NEW YORK, NY.- The Jewish Museum is presenting Masterpieces and Curiosities: Elaine Lustig Cohen from August 17, 2018 through August 11, 2019, featuring over 30 works by the pioneering graphic designer and artist. One of seven sections that make up the Jewish Museum’s third floor collection exhibition, Scenes from the Collection, “Masterpieces and Curiosities” offers an in-depth examination of a single object or group of objects within a larger cultural, historical, or aesthetic context. This iteration of “Masterpieces and Curiosities” focuses on six Jewish Museum catalogues whose covers and interiors were playfully and ingeniously designed by Elaine Lustig Cohen (1927-2016). Over six decades of practice, Cohen moved between diverse activities including art-making and rare book dealing, as well as design. This exhibition brings together the public sphere of her graphic design work and the private vision of her paintings, highlighting a pivotal moment and a singular voice in American visual culture of the twentieth century.

Cohen began her career in the mid-1950s, extending the vocabulary of European modernism into an American context as a designer for a clientele of significant publishers, architects, and cultural institutions. From 1962 to 1967, she helped shape the Jewish Museum’s institutional identity by directing the design of printed ephemera and catalogues for a program of art exhibitions that was among the most progressive in the nation, including the historic Primary Structures: Younger American and British Sculptors (1966) organized by Kynaston McShine. During the same period, Cohen developed a hard-edged style as a painter. Employing a bold formal language of geometric shapes and vibrant solid colors, Cohen’s paintings relate to her design work as well as the contemporaneous practices of other artists who strove to dissolve the barriers between painting and objecthood. Seen in this light, her work suggests that the lineage of post-painterly abstraction — the term often used to describe the 1960s work of artists such as Frank Stella, Ellsworth Kelly, and Morris Louis — should be expanded to include not only post-war artistic movements such as Abstract Expressionism but also post-war graphic design. At the same time, Cohen’s ephemera and exhibition catalogues offer a window into a moment in the Jewish Museum’s history that was as lively and colorful as her designs.

The exhibition includes six Jewish Museum exhibition catalogues: Toward a New Abstraction (1963); Recent American Sculpture (1964); Kenneth Noland (1965); Primary Structures (1966); Ad Reinhardt (1966); and Masada (1967). Also included are a selection of paintings from the 1960s and 1970s; approximately ten of Cohen’s typographic, abstract, and photographic book jacket designs that show her unique style and attention to content; and graphic pieces such as posters, bags, and invitations for the Jewish Museum.

The exhibition is organized by Prem Krishnamurthy, Curator, K,, Berlin, and Partner & Director, Wkshps, New York; Cole Akers, Curator and Special Projects Manager, The Glass House, a National Trust Historic Site; and Shira Backer, Leon Levy Assistant Curator, The Jewish Museum.

An exhibition featuring Cohen’s work will also be on view at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University at the James B. Duke House, 1 East 78th Street, from October 19, 2018 through February 24, 2019.