Alvin Lustig summed up the central theme of his short, prolific career when he wrote in 1946, “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 and form itself that is unsatisfactory and incomplete. This inadequate set of terms to describe an active life reveals only partially the still undefined nature of a designer.”
He was, as he put it, “a designer with a capital D,” one who didn’t see an inequity between painting and designing business cards, and, in fact, found the distinctions between fine and applied arts superfluous. It’s precisely this democratic approach that made his work so effective.
Lustig set up his own Los Angeles print shop in 1937 despite having had only a few design courses and three months at Taliesin East under his belt. He cut his teeth with flyers, pamphlets, and the like, and by the late 1930s he found a form to which his talents were especially well suited: book jackets. He began creating jackets for New Directions press in 1941, boldly experimenting with rigid geometric forms for Henry Miller’s The Wisdom of the Heart. But his truly classic jackets came in New Directions’ New Classics series, a quirky batch of reissues of literary fiction, poetry, and drama that constituted a remarkably serviceable primer of modernist lit.
The New Classics designs eschewed both the hard geometry of his early work and the well-trod paths of Deco calligraphy and overwrought representation popular at the time in favor of a style more akin to Joan Miró and Paul Klee. In many ways, the series acted as a canny conduit of modernist ideas and forms, bringing them down from the rarefied gallery and into the small-town bookstore. But perhaps even more rewarding was the way in which the series illustrated Lustig’s deep empathy for the plays, novels, and poems he designed jackets for. New Directions founder and publisher James Laughlin put it this way: “His method was to read a text and get the feel for the author’s creative drive, then to restate it in his own graphic terms.”
Lustig’s cover for D. H. Lawrence’s Selected Poems, a pair of abstract phoenixes, evokes that animal, elemental lifting of the spirit—“blood knowledge” as Lawrence would come to call it—which animates so much of the author’s work. The sun-bleached Hollywood grotesqueries of Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust get expert treatment, too: Exotic movie sets rest on bare scaffolding and a swarm of black specks surround bullet-hole type, illustrative of West’s indictment of the artificiality of showbiz and the novella’s violent climax. Lustig’s New Directions jackets are graphic essays whose beauty and formal innovation are clear at first blush, but whose grace, wit, and interpretive powers aren’t fully appreciable until one reads the book.
Even more impressive than the individual jackets is the stylistic unity of the series. Chip Kidd, book jacket design maven of the moment, says, “A testament to his talent is that New Directions asked him to do so many jackets. There must be 40 of them. His work has aged so well. Fifty-some years on it still looks fresh.” There were 36 in the New Classics series, but some would call the photographic collages adorning the covers of New Directions’ Modern Reader series his best work.
“To be frank, the most important jackets are the photographic ones,” Elaine Lustig Cohen, Lustig’s widow and colleague, opines. “No one was doing that when he was, no one was putting it together that way. They have a rhythm, even when they’re geometric, and all of them were very evocative of the text.” The Modern Reader jackets marry Dada-inspired collage, clean composition, typography, and Lustig’s own brand of artful abstraction seen with the New Classics. Especially chilling is his nightmarish collage for Italo Svevo’s The Confessions of Zeno, whose design cuts straight to the essence of the compulsive and dissipated title character.
While the book jackets were assuredly his greatest artistic success, Lustig’s career was a flurry of interiors and fabrics, signage and record albums, pamphlets, architecture, magazines, and even a helicopter in his late-’40s and early-’50s heyday. He continued making book jackets, but moved on to more academic texts, for which he fashioned spare covers dominated by blocks of color and by turns imposing and playful typography.
The mid-1950s saw his health failing, however. He had developed diabetes in his adolescence, and as one of the first to receive insulin to treat the disease, he also fell prey to its side effects. At 38 his vision began failing and by 39 Lustig was blind. A year later, in 1955, he died of diabetes-related complications.
The man who claimed to have been “born modern” lived a short life, and died leaving a great mark on modernist design. Lustig Cohen claims that at the core of his work there existed a deep commitment to modernism and an unshakable optimism: “All the visionaries like Mondrian and those at the Bauhaus believed that design would change the world, that it had a quality that would make your life better. Alvin believed that too.”
2 / From 1944 to 1946, Lustig took over as the visual research director at Look magazine, redesigning the house publications and even the design department itself in a modernist style.
3 / Lustig designed a helicopter—which was surely the Mini Cooper of choppers—for the aerospace company Roteron. The tiny, single-person craft boasted two counter-rotating coaxial rotors with the motor mounted between.
4 / In a pioneering collaboration between architect and graphic designer, Lustig designed the signage for Victor Gruen’s Northland Shopping Center near Detroit, one of America’s first malls.
5 / The New Directions New Classics were an unqualified success. Publisher James Laughlin muses: “Our New Classics series’s sales tripled after Lustig jackets were adopted. It is perhaps not a very good thing that people should buy books by eye.” But then he quickly adds, “His beautiful designs are helping to make a mass audience aware of high-quality reading.”
6 / Lustig was passionate about teaching design and designing curriculums at North Carolina’s Black Mountain College, the University of Georgia, and Yale University.
7 / While he had no formal training as an architect, friendships with modern icons Richard Neutra and Philip Johnson spurred Lustig to design buildings. In the late 1940s, he worked on the Beverly-Landau Apartments and Beverly Carlton Apartment Hotel in Los Angeles.
8 / Never one for the high/low art distinction, Lustig designed the opening sequence for the now-classic Mr. Magoo cartoon show. Sadly, he would lose his sight a few years later.
9 / Even after losing his sight, Lustig continued to design with his wife and assistants executing the physical drawing. To get shapes and colors right he would make references to objects and colors they all knew.
10 / Not long out of art school when she married Lustig, and rather young at the time of his death, Elaine Lustig Cohen has been working for the past 50 years as an acclaimed graphic designer and painter.
