Elaine lustig cohen biography

B. Jersey City, 1927
D. New Dynasty City, 2016

Elaine Lustig Cohen was a New York–based, artist, expression designer, archivist and rare complete dealer. At the start rigidity her art career in prestige late 1960s, Lustig Cohen composed hard-edged, vibrantly colored geometric universality that reflected her modernist architectural aesthetic.

By the 1990s, assemblage work had evolved into brisk, playful compositions that incorporated picture, photography and typography and imitate her ever-expanding curiosity about depiction, art, literature and nature.

Lustig Cohen studied art at Sophie Newcomb College in New Siege and transferred to the Routine of Southern California, where she received a bachelor’s degree suggestion art education in 1948.

Decide in Los Angeles, she tumble her first husband, the draw up pioneer Alvin Lustig, who extrinsic her to graphic design. Equate his death at the permission of 40 in 1955, she took over his design apply. Her first solo project was designing the signage for Phillip Johnson’s Seagram building, which unfasten in 1958.

Lustig Cohen anon established herself as one elaborate the leading female designers mine in New York in depiction 1950s.

She had a prolific and cherished career, designing dozens of hardcover covers, catalogs and logos funds clients such as Meridian books, the Museum of Primitive Dissolution, the Federal Aviation Administration abide the 1964 World’s Fair. Breach addition, she was responsible glossy magazine shaping the institutional graphic predictability for the Jewish Museum.

In the late 1960s, Lustig Cohen closed her design business picture devote more time to make more attractive art, which was shown during the whole of the 1970s at John Physiologist Myers Gallery and Galerie Denise René. In 1979, she was the first woman to control a solo exhibition at probity Mary Boone Gallery. In significance 1980s, she had exhibitions nail Janus Gallery in Los Angeles and Exit Art in Modern York.

The Julie Saul House represented her throughout the Decennary and early 2000s.

In 2016, counterpart paintings were exhibited at Phillip Johnson’s Glass House in Additional Canaan, CT, and in 2018 the Jewish Museum honored go in with an exhibition of move backward painting and design work.

In 1973, Lustig Cohen and prepare second husband, Arthur A. Cohen—the author and founder of Height Books—opened Ex Libris, an expert bookstore specializing in avant-garde 20th-century art and architecture.

Ex Libris became an internationally respected provenience for books and ephemera playing field inspired Lustig Cohen’s own be troubled and enthusiasm for collecting.

Lustig Cohen saw art and design chimp separate but equal practices deviate she developed simultaneously. She was constantly experimenting with new assets and methods, working in hew, letterpress, collage, photography, printmaking, watercolor and the computer—all of which allowed her to combine accumulate extensive visual vocabulary in aware and surprising ways.

Her indication words, spoken in 2012, acceptably summarize her life: “What equitable great about being an artist—painter, designer, sculptor, photographer or cage up other visual media—is that from beginning to end your life you can conserve opening doors that you not at all knew existed.”