“Announce the Marriage of their Daughter Elaine to Mr. Alvin Lustig . . . “
Mr. and Mrs. Herman Firstenberg
Mr. and Mrs. Herman Firstenberg: “Announce the Marriage of their Daughter Elaine to Mr. Alvin Lustig . . . “ Beverly Hills, CA: Self Published, 1948. Vintage wedding announcement and calling card with vellum tissue. A fine set.
9 x 12 sheet folded in quarters for mailing and a 4.75 x 3.25 card on matching cream paper with engraved text. Official announcement for the wedding of Elaine Firstenberg and Alvin Lustig on Sunday, December 19, 1948, in Beverly Hills, California. Old school calling card laid in and protected by a vellum wrapper, stating the couple are “At Home, 9126 Sunset Boulevard, Beverly Hills, California.” Acquired from the estate of one of the Lustigs’ peers.
No note has been made to Mr. and Mrs. Firstenberg’s reaction to their daughter centering her engraved wedding announcement on the stationery so the fold physically separated the bride and groom. Pretty modern if I do say so myself.<p>
“The year was 1948: I had just graduated from college and received an appointment to teach art in the Los Angeles public school system. Little did I realize that my life was soon to change forever.” —Elaine Lustig Cohen (1927 – 2016)
Excerpted from Steven Heller’s AIGA Medalist profile: “Elaine Firstenberg was born in Jersey City in 1927. She and a younger sister were raised by Herman Firstenberg, a plumber, and Elizabeth Loeb Firstenberg, his bookkeeper. Her mother and father encouraged their daughter’s creativity, so Elaine was enrolled in art lessons, where she learned to draw from casts. At 15, she wandered into Peggy Guggenheim’s short-lived but influential Art of This Century gallery, where Guggenheim had exhibited a collection of Kandinskys in an installation designed by Frederick Kiesler. That chance visit ignited Elaine’s lifelong passion for modern art. Soon thereafter, Elaine enrolled in the art department of Newcomb College at Tulane University. One of her art classes was based on basic Bauhaus fundamentals. Her favorite painter at the time was the proto-pop artist Stuart Davis. In those days women were not encouraged to study art as a profession, so she took art education courses at the University of Southern California to prepare for a teaching career. She then taught in a public school during the first year she was married to Lustig.
“Elaine was 20 when she met Alvin, then 32, at the opening of a new Los Angeles art museum in 1948. They were a handsome couple. A whirlwind courtship was followed by marriage and a job as the “office slave,” she recalls. Alvin presumed she would work in his office, though he had no intention of teaching her graphic design. “Teaching me was not even an issue,” she says. “It was, after all, a different time.” He did however encourage Elaine to research materials for interior design projects. Meanwhile, she made collages for prospective children’s books and sketches of fantasy furniture.
“In the late 1940s the California economy was weak, with hardly enough industry to support local designers. So in 1950, when Josef Albers invited Alvin to establish a graphic design program at Yale, the couple immediately left for New York. Professionally things were looking up, but Lustig’s health was deteriorating and his reliance on Elaine increased. Nonetheless, when the end came about, she was unprepared for what would happen next.
“About a week after Alvin’s funeral, Philip Johnson, who had earlier commissioned Alvin to design the Seagram Building signage, called Elaine to tell her that the job was hers. He then asked her when the official alphabet would be complete. That call was like ice water thrown on her face. “When Alvin died nothing had been done on Seagram,” Elaine recalls. “Eventually my schedule of the lettering and signs were incorporated into the architectural working drawings.” In addition to signs, she designed New York Times ads for the building. Johnson recognized her remarkable efforts, which helped to forge an important bond between them. Seagram next hired her to do a catalog for the rental of spaces in the building . . . .”
Alvin Lustig (American, 1915 – 1955) trained at the Art Center School of Design in Los Angeles and also briefly studied with Frank Lloyd Wright. His career highlights include numerous book jackets for New Directions and Noonday Press.
"By the time he died at the age of forty in 1955, [Lustig] 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.
"Lustig created monuments of ingenuity and objects of aesthetic pleasure. Whereas graphic design history is replete with artifacts that define certain disciplines and are also works of art, for a design to be so considered it must overcome the vicissitudes of fashion and be accepted as an integral part of the visual language." -- Steven Heller