographs linked in
poetic disharmony. This and other distinctive, though today lesser
known, covers for the New Directions imprint transformed an otherwise
realistic medium—the photograph—into a tool for abstraction through the
use of reticulated negatives, photograms and still-lifes. When Lustig’s
approach (which developed from an interest in montage originally
practiced by the European moderns, particularly the American expatriate
E. McKnight Kauffer) was introduced to American book publishing in the
late 1940s, covers and jackets were mostly illustrative and also rather
decorative. Hard-sell conventions were rigorously followed. Lustig’s
jacket designs entered taboo marketing territory through his use of
abstraction and small, discreetly typeset titles, influenced by the work
of Jan Tschichold. Lustig did not believe it was necessary to “design
down,” as he called it, to achieve better sales.
He further rejected the typical cover design that summarized a book
through one generalized image. “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,” wrote James Laughlin in ”The Book Jackets of Alvin
Lustig” (Print, vol. 10 no. 5, October 1956). As publisher of
New Directions, Laughlin hired Lustig in the early 1940s and gave him
the latitude to experiment with personal graphic forms. New Directions’
quirky list of reprints, which featured such authors as Henry Miller,
Gertrude Stein, D.H. Lawrence and James Joyce, was a proving ground for
the designer’s visual explorations and distinctive graphic poetry.
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 Taliesen 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 new Classics succeeded where other popular literary series, such
as the Modern Library and Everyman’s Library, failed because of
inconsistent art direction and flawed artwork. Each New Classics jacket
had its own character, with Lustig brilliantly maintaining unity
through strict formal consistency. At no time did his look overpower
the books. This kind of consistency is virtually unheard of today in a
publishing field where, according to Lustig’s former client and friend
Arthur Chohen, design is “wedded to rapidity and obsolescence, immediacy
without subtlety.” Lustig’s jacket designs for New Directions demanded
contemplation: they were not point-of-purchase visual stimulants.
It is not surprising that Lustig’s early work would challenge the
norm. He once proclaimed that he was “born modern” and had made an
early decision to practice as a “modern” rather than a “traditional”
designer. He was born in 1915 in Denver to a family that he said had
“absolutely no pretensions to culture.” He was a poor student who
avoided going to classes by becoming an itinerant magician for various
school assemblies around Los Angeles, where the family had resettled.
And yet it was in high school that he was introduced by “an enlightened
teacher” 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,” he wrote in “Personal Notes on
Design” (AIGA Journal, Vol. 3 No. 4, 1953). “This ability to
‘see’ freshly, unencumbered by preconceived verbal, literary or moral
ideas, is the first step in responding to most modern art.” Fascinated
by posters, he began devoting more time to making his own magic-show
posters than to refining his act.
At 21, he became a freelance printer and typographer doing
jobs on a letter-press that he kept in the back room of a drugstore. It
was there that he began to create purely abstract geometric designs
using type ornaments, or what a friend termed “queer things with type.”
A year or so later he retired from printing to devote himself
exclusively to design. He became a charter member of a very small group
(including Saul Bass, Rudolph de Harak, John Foli and Louis Danziger)
called The Los Angeles Society for Contemporary Designers, whose members
were frustrated by the dearth of creative vision exhibited by West
Coast business.
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.
Lustig is known for his expertise in virtually all the design
disciplines, which he seamlessly integrated into his life. He designed
record albums, magazines (notably the format and some covers of Industrial
Design), advertisements, commercial catalogs, annual reports and
office spaces and textiles. In the late forties he designed a
helicopter for Rotoron, a pioneering though short-lived aerospace
company. In 1950 he was commissioned by Gruen and Associates, a
California architectural firm headed by the Viennese architect Victor
Gruen, to design the coordinated signage (entrance and parking lot signs
and watertower) for J. L. Hudson’s Northland in Detroit, the first
American shopping mall. As evidence of his eclecticism, around 1952 he
designed the opening sequence for the popular animated cartoon series Mr.
Magoo. In 1953 he designed various print materials for the Girl
Scouts of America and transformed aspects of their graphic identity from
homespun quaintness to sophisticated modern. He was passionate about
design education, and developed design courses and workshops for Black
Mountain College in North Carolina and the design department at Yale.
Yet for all his accomplishments, he wanted most to be an architect, for
which he had neither the training nor the credentials.
Although Lustig’s work appeared revolutionary in the 1940s, he was
not the radical that critics feared. His design stressed the formal
aspects of a problem, and in matters of formal practice he was precise
to a fault. In his essay “Contemporary book Design” (Design
Quarterly, no. 31, 1954), he notes: “The factors that produce
quality are the same in the traditional and contemporary book. Wherein,
then, lies difference? Perhaps the single most distinguishing factor
in the approach of the contemporary designer is his willingness to let
the problem act upon him freely and without preconceived notions of the
forms it should take.” While the early moderns vehemently rejected the
sanctity of the classical frame—the central axis—Lustig sought to
reconcile old and new. He understood that the tradition of fine
bookmaking, for example, was closely aligned with scholarship and
humanism, and yet the primacy of the word, the key principle in classic
book design, required reevaluation. ”I think we are learning slowly how
to come to terms with tradition without forsaking any of our own new
basic principles,” he wrote in “Personal Notes on Design.” “As we
become more mature we will learn to master the interplay between the
past and the present and not be so self-conscious of our rejection or
acceptance of tradition. We will not make the mistake that both rigid
modernists and conservatives make, of confusing the quality of form with
the specific forms themselves.”
Lustig’s 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.
Copyright 1994 by The American Institute of Graphic Arts.
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