Alvin Lustig
Exodus“Work? It’s just serious play,” Saul Bass remarked in a 1993 interview. Indeed, Saul Bass’s marvelous career, which spanned from the 1930s until his death in 1996, is defined by his trademark wit, humor, and playfulness. Whether it was in movie posters, billboards, brand identities, or packaging design, Bass always injected his work with a delightful energy and intelligence, quite remarkable given the distilled simplicity of his work. Saul Bass, poster, graphic design, Arts Students League, Bauhaus, Paul Rand, Alvin Lustig, New York City, film, Judaism |
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Alvin Lustig’s IncantationAlthough his career was tragically short, Alvin Lustig was among America’s most influential mid-century graphic designers. Textiles like Incantation (1947) reflect a rich multidisciplinary practice that encompassed furniture, graphics, architecture, and animation. After studying design and printing at Los Angeles Junior College, Lustig started creating geometric patterns in the medium of letterpress in the early 1930s. Alvin Lustig, Laverne Originals, Paul Klee, Joan Miro, Elaine Lustig Cohen, textiles |
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The Meeting of Modern MindsIn Alvin Lustig’s cover design for Ezra Pound’s Selected Poems, one shape moves by the other, led by its emanation. Rising to the surface, from field to foreground, negative space turns positive. Infinite mutations form a continuum that is hard-edged yet sensuous. Alvin Lustig, Ezra Pound, New Directions, poetry, book cover design, Black Mountain College, modernism |
