November 16, 2005
Alvin Lustig
Mid-century Modernist, Alvin Lustig, has a new web site devoted to him. While I don’t know much about him yet, it appears that he was very engaged in many aspects of design and in the promulgation of the idea of the importance of design as a factor in quality of life — that a life lived with an attention to detail could make a difference — that aesthetics effected everything and once that realization was made, a person’s life could be changed for the better. Here’s hoping he was right.
Here’s a good paragraph:
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 forty 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.
