ELAINE LUSTIG COHEN

Elaine Lustig Cohen is best known for her work that has played a pivotal role in the evolution of American modernist graphic design, integrating European avant-garde with experimentation to create a distinct visual vocabulary. 

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While the Arts and Crafts movement provided philosophical fuel for progressive graphic design in the early twentieth century, by the 1940s, the formal and technological experiments of Bauhaus and European avant-garde movements including Futurism, Constructivism, and Surrealism had reached a small community of American designers. Few women gained entrance to this new American group. Among these few women was Elaine Lustig Cohen, who married the graphic designer Alvin Lustig in 1948. Elaine Lustig managed her husband’s studio in Los Angeles and later in New York as a secretary, production assistant, and draftsperson. Alvin Lustig’s diabetes caused him to go blind at the end of his life, which meant that Elaine acted as his eyes as well as his hands as she helped him complete projects.

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After Alvin's death in 1955, Elaine assumed ownership of her husband’s midtown Manhattan design practice and most of his clients. The clients expected her to complete her last husband's unfinished commissions. What the clients didn't realize was that Alvin Lustig never included her in his own projects. “As a rule, no one in the Lustig office designed except Alvin himself,” Elaine recalls. In fact, Laine and Alvin's assistants would do the “dirty work” while Alvin sat at his desk making thumbnail sketches.

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There were few female American designers that ran their own studios at that time. Nonetheless, 28-year-old Elaine took over the practice, despite having no formal training as a designer. 

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At age forty, Elaine married Arthur Cohen, publisher of Meridian Books, and started her own design practice. From 1955 to 1961 Elaine designed covers for Meridian Books that used geometric symbols, evocative photographs, and expressive typography. 

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Lustig Cohen’s other notable design work includes lobby signs and catalogs for institutions such as the Museum of Primitive Art, the Jewish Museum in New York City, and the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro. From 1969 she focused on creating art—painting, collage, and print work. Elaine began painting later in her life because Alvin told her that painting was dead, so she didn’t start painting until after he died. Lustig Cohen also designed catalogs for the antiquarian bookstore Ex Libris, which she and her husband, publisher Arthur Cohen, owned and operated. Lustig Cohen was awarded the 2011 AIGA Medal of the American Institute of Graphic Arts.