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On Seeing and Being Seen

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On Seeing and Being Seen ON SEEING AND BEING SEEN BY MEG MILLER As one designer goes blind, another emerges from under his shadow EyeOnDesign_#01_Mag-6.5x9in_160pgs_PRINT.indd 52 2/13/18 2:49 PM ALVIN LUSTIG AND ELAINE LUSTIG COHEN. COURTESY: THE ESTATE OF ELAINE LUSTIG COHEN BY MEG MILLER As one designer goes blind, another emerges from under his shadow Pages 52 and 53 EyeOnDesign_#01_Mag-6.5x9in_160pgs_PRINT.indd 53 2/13/18 2:49 PM On Amazon, you can buy a new, because he no longer saw them. hardbound copy of Tennessee Instead, he would verbally dictate Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof for what he imagined in his mind’s $1,788.01. The play is one of Williams’ eye to Elaine and the assistants most famous, and allegedly his working at his design office. personal favorite. But the reason “He would tell us go down a behind the price tag is more likely pica and over three picas, and how the cover than its contents; a milky high the type should be, and what galaxy wraps around the spine, the color should be,” said Elaine. and the monosyllabic words of Sometimes his reference points the title stack up the center like a were past projects—“the beige that chimney. At a talk in 2013, Elaine we used on such and such”—or the Lustig Cohen, who was widowed by colors of furniture he’d picked out the book’s famous designer, Alvin for interior jobs. In one particularly Lustig, turned to Steven Heller, her poetic instance, he described the interviewer on stage. Pausing to shade of yellow he wanted to use locate the cover in her memory, she as “the dominant yellow of Van said, “The jacket that you’re talking Gogh’s sunflower.” about for Tennessee Williams, that was very late. And that was a jacket that Alvin actually never saw.” Elaine wasn’t referring to the final jacket, published the year that Alvin died at just 40 years old. What she meant was that Alvin never saw the jacket at all: not the initial sketch, not the paste-up, nor any of the proofs. By the time Alvin was designing Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, he was virtually blind. The diabetes that had plagued him since childhood had damaged the capillaries behind his eyes, and for about two years before his death a thick veil of fog gradually obscured his vision. By the year 1954, he no longer sketched his designs EYE ON DESIGN EyeOnDesign_#01_Mag-6.5x9in_160pgs_PRINT.indd 54 2/13/18 2:49 PM COURTESY: THE ESTATE OF ELAINE LUSTIG COHEN On Seeing and Being Seen Pages 54 and 55 EyeOnDesign_#01_Mag-6.5x9in_160pgs_PRINT.indd 55 2/13/18 2:49 PM Elaine became a visionary designer When Elaine met Alvin, she was in her own right, and the self- nearly 21 and volunteering at an appointed preservationist of Alvin’s art gallery in Beverly Hills. He was legacy decades after he died in 12 years her senior and already an 1955. Before her death, Heller established designer, famous for called Elaine “a living link between his designs for the New Classics design’s modernist past and its book series from publisher New continually changing present” Directions. In her first year of in an article honoring her for the marriage, Elaine taught art at a AIGA Medal. She died a renowned public school in L.A., but found designer and painter, and one of it a drag to leave the apartment- the very few mid-century women slash-office that she and Alvin designers who are celebrated at shared on Sunset Boulevard— the same caliber as their male full of high-profile clients and contemporaries. However, it wasn’t interesting conversation—to go to until after Alvin that she was seen a classroom of 14-year-olds. So as a designer, or even considered she quit. She helped run the office, herself one. where she later executed Alvin’s Elaine got her first taste of verbal instructions. art as a teenager, when one Around age 27, Elaine became day she stumbled upon Peggy the only person who knew how Guggenheim’s Art of This Century long her husband had to live. The gallery in New York City. She doctor told her first, and she told had come into Manhattan from Alvin when keeping it to herself New Jersey for an orthodontist became unbearable. “The last year appointment. The exhibition was of was the most difficult, as you can Wassily Kandinsky’s work and the imagine,” she told Glueck. “He was music piping through the gallery impossible. I was impossible. He speakers was Johann Sebastian didn’t want to be helped, but he Bach, who also worked through had to be helped.” Still, Elaine was fading vision. “I still remember devoted, describing herself once walking in there,” she said in a 2009 as Alvin’s “blind disciple.” oral history with arts journalist As his eyesight worsened, Grace Glueck. “I didn’t know what it Elaine’s tasks went from purely was all about. I had no idea. It blew administrative to doing the physical me away.” labor of design at the time; she learned how to order type, make EYE ON DESIGN EyeOnDesign_#01_Mag-6.5x9in_160pgs_PRINT.indd 56 2/13/18 2:49 PM a mechanical, make paste-ups, ‘Of course. Fine.’” The architect design a page in a book, and Philip Johnson even gave him a specify it. Later on she would drive new project: the signage for the Alvin up to Yale to teach, and would Seagram Building in New York. pass the time by sitting in the back of Josef Albers’ classes, listening in on his lectures. When Alvin’s rapidly degener- ating eyesight could no longer be kept a secret, the couple threw a cocktail party for their friends and clients to break the news. Nobody seemed to doubt that the confident, well-known designer could complete their commissions blind. “[We announced] that he was losing his sight and that he was going to continue to design,” Elaine described. “Everybody said, On Seeing and Being Seen Pages 56 and 57 EyeOnDesign_#01_Mag-6.5x9in_160pgs_PRINT.indd 57 2/13/18 2:50 PM Alvin was a skilled illusionist from the New Classics series rejected the beginning. In high school he the popular commercial styles of became a magician, teaching the time for a system of abstract himself design by making the symbols in the vein of Paul Klee promotional posters for his shows. and Joan Miró. For Noonday and He was bored in class—far smarter Meridian Books, he took a quieter, than his peers—so his teachers let more Swiss approach to a series him skip class to tour other schools of academic paperbacks. The performing magic tricks. Then one publisher, Arthur Cohen, who would teacher, whom he later described later become Elaine’s second as “enlightened,” introduced him to husband, credited Alvin with modern art, which had a profound opening his eyes to the importance impact on him. of design. “A young publisher such “This art hit a fresh eye, unen- as myself was characteristically cumbered by any ideas of what prejudiced and blind,” he said. Until art was or should be, and found an meeting with the designer, he felt immediate sympathetic response,” that the text was “all important,” Alvin wrote in a 1953 issue of and that the physical book was a the AIGA Journal. “This ability to much lesser issue. ‘see’ freshly, unencumbered by Although Alvin is most famous preconceived verbal, literary, or for his jackets, his approach toward moral ideas, is the first step in design was holistic, and his talents responding to most modern art.” were incredibly wide-ranging. In his As a professional designer, Alvin 20s, he studied under Frank Lloyd trained his eye on books: His work Wright at Taliesin East, before played a major role in elevating the becoming frustrated with the lack book jacket from something purely of freedom and running away in promotional to a vehicle for artistic the middle of the night. In L.A. he expression. His own style of jacket was friends with the Eameses and design was constantly evolving, Richard Neutra, and often took on from photographic and pictorial architectural and industrial design imagery to eclectic typographic projects alongside his graphics compositions, to total abstraction, work. His office in New York worked and, later, to the simpler geometric on book covers, museum catalogs, forms that he produced while blind. magazine design, identity design, From 1945 to 1952, his designs for as well as architectural, furniture EYE ON DESIGN EyeOnDesign_#01_Mag-6.5x9in_160pgs_PRINT.indd 58 2/13/18 2:50 PM and fabric design projects, too. In a Lightolier showroom, and an the late 1940s he even designed identity for the Girl Scouts, among a helicopter for the aerospace other things. At the end of his life, he company Rotoron. “I always think planned to travel to Israel, believing of Alvin as a visionary,” Elaine has that his skills could positively said. “He saw himself as using impact the country. He’s rumored design to do everything with; to to have felt Christ-like; he believed change everything in the world.” that he had a sense of power and responsibility as a designer. Elaine has described Alvin as As his abilities began to fade, clever and playful in private, but Elaine’s sharpened. She learned in the public eye he was reserved the technical aspects of design and distinguished, serious about out of necessity, becoming the his craft and aware of his talent.
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