Elaine Lustig Cohen Art

ELAINE LUSTIG COHEN (b. 1927) is an artist, dealer, and designer. She founded the gallery Ex Libris with her husband, publisher and author Arthur Cohen. Cohen’s recent work concentrates on collage using found photographs and ephemera. Elaine Lustig Cohen is the pioneering female graphic designer who incorporated the aesthetic vocabulary of European modernism into American graphic design, during the 1950s and 1960s. After training as a painter, she developed her design skills working with Alvin Lustig (whom she married in 1948). Following Lustig's premature death in 1955, she took control of the studio and between 1955 and 1961 produced a distinctive series of covers for publishing houses Meridan Books and New Directions. With their strong concepts, abstract forms and typographic invention, they represented a break from the prevailing tradition of pictorial illustration in book-jacket design. Her ability to summarize the content of text in the cover design was further aided when, working for architects including Eero Saarinen and Philip Johnson she produced signage schemes intended to express a building's character. She designed many posters and catalogues for New York-based arts organizations, including the American Center for the Arts, the Lincoln Center, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Jewish Museum. She married Arthur A. Cohen, publisher of Meridian Books; in 1973, they established Ex Libris, New York, a bookshop and gallery specializing in rare volumes of the European avant-garde. In 1995 her contribution to graphic design was acknowledge by an exhibition at the Cooper Hewitt, National Design Museum, New York." (Livingston, 2003, 51). She continues to paint and create dynamic graphic collage-based work and is represented by Julie Saul Gallery, New York. Elaine Lustig Cohen donated her collection to RIT in 2008. Lustig Cohen, the subject of a joint retrospective in 2007 at Julie Saul Gallery and Pavel Zoubok Gallery, has exhibited widely since the 1970s. Her work is found in the collections of the Whitney Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and Boston Museum of Fine Arts, among many others. A retrospective of her graphic designs was held at the Cooper-Hewitt in 1995. Ex Libris, which she ran together with her husband Arthur Cohen, was highly regarded for its exhibitions of 20th century avant garde books and ephemera...